RelationsInternational

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I started a series of blog posts on moving from a faculty position to the administrative realm (you can find them by typing “Dark Side” into the search box on this blog). Like George Lucas, I wrote a trilogy and then stepped away for a while. Unlike Lucas, I hope that now that I’m picking up the thread again this next set will be at least as good as the first ones. I promise, at least, no Jar-Jar Binks.

When last we left off, I had written about things faculty can do to set themselves up for administrative positions in the future – a sort of “how to build your resume” exercise. Now that administrative interview season is upon us, I want to turn my attention to more immediate concerns. Assuming that you have already ventured onto the path, applied for an administrative job, and been granted an interview, now what?

The key point here is both obvious and easy to miss: Administrative interviews are fundamentally different from faculty interviews. The sooner you convince yourself of this – really believe it – the better off you will be.

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#JeSuisCharlie and #JeSuisAhmed have been trending this week in response to the tragic deaths from the attack on the French satire magazine Charlie Hebdo on January 7. #JeSuisCharlie is being used to defend the freedom of expression and the press of the magazine, and stand with those killed defending it, and #JeSuisAhmed is to remind those who would essentialize Islam and violence that an Islamic man died defending the right of the magazine to mock his religion through free speech. These hashtags have been used more than five million times.

The New York Times estimated that more than half a million Iraqi children died before 1995 from the sanctions regime (before its height in 1996 and 1997). It is now estimated that 5.4 million people have died in the ongoing conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami killed almost a quarter of a million people. In the United States, 1 in 100000 people starves to death every year – that’s more than 3000 people. The leading causes of death on January 7, 2015; like on September 11, 2001 and other hallmark days for global terrorism – were largely preventable diseases, rather than war or terrorism. I don’t know any of the names of any of those people – the starved Iraqis; the dead Congolese; the Indonesians, Sri Lankans, Indians and others killed and displaced by the tsunami; the starved Americans. I may be able to find some of them, but the overwhelming majority of those dead people will remain nameless to me, as will most of the victims of most of the tragedies in the world.

Don’t get me wrong. I am for free expression, and against killing people for it (though also preferably for inter-religious respect and against essentialism). But, with Judith Butler, I am interested in what makes some lives grievable and others not – what the conditions that make life (and death) recognizable are. In a very different way, the #BlackLivesMatter movement has been asking a very similar question – how do some lives come to be signified as meaningful and some as meaningless? How are some lives individually valuable and others aggregated in statistics, or just ignored? I think that, whatever the answer to those questions are, they must be definition be unjustified metrics of visibility. So with that thought, for today, #jesuisnameless.

We all survived, the great hacking scare of 2014 is almost over.  On November 22, North Korea or its operatives attacked Sony’s networks over the movie The Interview.  In what is normally a quite holiday period of writing and copy editing, I got caught up in the events surrounding the Sony hack and tried to engage the media.  

The issue is that engaging the media and the ongoing public debate is borderline insane.  Events move so quickly, it is hard to keep up  Other commentators are more than wiling to go on the news and say borderline dangerous things like we are at a state of war with North Korea.

I really wish the whole time I had been on a plane and avoided this whole mess, problem is its important, both as our responsibility as academics to engage the debate with some analytic rigor, but also to the institutions that pay us to promote the work we do.  At least the movie was good and had my favorite line about rivalry relations in a movie so far, Franco to Jong-un “A friend does not blow up another friend’s country.”

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