Fired up!

Morning everybody. Did you enjoy me taking a day off from blogging yesterday? Or notice? It was a combination of exhaustion and business. I nearly got locked in the office at 10 p.m. the night before, having got caught up forensically examining Booz Allen's Code of Ethics, under which they fired Edward Snowden for leaking details of the NSA's Prism programme of spying on everyone, everywhere.

Then yesterday we had a series of meetings including one with the External Examiners – academics from other universities who analyse our curricula, assignments, marking, content and all the other things which constitute a course. It's the most important way we ensure that we're up to scratch intellectually and pedagogically. Weirdly, it was fun: we talked about all the things academics moan about in general, they praised the things the university is about to abolish (like the marking scheme) and we talked about individual modules. It was like being released after years in a hostage cell: words like 'imaginative' and 'sophisticated' were being bandied about. Our best undergraduate students, we're told, are almost operating at MA level, while even the mid-range ones are very strong compared with other universities. It's just so good to hear some validation now and then: we don't often get an outside perspective and it's easy to get caught up in the quotidian annoyances, losing sight of the genuinely good work we and our students do.

Somehow, perhaps dazed by all the praise (for my colleagues' work) I landed (well, volunteered for) the job of scanning and uploading all my colleagues' REF material: the chapters, articles and books which will be assessed in the programme which determines which universities will get research funding over the next few years. I suppose it's only right: I'm not in the REF exercise because too much of my suddenly free-flowing research is due out next year rather than this time (which is infuriating) but I can't help thinking that in a research-oriented university, academic staff wouldn't spend their time doing this kind of work. There's nothing demeaning about it, but having spent all these years training to produce research, it's not a great use of my salaried time. That said, the REF leaders for my subject group have spent the best part of two years doing this sort of thing, at great cost to their own research outputs, so it's time someone else took on some of the burden. They also serve who stand and photocopy…

At completely the other end of the working spectrum, I helped out with an MA class on Popular Culture the other evening which was probably the most fun I've ever had in a classroom. Or perhaps just the most fun I've ever had, which may give you a little more insight into my psychological condition. I was so enthused that I even took a picture of one of the whiteboards we filled:

Led by my colleague Steve with me chipping in and restraining him from playing yet another illustrative Grateful Dead track (he's a barely-reformed hippy), the subject was the dialectic relationship between postmodern religion and aspects of popular culture, and the ways in which they've affected each other: discourse, ritual, architecture, music and so on. With two of us and three students, we spent three hours talking about Victor Turner's work on rites of passage, Orientalism, the fascinating ways in which Western capitalist technology is used to construct a romanticised version of tribalism (a side-effect of postmodern discontent), Harry Potter and the Sorting Hat, rave culture, why Richard Branson is such an awful enemy of enlightened values, Bakhtin and the carnivalesque, Electronic Dance Music and trance, coffee bars and Tea Ceremonies, performativity, Foucault's notion of heterotopia (i.e. that people experience the same event in different ways), shamanism and techno-shamanism, ritual spaces, places and times and most of all, liminality and its essential place in human experience. All soundtracked by the direst music you can possibly imagine. Still: heavy metal next week. The relief…

So it's not all drudgery round here: my enthusiasm has been thoroughly rekindled by that class and I'm raring to go. I've just received the final proofs of one of my publications to check, and I'm spending the day doing final edits of another, having received the readers' reports. Today will be a good day. Once the after-effects of last night's curry with the external examiners subside…