Tara McMullin

@taramcmullin

Writer, podcaster, and producer baffled by the absurdity of neoliberal capitalism. Autistic feminist. Aspiring independent scholar. Amateur baker. Host of the What Works podcast and author of a book of the same name.

whatworks.fyi

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I think of a comparably personal comment I once heard my colleague Judith Shapiro, former provost of Bryn Mawr and then president of Barnard, make to a group of young people about what they should expect from college: “You want the inside of your head to be an interesting place to spend the rest of your life.”

Andrew Delbanco • What Is College For?

Higher Ed Under Capitalism

To be competitive in this job market and to hold on to, let alone advance within, whatever job we might manage to land, we will need to adapt, in some way and to some degree, to the workplace-feeling rules and affective expectations that are increasingly being imposed up and down the labor hierarchy. Whether that means an employee will be required... See more

Down with Love: Feminist Critique and the New Ideologies of Work

Labor Under Capitalism and Emotions @ Work

The need for romantic love is thus imagined as so deeply entrenched in the structures of feminine subjectivity that women desire nothing so much as to be safely ensconced in the institutions, marriage and family, that will secure it. As de Beauvoir describes the woman in search of love and marriage, “she chooses to want her enslavement so ardently... See more

Down with Love: Feminist Critique and the New Ideologies of Work

Emotions @ Work

challenges-15-00029-v2

The article critiques prevailing paradigms of digital literacy, proposing a consciousness model rooted in media ecology to address the structural biases of digital communication technologies that hinder sustainability efforts.

Link

Media & Culture

A democratic cultural politics would be developmentalist — oriented to learning, growth and discovery — rather than presentist. All kinds of resources made available by digital hyperconnectivity could support such a developmentalist cultural politics. But the algorithms that feed us what we like or register what is popular — and thereby... See more

Rogers Brubaker • Hyperconnected Culture and Its Discontents

Media & Culture and

No Redemption Arcs in Hell

Brandon blgtylr.substack.com

the art of writing

"Redemption comes from a character who has incurred a moral debt through their actions then making good on that moral debt by performing some deed or service or act of heroism that will ameliorate the bad. That seems simple enough. But in the arid secular plains of modernity and its accompanying moral relativism, what is even good? What is even bad? How can there be redemption in the absence of a functioning moral schema?"

Taken together, the union of all your ways of potentially or actually being at home in various areas of your life, online and offline, constitute how you are at home in the universe itself, and on the planet in particular. Along each dimension, you might exist anywhere from nascent, to viable, to disintegrated conditions of identity.

None of us is... See more

Venkatesh Rao • Digital Homelessness

Broken Links

The Creator Economy

Comfort, however, is not the same as healing. The frequently-invoked (pop) culture war framework conjures images of a pitched battle between ‘queer fandom’ interested in social justice and a reactionary fan identity over the soul of the culture industry. In reality what drives our culture industry is not a soul, but two basic functions of its place... See more

Media & Culture and Fandom & Capitalism

Varsity: “Fandom—the highest stage of capitalism?”