The Texas professoriate and public political discourse before and after 9/11

Robert Jensen's critique of the participation of academic intellectuals in Texas in public political discourse after the 9/11 terrorist attacks underestimates what professors have done to inform a politically apathetic public about warfare, American foreign policy, civil liberties, and cultural and humanitarian issues. Jensen undervalues non‐confrontational political strategies and broader forms of intellectual political engagement. Confrontational strategies mobilize citizens inclined to activism, but less overtly political strategies invite larger numbers of citizens to think seriously about politics. Jensen's locally famous post‐9/11 Houston Chronicle editorial is analyzed as rhetorically egocentric and alienating, and ultimately counter‐productive in the post‐9/11 political environment.     

Muralism and the People: Culture,Popular Citizenship,and Government in Post-Revolutionary Mexico

This paper examines the history of Mexican muralism within the governmental development of a national cultural infrastructure after the Revolution of 1910. Treating mural art as a technical apparatus of popular communication, the paper argues for a more complex understanding of cultural communication through analysis of the institutional apparatuses of heritage as discursive sites of popular citizenship. In addition, this paper theorizes and historicizes Mexican state formation through the insights of Michel Foucault's essay on \ldblquote Governmentality\rdblquote for the purpose of providing a more nuanced theory of the relationship between culture, power, and the people     

Historically Black College and University Libraries in the 21st Century

Abstract

The strategic stewardship of the nation's cultural resources assumes the existence of a national strategy to preserve and protect those resources. As we work to develop that strategy, we should be reminded that stewardship involves responsibility at the local level for the daily security and preservation of the vast historical and intellectual records of human experience. Any national strategy to preserve and protect must be based on the defining issue of selection-selection based upon common approaches, values, and prioritization across the research library and scholarly community-as well as on the choice of format for preservation.     

Intellectual Property in the Makerspace

Abstract

In library makerspaces, there is a potential for users to infringe on other’s intellectual property rights through illegal reproduction. There is also the opportunity for makerspace users to create their own new intellectual property which could then be protected. This article presents a case study from a library makerspace working to address intellectual property issues, as well as a survey of other library makerspaces detailing how they are currently addressing such concerns. Results conclude that while currently there is a lack of targeted services and resources, libraries need to create policy, services, and collections targeted towards intellectual property in their makerspaces.     

Notes on reconstructing “the popular”

ABSTRACT

Drawing on Stuart Hall’s influential “Notes on deconstructing ‘the popular’” [Hall, S. (1981). In R. Samuel (Eds.), People’s history and socialist theory (pp. 227–240). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.], this essay maps out some of the major shifts in cultural studies’ relationship to popular culture over the past several decades. It concludes with a call for cultural studies to find ways to work from the terrain of the popular, rather than merely studying that terrain, or trying to “translate” its scholarly analyses for popular audiences. This is a necessary path to fulfilling its mission as a political project.     

The SANU Memorandum: Intellectual Authority and the Constitution of an Exclusive Serbian “People”

Through this essay, I assert that the intellectual authority of prominent cultural intellectuals can affect a form of “cultural pedagogy” that can essentially re-educate an audience through constitutive discourses that can re-articulate that audience's identity, cultural framework, and historical references, and in so doing can normalize mass violence. Serbian intellectuals and cultural elites played a prominent role in initializing the extreme nationalist mindset that increasingly polarized Yugoslavia throughout the 1980s. In 1986, the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences (SANU) drafted a Memorandum, the publication of which in the Serbian newspaper Vjecernje Novosti is retrospectively the precipitating event that awakened Serbian national consciousness. This essay critiques the 1986 Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences with regard to its role in constructing an exclusive and politically charged Serbian identity. Beginning with an examination of the Memorandum's central claims, this essay asserts that the dominant mythic themes that emerge in the document were part of a deliberate teleological reordering of historical events that provided the foundation for the constitutive rhetoric of Serbian intellectuals-turned-politicians. This essay allows for a deeper understanding of the effects of constitutive discourses, rooted in a mythos of victimization, on the emergent nationalism and mass violence in the former Yugoslavia.     

The identity work of questioning in intellectual discussion

This article examines how questioning practices in intellectual discussion do identity work. Drawing upon the discussion discourse of a Ph.D. department's weekly colloquium, as well as several other sources, three aspects of intellectual identity are identified that are routinely at stake for academic presenters in discussion periods: their knowledgeability, originality, and level of intellectual sophistication. We identify and describe questioning practices that support and challenge these desired identities. Analysis of the discussion discourse shows how use of marked and unmarked question forms implicate a question recipient's knowledgeability level, how time references and interest queries imply a person's degree of originality, and how lexical choices can problematize presenters’ intellectual frameworks, which in turn can become challenges to their intellectual sophistication. The concluding section considers how the identity—implicative discourse analysis developed and used in the paper could become a useful new methodological tool and sketches out implications for future research on questioning, politeness theory, and a current metatheoretical debate about inquiry.     

