[Air-L] Fwd: danah's response - Graduate programs for Internet studies

[Denise N. Rall]

Jumping on to this conversation quite late -

The point of my PhD thesis is that many academics can 'work themselves into' an internet studies position *without* purposely starting out to do that in the first place. I identified four types of 'internet scholars'
*the professional
*the research-based
*the peripatetic
* the immersed

While the paper was rejected for publication, I think it is still important to note that there are many ways to get to the end, and many of those ways - are - opportunities taken. Clifford Geertz remarked on the progress of his career - I quote at length - 

"The question was: where, elsewhere? With nothing substantial in the way of a job . . . I thought it expedient to take shelter in graduate school, and my wife, Hildred, another displaced English major unprepared ‘for the real world,’ thought she might do so as well. But, once again. . . I was – we were – without resources. So I . . . asked another unstandard academic, a charismatic philosophy professor named George Geiger, who had been Lou Gehrig’s backup on the Columbia baseball team and John Dewey’s last student, what I should do. He said [approximately]: ‘Don’t go into philosophy; it has fallen into the hands of Thomists and technicians. You should try anthropology’ . . . "(Geertz 2000: 7).

Geertz later states: “As improbably and casually as we had become anthropologists, and just about as innocently, we became Indonesianists . . . the rest is postscript, the working out of happenstance fate” (2000:9).

From: Geertz, C. (2000). Available light: Anthropological reflections on philosophical topics. Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press.
	
As I noted in the thesis, Geertz was used as my exemplar of a peripatetic scholar. He went where the opportunities were, and made the best of them.

There are two newish books reviewing his contributions to the field of anthropology as well as a collection of essays:
Clifford Geertz By His Colleagues by Byron Good (Editor), Richard A. Shweder (Editor), Clifford Geertz (Editor) Paperback, Univ of Chicago Pr (March 2005)
Life Among the Anthros and Other Essays by Clifford Geertz, Fred Inglis (Editor) Hardcover, Princeton Univ Pr (April 2010) 

Cheers, Denise

Denise N. Rall, PhD. Special Projects, Faculty of Arts & Science  
Southern Cross University, Lismore NSW AUSTRALIA Mobile +(61)(0)438 233344 http://www.scu.edu.au/schools/esm/staff/pages/drall/



--- On Sat, 2/10/10, Jeremy hunsinger <jeremy at tmttlt.com> wrote: