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	<title>decasia</title>
	<link>http://decasia.org/academic_culture</link>
	<description>critical anthropology of academic culture</description>
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		<title>Losing the Excellence Sweepstakes</title>
		<description><![CDATA[In France, one way that the Sarkozy government has been financing major projects on universities is with a large loan it took out in 2010, termed the &#8220;Grand Emprunt.&#8221; (I would translate this as &#8220;major loan&#8221; — &#8220;grand loan&#8221; would sound a bit silly in English.) Part of the funds have been directed towards so-called [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://decasia.org/academic_culture/2012/01/losing-the-excellence-sweepstakes/</link>
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		<title>Ashamed to be apolitical</title>
		<description><![CDATA[The generally staid newsletter of my disciplinary association (the AAA) suddenly had a leading letter by Eric J Montgomery in this month&#8217;s issue: What happened to activist anthropology? To solidarity and support for those fighting injustice and inequality? At the AAA meeting in Montréal support for the Occupy Wall Street movement was conspicuously absent. As [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://decasia.org/academic_culture/2012/01/ashamed-to-be-apolitical/</link>
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		<title>Renaissance critiques of scholarship and ironic reflexivity</title>
		<description><![CDATA[The Renaissance seems to have been a particularly rich moment for internal critique of the academy. I happened to be reading a bit of Erasmus&#8216;s The Praise of Folly (1511) today and was struck by its hilarious, bitter parody of medieval scholastics. For instance, on scholarly publishing: Of the same stripe [i.e., belonging to the [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://decasia.org/academic_culture/2012/01/renaissance-critiques-of-scholarship/</link>
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		<title>On blogging and not blogging</title>
		<description><![CDATA[In spite of my desire to write more on my blog back in July, I obviously haven&#8217;t done a good job of keeping up with it. That isn&#8217;t something that you should interpret as a choice. It was more like the result of economic necessity: back in July I started working for the university, first [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://decasia.org/academic_culture/2011/11/on-blogging-and-not-blogging/</link>
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		<title>Full of question marks</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Continuing my analysis of the April 2010 debate at Paris-8 over the passage to &#8220;Expanded [Managerial] Competences,&#8221; which I invoked in my last post, I wanted to give a snippet of that discussion, since it says a lot about how French academics grapple with the future of their institution. I haven&#8217;t gone through the whole recording [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://decasia.org/academic_culture/2011/07/full-of-question-marks/</link>
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		<title>Politics that fade</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I happened to discover the other day that if you display photographs from my fieldsite at full vertical resolution, while reducing the width, you get a vertiginous sense of height. This here was the light of late afternoon as it fell through low bushes across the windows of an amphitheatre in Bâtiment D (D Building) [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://decasia.org/academic_culture/2011/07/politics-that-fade/</link>
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		<title>The fallacy of blaming universities for unemployment</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I feel obliged to respond to wretchedly short-sighted articles like this one in Salon that critique liberal arts programs for not preparing people for the brutal job market. I&#8217;m just going to say this as simply as I can: It makes no sense to blame universities for producing graduates who can&#8217;t get jobs, because the [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://decasia.org/academic_culture/2011/06/the-fallacy-of-blaming-universities-for-unemployment/</link>
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		<title>&#8220;Nothing left but the fac&#8221;</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I&#8217;ve just started reading the most prominent book on French university reforms of the past year, Refonder L&#8217;Université: Pourquoi l&#8217;enseignement supérieur reste à reconstruire, which translates to &#8220;Refounding the University: Why higher education awaits reconstruction.&#8221; It came out last October from La Découverte, and has spawned debate at, for instance, ARESER (the Association of Reflection [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://decasia.org/academic_culture/2011/06/nothing-left-but-the-fac/</link>
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		<title>Rage, repetition and incomprehension in precarious work</title>
		<description><![CDATA[The following is the text of an open letter sent to the President of the University of Paris-8 by a teacher in visual arts. She&#8217;s losing her job because of a particularly Kafkaesque circumstance: she doesn&#8217;t make enough money from art to maintain her tax status as an artist, and in France there&#8217;s a regulation [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://decasia.org/academic_culture/2011/06/rage-repetition-and-incomprehension-in-precarious-work/</link>
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		<title>Excerpt: returning to the field</title>
		<description><![CDATA[This is from my field notebook earlier this spring, as I returned to France after spending some time back in Chicago this winter. march 2 &#8211; on returning to france the sky hazed and prongs of sun forked into the railroad cars and the gravel ballast of the tracks. in the tunnel the buckles of [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://decasia.org/academic_culture/2011/05/excerpt-returning-to-the-field/</link>
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