Scholarly Communication

Cinegogía is an open-access website devoted to the teaching and study of Latin American cinemas. Bridget Franco, an associate professor of Spanish at College of the Holy Cross, founded and coordinates the website. Cinegogía contains a database of Latin American film as well as resources for teaching and researching film. Teaching resources include syllabi, teaching activities and assignments, and film guides. Cinegogía has a considerable selection of films by and about Black and Indigenous communities in Latin America. Bridget Franco and I discuss how she founded the site, teaching with Latin American film, and digital humanities projects.Bridget Franco is Associate Professor of Spanish at College of the Holy Cross.Reighan Gillam is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creations. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jess Polka, executive director of ASAPbio, and Sam Klein of the MIT Press/MIT Media Lab’s Knowledge Futures Group (KFG) and Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society survey and explain open science initiatives and tools. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the first of four episodes in the MITP Open Access series, Travis Rich, PubPub co-founder and project lead, speaks with Edward Finn, founding director of the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University. They discuss Frankenbook—an open access digital version of the print edition of Mary Shelley’s masterpiece Frankenstein published by the MIT Press in 2017. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Vivian Berghahn joins to discuss what is broken with the peer review system in general, how it impacts book publishing, and some creative solutions for how it can be rectified. Also, hear the surprising reason why small, independent publishers tend to have more robust quality review processes than big corporate publishers.Avi Staiman is the founder and CEO of Academic Language Experts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dr. Joyce Kinkead, Distinguished Professor of English at Utah State University discusses her recent book, A Writing Studies Primer (Broadview Press. 2022). A Carnegie Foundation/CASE US Professor of the Year, Professor Kinkead’s primary scholarly areas are in Writing Studies and Undergraduate Research. She has brought a tremendous amount of her expertise in undergraduate research, writing, and composition to the forefront of A Writing Studies Primer.Writing is omnipresent in our lives, yet we rarely stop and consider its history and material culture. This volume introduces student readers to the development of writing across time and societies. The book incorporates autoethnography and asks readers to consider writing histories, influences, processes, and tools in their own lives. Designed for composition courses with a Writing about Writing focus or courses in writing studies, A Writing Studies Primer is a unique introduction to writing through its material culture.Dr. Julia M. Gossard is Associate Dean for Research in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences and Associate Professor of History at Utah State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Alessandra Anzani, Editorial Director, Academic Studies Press, talks about the steps that authors need to take to bring their manuscripts to publication. The conversation includes a deep dive into the different kinds of editing a book goes through, including what authors need to do themselves or with external support vs. the editing (some) publishers will do for authors. We also discuss some of the advantages of small publishers and how to best promote your book after it is published.Avi Staiman is the founder and CEO of Academic Language Experts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Cormac Herley, Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research. We talk about the science of security and as well, about the communication of security science.Cormac Herley : "For very many projects, all through, I sort of have this kind of imaginary dialogue going on with my imagined audience or with representatives of my imagined audience, where what I'm doing on my side of the talk is to convince them. And for me personally, the point of the dialogue is kind of, What am I trying to convince them of? Because, I mean, if I can't tell myself first what it is I'm trying to convince them of, well then, success is going to be very unlikely." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Blunt Instruments: Recognizing Racist Cultural Infrastructure in Memorials, Museums, and Patriotic Practices (Beacon Press, 2022) provides a field guide to the memorials, museums, and practices that commemorate white supremacy in the United States—and how to reimagine a more deeply shared cultural infrastructure for the future.Cultural infrastructure has been designed to maintain structures of inequality, and while it doesn’t seem to be explicitly about race, it often is. Blunt Instruments helps readers identify, contextualize, and name elements of our everyday landscapes and cultural practices that are designed to seem benign or natural but which, in fact, work tirelessly to tell us vital stories about who we are, how we came to be, and who belongs.Examining landmark moments such as the erection of the first American museum and Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling pledge of allegiance, historian Kristin Hass explores the complicated histories of sites of cultural infrastructure. With sharp analysis and a broad lens, Hass makes the undeniable case that understanding what cultural infrastructure is, and the deep and broad impact that it has, is essential to understanding how structures of inequity are maintained and how they might be dismantled.Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology and a volunteer at Interference Archive. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What do the technical practices, procedures, and systems that have shaped institutions of higher learning in the United States, from the Ivy League and women’s colleges to historically black colleges and land-grant universities, teach us about the production and distribution of knowledge? Addressing media theory, architectural history, and the history of academia, Knowledge Worlds: Media, Materiality, and the Making of the Modern University (Columbia UP, 2021) reconceives the university as a media complex comprising a network of infrastructures and operations through which knowledge is made, conveyed, and withheld.Reinhold Martin argues that the material infrastructures of the modern university—the architecture of academic buildings, the configuration of seminar tables, the organization of campus plans—reveal the ways in which knowledge is created and reproduced in different kinds of institutions. He reconstructs changes in aesthetic strategies, pedagogical techniques, and political economy to show how the boundaries that govern higher education have shifted over the past two centuries. From colleges chartered as rights-bearing corporations to research universities conceived as knowledge factories, educating some has always depended upon excluding others. Knowledge Worlds shows how the division of intellectual labor was redrawn as new students entered, expertise circulated, science repurposed old myths, and humanists cultivated new forms of social and intellectual capital. Combining histories of architecture, technology, knowledge, and institutions into a critical media history, Martin traces the uneven movement in the academy from liberal to neoliberal reason.Nushelle de Silva is a PhD candidate in the Department of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her work examines museums and exhibitions, and how the dissemination of visual culture is politically mediated by international organizations in the twentieth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Is writing a nonfiction book harder than you thought it would be? This episode explores: What your reader needs from you, and why. Which writing struggles are the most common, and how to fix them. How to make sure your purpose in writing your book isn’t getting lost. Ways to more effectively focus on what you need to say. What to polish up [and how to do that] before you send it off. Why you can send it out before it’s “perfect.” Our guest is: Dr. Laura Portwood-Stacer who earned a PhD in Communication from the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. She is a publishing consultant and developmental editor for academic authors, and offers a free newsletter entitled Manuscript Works. Before starting her consulting business, she was a scholar and academic whose research focused on lifestyle choices; and taught at New York University in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication. She now lives in Los Angeles with her family, and is a two-time Jeopardy champion.Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women and gender.Listeners to this episode may be interested in: Story Craft: The Complete Guide to Writing Narrative Nonfiction, by Jack Hart The Grant Writing Guide, by Betty S. Lai The Book Proposal Book, by Laura Portwood-Stacer Laura's template on how to write an introduction Laura's template on Reverse Outlining 7 Mistakes I Made When I Published My Academic Book by Laura Portwood-Stacer How To Impress an Acquisitions Editor The Academic Life podcast on how to revise your dissertation so a university press will want to publish it The Academic Life podcast Do You Need A Developmental Editor? The Academic Life podcast on University Press Submissions and The Peer Review The Academic Life podcast about marketing your scholarly book The Academic Life podcast on writing a book proposal The Academic Life episode on open-access publishing Welcome to The Academic Life! Join us here each week, as we learn from experts inside and outside the academy, and embrace the broad definition of what it means to lead an academic life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices