It's been a long time (since anything other than blockquotes, it seems.) I shouldn't have left you without a dope beat to step to.

My apologies. I've been busy with a combination of GSOC, coursework, and, our group research project on piracy. The current state of my piece of the project proposal is below:

"The University of Pirates and the Pirate University: Academic Knowledge Production, Intellectual Property, and Utopia,"

The neoliberal university's position as a site of knowledge production and relationship to the licensing of the products of publicly funded research as intellectual property to be farmed out, often, to partnerships with private corporations, means that for academic capitalism, production and "piracy" are now increasingly intertwined. I propose a project which understands the current predicaments of so-called cognitive capitalism, (see Nick Dyer Witheford's essay in the European Journal of Higher Arts Education : http://www.ejhae.elia-artschools.org/Issue2/1b-dyer.htm) intellectual property, and academic labor. I will rely specifically on theorizations of immaterial labor by autonomist marxists like Dyer Witheford, Negri, Lazzarato, Tiziana Terranova (particularly this interview with Marc Bousquet: http://www.metamute.org/en/Recomposing-the-University et alii, and on some case studies of recent struggles within and against the global university's logics of ownership and work. I will also look at attempts to envision a nomad space of knowledge production against and/or outside of the post Bayh-Dole patent machine - what Dyer Witheford theorizes as the pirate colonies on the margins of David Noble's digital diploma mills. (yarr.)

Clearly, it needs work, but i think it's headed in a productive direction.

I haven't had a good night's sleep all week and i'm not really sure why. I just toss and turn and never feel rested. And i have these bizarre, surreal, intimate dreams which have been haunting me for the last couple of nights and i don't really get where they're coming from and why now. And right now i'm exhausted and
feeling mildly unproductive, not to mention a bit hungry. My major accomplishment of the day was buying new shoes - which boast - instead of gapoing holes where the heel should be, strong rubber soles as yet uneroded by the seven miles I walk every day. Also I think I have a better sense of the organizing that has to happen in my department, so I feel good about that. Really, though, I kind of just want to find something soft right now and lie on it for a few days, but i have what looks to be a busy weekend followed by a busy week, so that's a pipe dream. I'd really like to get out of the city for a little while, to go somewhere where leaves change colors and fall air is actually crisp. One of those moments where learning to drive probably would have been a good idea. But I am thinking maybe i should wait until things are a little more settled, until Fall has fallen a bit more, until I've finished an incomplete or two. Argh.