September 11 and the failures of American intellectuals

This essay critiques the main responses to 9/11 by US intellectuals and analyzes how these reactions reinforced a determined ignorance of the consequences of US economic, foreign, and military policy and a further depoliticization of the culture in general. As a class, faculty have the resources—material and intellectual—to make a serious contribution to progressive political and social change in the world. They need to start putting those resources to work.     

Cultural Studies and/of Economic Rights: Neglect and Promise

This article theorizes the historical non-relation between cultural studies and economic rights discourse, tracing it to ideal typical distinctions between economy and culture in early cultural studies; Karl Marx's influence on Left thought generally via his critique of bourgeois rights; and Foucauldian governmentalist treatments of rights as neoliberal technologies of control and treatments of economy as having no agency of its own but rather as an effect of governmentality. It then introduces a case-study conjunctural history of American economic rights as a history of present American citizenship and politics in order to demonstrate the historically contingent articulations of individual freedom, government, and economic relations, which are not easily explained by the Marxist or Foucauldian vocabularies. The conjunctural history provides cultural studies research with a new perspective for attention to radical democracy and critiques of neoliberal capitalist policies without surrendering the utility of rights to (neo)liberalism.     

From Embedded to Machinic Intellectuals: Communication Studies and General Intellect

This essay examines how the increasing dependence of the academy, specifically communication studies, on corporate and federal funding is creating a sector of embedded intellectuals. Using the theoretical lens of what is loosely called “autonomism,” I argue that the concept of General Intellect forces us to reconsider traditional notions of intellectual work. The significance of communication, as both a growing academic field and infrastructure for this General Intellect, puts the discipline in the spotlight. After summarizing Gramscian and Foucauldian conceptions of the engaged intellectual, I sketch out a figure of the intellectual adequate to these conditions, what I call the machinic intellectual.     

Incorporating indigenous knowledge materials. Efforts at Elhafeed Library,Ahfad University,Sudan

Abstract

This article describes work being done at Ahfad University for Women in Omdurman, Sudan, to document and catalog indigenous knowledge (IK) materials. The recognition and appreciation of IK taps into the intellectual resources associated with it. Librarians, as major workers in the knowledge society, have to recognize their roles in the incorporation of IK into the “scientific knowledge system” with which they are familiar.     

To Receive Well—It's Critical

This essay explores a non-negationist approach to the “critical” by recounting cultural studies's recent articulation of intellectual work to social movement practice. The academicization of cultural studies is evaluated not as cooptation of criticality, but as subsumption, which creates new platforms for action. Ultimately, Cultural Studies would benefit from its own “reception study” in which its powers to be affected could be enhanced to reconnect it with ongoing popular struggles.     

The dynamics of bilateral intellectual property negotiations: Taiwan and the United States

This study analyzes the progress of copyright enforcement in Taiwan in the period from 1985 to 2000. As a rapidly industrializing region, Taiwan has faced significant pressure from its international trade partners to improve intellectual property protection. This pressure has been strongest from the United States, Taiwan's largest partner. Analysis of the progress of intellectual property protection in Taiwan provides an opportunity to learn more about the dynamics of intellectual property policy development in developing countries, and the impact of U.S. actions on internal IP politics and cultural development. The paper will survey the significant milestones in Taiwanese copyright policy development over the last two decades and conclude with a conceptual model that can be tested by analysis of other case studies of cross-jurisdiction intellectual property relationships.     

COLOR POEMS

ABSTRACT

The value, roles and responsibilities of public libraries have been articulated in a variety of ways, and today their exact nature continues to be subject to broad interpretation. This research approaches the subject from a historic perspective, using Ernestine Rose and her career at the New York Public Library to exemplify five propositions that lead to a value-centered understanding of public libraries as cultural institutions that engage considerable physical, economic, and moral resources to improve the social and intellectual capacity of their communities.     

Editorial: Transition and reinvention

The rapid development of information technology has dramatically changed the basic paradigm of access in libraries, as well as librarian's roles and responsibilities. In order to remain abreast with these changes, instruction on intellectual freedom in Library and Information Science education needs to be reexamined and revamped. There have been few studies which examined the state of intellectual freedom education in library science programs, and even fewer examined from an international or comparative approach. The present study is an examination of the state of intellectual freedom education in Japan. Interviews and a survey were applied to five Library and Information Science educators in Japan. The findings were analyzed in comparison with the results of Bruce Shuman's survey (1977). The University of Hawaii Library and Information Science curriculum was also used as a reference for comparison. Other recent smaller-scale survey studies are supplemented to illustrate American practice as well. Two findings of this study merit further investigation. First, the Japanese approach to and perspective on teaching intellectual freedom are more theoretical while the American counterpart attempts to be both theoretical and practical. The differences are attributed to their social cultural environment in libraries, higher education, and society at large. The study also found differences in how intellectual freedom education is perceived in relation to the other subjects in the curriculum. Some of the Japanese respondents in this study see it as a specific subject matter to be taught in designated courses. On the contrary, American subjects argued it should be taught throughout the curriculum.     

