Brian Ekdale

Associate Professor, Journalism & Mass Communication, University of Iowa

Blog, Conferences, Randoms

November Roundup/Linkup

What’s that? There was a November? I hadn’t really noticed. It’s been a wild month or so, but here are some of the things that have keep me busy the last several weeks:

  • Watching the Chicago Bears and the Wisconsin Badgers football teams win games. While my fantasy football team is on a horrendous losing streak, my “reality” teams are on big winning streaks. I’ll take that.
  • Doing the academic job market thing. For anyone out there finishing a Ph.D. and applying for jobs (especially those within the field of Communication), I’d highly recommend this series of posts on Jonathan Gray’s blog. His blog provides a lot of good info from the perspective of someone who went through the process several times and learned a bunch along the way. Jonathan is an Associate Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
  • Watching a lot of cable TV at airports and hotel rooms. In the process, I came to understand all the fuss over cable news. And by fuss, I mean hatred. In particular, I watched a Glenn Beck episode where he spent 30 minutes arguing the European Union is (intentionally) the reincarnation of the Tower of Babel and I noticed that CNN Headline News has gone the way of MTV, in that it offers neither headlines or news.
  • Attending back-to-back conferences in San Fransisco: the National Communication Association conference and the African Studies Association conference. While conferences are always a good opportunity to see what interesting projects others are up to, I had forgotten that attending conferences is a great for getting you excited about your own research. Several times, I found myself sitting in the audience at a panel and getting excited about moving forward on my own research. Those moments are really valuable.

And some other things, too. What I didn’t do was a lot of blogging. I’m hoping to remedy that in the near future.

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