Author: Abby Glogower

On View: Nurturing Inquiry: Exploring Special Collections Research

Published by Abby Glogower

I can’t speak for all academics, but personally I have a comforting little secret to air: despite the composed, jet-set, fellowship-laden, idea- and ambition-saturated veneer I might strive so desperately to affect for professional presentation, I often don’t know what I’m doing. This is especially true at the beginning of a major project, where I mostly don’t know what I’m doing. On darker days, it’s easy to get down on myself. On brighter days, I manage to remember that bringing genuinely interesting, well-developed new knowledge into the world is incredibly hard work—even for the pros. In the summer of 2012, following my second year of graduate school, I received a research grant from my alma mater, Oberlin College, to spend two months in Philadelphia laying groundwork for a dissertation prospectus. I had long been inspired by the exhibits and events hosted by the Visual Culture Program at the Library Company of Philadelphia, and the staff there in prints and photographs kindly let me take up residence in their study room for most of July and …

Erratic Copying: Consummate Memetics in the Year 2012

Published by Abby Glogower

Perhaps the greatest delight in teaching is watching students realize that debates are often not what they initially appear. I relished this transition in particular this fall, when my freshman working on an argumentative paper about the future of journalism began (mercifully) to drift from her original question—echoing the panicked buzz of so many alarmist headlines—“is print dead?” towards the infinitely more sophisticated “what does it mean to digest journalism digitally and how does this readership mode both continue and differ from others?” Inspired by the impending election, she asked her classmates during a draft review clinic whether she might discuss how election coverage played out online through social media—moving beyond the articles on news outlets themselves to address the ways topic circulated via Facebook walls and even enjoyed a second life as memes. The class seized enthusiastically on this question and began referencing images they had seen “reporting” the campaigns’ myriad gaffs and malapropisms. Everyone giggled when I pulled up one of my personal favorites from the recent presidential debate entitled One Meme to …

Visualizing the Student Debt Crisis at Now! Visual Culture

Published by Abby Glogower

The Friday morning sessions at the Now! Visual Culture conference this weekend in New York began with a timely wake up call:  a panel organized by Dr. Joan Saab of the University of Rochester examining the twin crises of academic labor and student debt.  Perhaps most compelling was New School and CUNY professors, Ashley Dawson and McKenzie Wark’s identification of the student debt issue as, at root,  a crisis of visuality.  Whereas the plight of underwater homeowners, our panelists stressed, became quite naturally embodied in the image of the evicted, gutted, foreclosed domicile–splashed lugubriously, on the nightly news and marked on real-estate site web searches–the student debt disaster has no analogous icon. It exists, afterall,  on the site of individual subjects: living, working, beings incapable of the evacuation and ossification of built structures. The Occupy Student Debt movement, presented in brief by fellow panelist Pamela Brown (activist and Sociologist at the New School),  has been one such effort to visualize and politicize what has been metastasizing into an invisible catastrophe: the shackling and indenturement of an …