cbberg.info :: academics

New Blog Entries

Posted: 6 Sept. 2008

Two new blog entries, the first an update of "Nobody Gives a Damn About the Constitution Anymore," discussing the travesties of justice outside the conventions. What happened outside the Democratic and Republican National Conventions was disgusting, but it certainly wasn't unexpected. This is an update of the warning I wrote in late 2004, when I saw what was coming. The second entry is a discussion of a long-overdue Democratic response to Republican attack politics.

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Almost Complete

Posted: 22 Jul. 2008

The site is nearly complete. All that's left is a "Contact" page, and based on past experience, I may want to play around with a few Captcha programs before I post that one - Too many spambots get my address and even with good filtering, I end up spending too much time sorting.

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Academic Info

Summary

I'm at the end of the third year of my Ph.D. program in Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media [Link] at NC State University [Link]. Third year equals no graded courses, a ton of reading, and putting together the prospectus, taking the prelims, and performing other non-interesting tasks necessary for completing the doctorate. As I'm currently writing this while I should be working on my prospectus, I shouldn't have to tell you just how unexciting it all is. The three areas my examinations have covered are:

Political communication, mainly rhetoric
Critical and Rhetorical theory
Information architecture, interface, and composition

This section basically serves to direct you to the various aspects of my academic existence, mainly teaching and research ideas that I've posted online, with a link to my blog thrown in to give you an idea of where my coursework is keeping my brain. Also included are links to my teaching portfolio, conferences I've attended and the presentations there delivered, and other stuff for which "stuff" is a perfectly appropos label.

A Few Valuable Readings

While I do review texts elsewhere on the site [Link], these are just a few books from my reading list that I feel are valuable to anyone interested in my research fields. You'll notice a few clusters of authors - these are some of my favorite scholars in their respective fields.

Murray Edelman - The Symbolic Uses of Politics - Chicago: UP of Illinois, 1985.
Murray Edelman - Constructing the Political Spectacle - Chicago: UP of Illinois, 1990
Edelman - The Politics of Misinformation - New York: Cambridge UP, 1997

Brian Massumi - Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation - Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2002.
William Connolly - Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed - Minneapolis: UP of Minnesota, 2002.
Guy DeBord - Society of the Spectacle.

Tom DeLuca and John Buell - Liars! Cheaters! Evildoers! Demonization and the End of Civil Debate in American Politics - New York: NYU Press, 2006.
Philip N. Howard - New Media Campaigns and the Managed Citizen - New York: Cambridge UP, 2006.
Kathleen Hall Jamieson - Eloquence in an Electronic Age - New York: Oxford UP, 1990.