IN MEDIAS RESEARCH
Kristin: So how are things? Your idea for the Composing (Media) = Composing (Embodiment) book sounds intriguing! I'd think it's worth at least writing up an abstract for us.
Cheryl: Seriously? OK, will do. I mean, what's another project!?
Kristin: Exactly! I knew you were looking for something to take on.
Cheryl: lol
Kristin: Hard to say what we'll get in and how we'll shape it, but if it's just a 500-word abstract for now...why not?
Cheryl: Jim and I got 60 abstracts for the RAW (Reading and Writing New Media) collection.
Kristin: WOW. How many did you go with?
Cheryl: Twenty-two chapters. It's going to be a loooong book. We spent most of the month after we got the abstracts figuring out which ones to accept and what order they should go in.
Cheryl: We're multiply submitting the prospectus with detailed TOC and four sample chapters to five presses today.
Kristin: Cool. Our grand plan is to talk to publishers at CCCC.
Cheryl: Yea, that's what Jim and I did. Made up a nice brochure with the TOC. But, don't let the abstract phase fool you -- that's the hardest part of the collection, imho.
Kristin: Hmmm, good to know. How'd the CCCC thing pan out for y’all?
Cheryl: We got two contacts, but, for us, it was more about making sure that *somebody* would be interested, I think. At least that’s how I felt about it. Jim has more experience with books, so I was following his lead. Now that we're reading through the chapter revisions, we think we've hit gold.
Kristin: Makes sense. This is all foreign territory to me. It seems like you have some good people in the book.
Cheryl: It's a weird process, for sure. I'm lucky because Jim and I work really well together, and picking a good co-editor can be the make-or-break situation.
Kristin: Yeah, I think Anne will be great to work with. She’s very pro-active.
Cheryl: My only other suggestion about editing a book collection (or, for that matter, any other editing work) is to remember to make time for your other research. USU counts an edited collection as a book publication, but other schools don’t. If you still need a monograph, make sure you start working on it next year.
Kristin: Actually, WSU counts edited collections, too—although not as much as a monograph. It really depends who I talk to what answer I get on this…but it seems like if I do a lot of publishing a monograph isn’t a requirement. Although, I might work on one anyway. 
Cheryl: Wow. Cool. Then you're set.
Kristin: Yeah. I'm stoked. I figure this, plus an article and intro in the book, plus an article/year, plus Bedford stuff, plus working towards a monograph and I should be in good shape (or so I tell myself!)
Cheryl: Golden.
Kristin: GOLDEN!
Cheryl: They [your T&P committee] will just want you to figure out how to articulate your focus. What brings it all together, you know?
Kristin: Yeah, that part frightens me, but I think it'll be good. I just need to keep myself from straying too much for now.
Cheryl: I thought so too -- my committee told me in the first and second years: "Cheryl, you can't write everything about new media. You have to focus." I said, why? But I realized I have figured out how all the disparate things work together. I couldn’t successfully articulate my research agenda until the end of my second year. So, let's play a game: The Kristin tenure-narrative game.
Kristin: Can I be the princess?
Cheryl: Yes, princesses are always allowed in T&P meetings….
Kristin: Great.
Cheryl: So, Kristin, what's your article this year about?
Kristin: [long pause] I started writing something then it bothered me. Do over. … I was trying to sum up the four things I've been working on this fall: this article, the Bedford project, the book, and the article from my diss (which I just sent an abstract off for yesterday)
Cheryl: Good for you!
Kristin: Four things ain't bad.
Cheryl: Four things ain't bad, but...can you sum them up? What connects them?
Cheryl: Connect Four -- hahahaahahahaha
Kristin: booo.
Cheryl: lol
Kristin: What connects them is the overarching question of how we teach with new technologies.
Cheryl: That's too broad. (That's what your tenure committee will say.) What's your angle on how we teach with new technologies?
Kristin: How about this: The ways that visual compositions cannot be guided by purely tech-comm based rubrics (ones that treat visuals purely as a means for efficiency and usability) but instead must be guided by questions of meaning and identity--that is, how do the ways we compose in online spaces affect the ways we perform and understand identity? … That was painful and clunky.