Public Libraries Development Reconsidered

Abstract

This paper advances a new interpretation of the development and current decline of public libraries in Egypt based on the study of international influences which helped to shape national discourses about development and provided the context for policy making and resource allocation in Egypt. After 1945 UNESCO encouraged fundamental education and the development of public libraries as operational tools of "education for development". Public libraries witnessed remarkable growth, but then, in the late 1960s, the dominant international discourse about development shifted under the influence of dependency theory to emphasize the need for developing countries to develop from within. Information for development became a self-evident requirement, but the new priority displaced public libraries in favor of specialized information systems for decision-makers. Traditionally, public library decline is attributed to local factors and issues of scarcity. In the case of Egypt, however, factors of scarcity are better interpreted as symptoms than as underlying causes of decline. This paper maintains that the current state of decline of public libraries in Egypt is primarily a consequence of public policy choices precipitated by a shift in international as well as national development priorities, not of factors inherent in the country’s political, social and cultural fabric.     

纸本庋藏——民智启蒙——道义担当:知识分子失语时代公共图书馆有所作为的可能向度

悬置政治-社会层面"不可抗因素"不论,20世纪80年代末以降并迄今方兴未艾,出版、印刷等传统纸质传媒式微,电视、数字、网络等新兴电子传媒汹涌勃兴的同时,介入公共话语、充当社会正义良知代言人的知识分子日渐退隐最终逍遁于无形,之后来者自觉演变分化为学院知识分子和媒介知识分子(或称电视知识分子),即本质上规避道义担当、抛却社会责任的所谓"知道分子"。进一步研究发现,出版、印刷传统纸质传媒与电视、数字、网络等现代电子传媒分别构成了知识分子文化与知道分子文化的重要形式表征,由此揭橥凸显了公共图书馆文献馆藏意义层面长期以来被繁茂芜杂的技术细节所遮蔽着的一个重要事实:纸质印刷文本不仅为知识分子提供了言说空间,而且也在一定意义上建构起了知识分子的反思精神与批判立场;以纸质印刷文本庋藏、传播为己任的公共图书馆,实乃当下"后知识分子时代"知识分子文化传承最具操作可能的重要途径。今日知识分子公共话语集体失语,民众趋之公共图书馆寻觅精神家园,寄望其能肩起道义担当,引领崇高价值。因含此内在独特天然优势,公共图书馆确具民智启蒙、人文引领等道义担当之可能向度。藉此,热闹经年的"全民阅读"活动不再只是驻足于浅表意义层面上的应景运作,而终于找到了自身赖之安身立命的真正魂魄;同理,沸沸扬扬的"公共图书馆精神"、"公共图书馆核心价值"等大而无当之类空泛的理念讨论,也终于找回了自己真正的精髓或归宿。     

(2) The Role of the National Diet Library in Sharing National Library Resources

Abstract

This article outlines several significant features of reading in Russia today. First the change of the cultural hierarchy is addressed: no longer is the reading of the classics a status symbol, indicating the reader’s adherence to traditional norms of culture. The classics have been abandoned as readers unashamedly pursue light entertainment in the form of detective stories, romances, etc. Second, there has emerged a new system of cultural organization as a result of the collapse of central state direction. So far these new forms of organization have proven totally inadequate: much of publishing is beyond the reach of both bibliographic control mechanisms and libraries, which are gradually ceasing to function as sites where high culture is consumed.     

St. Louis Public Library Employee Scholarship Program

ABSTRACT

The text of a successful employee scholarship program policy at the St. Louis Public Library is presented in this article. The policy covers rationale, application and renewal procedures, content and degrees covered, levels of financial support, approval and disapproval process, appeal procedure if application denied, work time and monetary repayment options, for single classes and associate's degrees along with Bachelor's and MLS degrees as well.     

Economic Analysis and Copyright Law: Are New Models Needed in the Digital Age?

Summary

Economic analysis has played a central role in the development of intellectual property policy. Since information exhibits characteristics of a public good, both non-rival consumption and non-exclusivity, information markets are prone to market failure. This requires a policy response in the form of a subsidy or direct government provision. The monopoly rights granted to owners of intellectual property can be viewed as a form of subsidy intended to avert market failure. But in the digital environment, the tendency to market failure increases as information is more susceptible to copying and distribution with neither significant additional cost nor loss of quality.

While a wide range of policy tools are available to meet the challenges of the new digital environment, the range of current legislative proposals shows that the expansion of property rights in information is the only approach being given serious consideration.

This paper reviews these proposals as well as the wide variety of other approaches that could be considered including an increased role for the public provision of information. It is concluded that the traditional model of positive economic analysis is unable to explain the current policy environment and that a broader approach rooted in political economy would be appropriate.