Cheryl: That WAS painful and clunky. This part's good: ‘How do the ways we compose in online spaces affect the ways we perform and understand identity?’
Kristin: Something about trying to extend our pedagogical practices for visual texts beyond, something something, … see, I really don't care much about my research (did I just say that?!?! Let’s just say—it’s not a passion).... this is a problem.
Cheryl: lol. Not an a-typical thing, you know. Especially after spending all that time on the diss. You have to figure out your own "in" -- What's gonna keep you interested for the next six years?
Kristin: Good, because I worry I'm supposed to be passionate about online design. I mean, it's fun sometimes, but really....
Cheryl: So what ARE you passionate about?
Kristin: It's the identity thing I care about. Getting back to my feminist theory roots, I guess.
Cheryl: Remember once you said you wanted to study the Native American/Finnish connection?
Kristin: Yeah, totally.
Cheryl: So how can you structure the next few years to focus on that stuff? AND get published and make it fit within the other stuff (like Bedford) that you do.
Kristin: Actually, I was trying to think of a way to make my chapter for the Composing (Media) book collection about online Indian identity or something like that.... OR, online design through the theories of Native identity. I feel like I need to keep a focus on the 'online' thing to really make all the pieces fit.
Cheryl: So, is it online that you need to keep, or "communication" that you need? I mean, online's just a medium. Is that the important aspect here?
Kristin: If not online, then what's my thread? I'm trying to find my thread....I know it's just a medium, but it seems like an itty bitty thread at least.
Cheryl: But itty bitty doesn’t make your tenure narrative. Itty bitty is a branch. So what's the article you just sent out?
Kristin: I sent in an abstract for a special issue of Feminist Teacher (journal) on technology. I suspect it's too comp/rhet for them, but I figured I'd try. It's on using listening as a way of re-seeing online design.
Cheryl: Cool. Now how did you use the same listening stuff when working on ix?
Kristin: It's something like: our rubrics from ix aren't saying they will make your design efficient and accessible, but instead our rubrics will guide the ways we understand visuals to work. Something like that.
Cheryl: That's pretty good!
Kristin: Being an academic is such bullshit sometimes. I mean, more, that we have to create these bullshit stories about how oh-so-important our work is to the world. That's probably why so many academics have an inflated sense of self importance. (That's part me being honest, and part me being insecure.)
Cheryl: You’re right -- academics do have an over-inflated sense of self. I think they have to in order to survive. And it's not always the best personality for some folks to take on.
Kristin: Honestly it kind of turns my stomach. Like I'm not being honest with myself.
Cheryl: Tenure is absolutely a game -- selling yourself, your work, to administration who've never seen or heard of, say, feminist studies before. But why do you say you’re not being honest with yourself?
Kristin: Being honest with myself would be saying: Well, this article really ISN'T transparently connected to that article. And this work really ISN'T all that groundbreaking. And this work really ISN'T all that revolutionary to the field.
Cheryl: But why do you say that? I mean, who else has applied listening from a feminist theory standpoint to new media? And who also makes it useful to comp?
Kristin: um, nobody....I guess I feel like if I'm not saving puppies or curing AIDS my career isn't really all that important, so to make it sound so seems, well, odd.
Cheryl: What?!
Kristin: I know, that's totally silly...
Cheryl: You're saving hundreds of students from bad design, Ms. Princess. And bad writing! Teaching is like saving the world!
Kristin: I have to remember that sometimes. I think this semester jaded me.
Cheryl: You're one of the best teachers I know. And next semester, you will continue teaching, and it will be hard the first few class periods because you'll remember this semester and remember how yucky it was. But then you'll get right back in there and be yourself-as-great-teacher, and the good memories of being a great teacher will come back. That's the way it goes. That's what happened to me this term. I didn't even want to step foot in my classrooms this term because last semester was such an awful teaching semester for me. But this term has turned out to be the most picture-perfect teaching semester I've EVER had.
Kristin: Woe is me. The plight of the salutatorian from a small, poor, blue-collar high school. hahaha.
Cheryl: I hear ya. I’m first-generation college graduate, and I think that's why I'm so brash when it comes to dealing with the academic nonsense. I pretend like it's all a joke.
Kristin: Such a huge part of my upbringing was to never act like you're better/smarter/stronger/richer/prettier
/whatever than anyone else, so sometimes academia is really hard. I was taught to behave as though "We're all in this together" (even if we're not).
Cheryl: Exactly, and I don't always feel like we're in it together. I mean, we are -- we have to support each other, but some people take tenure waaaaaayy too seriously. I don’t take it too seriously because I see it as part of the game.
Kristin: Then again, do we kind of have to take it seriously to get by? I mean, I guess, HOW serious do we have to be about it (on a personal level, that is)?
Cheryl: Personally, not at all! Professionally, it's our lives…
Kristin: I don't want to not enjoy a meal with my husband because I'm freaked out about my tenure narrative. If I ever have to seriously sacrifice my family or friends because of my job, I’m in the wrong field.
Cheryl: You have to compartmentalize.
Kristin: Yeah, I guess so many academics I know blur that personal/professional line so it's hard for me, sometimes, to see the difference.
Cheryl: I blur it. I blur it all the time. I'm a horrible example of not compartmentalizing.
Kristin: Mental note: MUST QUIT LOOKING UP TO CHERYL.
Cheryl: lol
Kristin: I guess I know that I CAN create tenure narratives, and I CAN sell myself (heck, I feel like I was pretty successful on the market), and doing so doesn't make me a bad person.
Cheryl: Exactly. It's not a fun thing (unless you're a masochist), but it's a necessary thing.
Kristin: It's the makkara and beans syndrome, courtesy of Finnish Grandpa Burt. Jeff was talking one night to Grandpa about a meal he cooked for my birthday. It was some fancy thing that took a lot of time, and Grandpa looked at him all perplexed and said "makkara and beans! 15 minutes and you have yourself a good meal!" (makkara=Finnish sausage)
Cheryl: lol. The trick about it, like Matt Barton said in his video, is to keep on top of it. Make sure that every time you send an article out, write another textbook CD, propose an edited collection, you write up a paragraph about WHY you're doing it and how it relates to your research agenda.
Kristin: Matt's advice is really good. I get lost sometimes in the "MUST" and lose the "WHY."
Cheryl: Academic life/work (and I guess I shouldn’t conflate the two) often feels useless compared to the "real" world. I mean look at all the conversations about Spellings and NCLB and whatnot -- how the heck can we have an impact on those things? Especially when we spend an entire month (at least I and most of my colleagues here do) every September putting our freakin tenure binders together.
Kristin: Small potent gestures (a la C. Selfe) right?
Cheryl: Yes. For me, teaching and editing are my small potent gestures.
Kristin: Teaching, advising, talking after class to students who care (had a great conversation yesterday with a student in my rhetoric class about how delivery plays a huge role in hip hop).
Cheryl: It ends up that I love researching too, which I never thought I would, but I've learned to focus (and say no to some research projects) when they don't fit in with what I want to do.
Kristin: I just need to fine tune my passion a bit--it's hard the first year to rekindle it, as it's been stomped down by the diss and the market.
Cheryl: Yes, the diss and the market will do that. Take the first year and recover. You've already done more than you need to, probably, this year. (Certainly this semester.) You need to regroup because you have another 11 semesters ahead of you before tenure.
Kristin: Funny, because I feel like I'm not doing enough. A bit more breathing would be a good thing.
Cheryl: That's an academic's attitude through and through (not feeling like you’re doing enough). Seriously -- you're already doing a lot, even though it may always feel like you're not. Be choosy about what you do regarding research.
Kristin: I love Becky's advice to "Have a life, because if you don't have a life you won't be happy, and if you're not happy, you're not getting tenure." Thank you, Becky!
Cheryl: Yes, thanks! That's why she gets the last word.