Rough Theory

I’ve just spent the better part of the last three days answering student emails. I’m responsible for some large courses this term and, due to the last-minute finalisation of my teaching schedule, my name is also attached in various ways to courses I’m not teaching, so I’m the proximate target for several hundred students trying to get their term organised and off to a smooth start. At a staff meeting yesterday, one of my staff members teased me that I’ve taught half the catalogue in my time here, so students reasonably think they can contact me about any course on offer… ;-P

Student emails have cycles. One of the things that always strikes me about mails at the beginning of the term, is how many of them operate under the clear assumption that the only thing I do, is whatever I would do in relation to that particular student – that I teach only one course (and so the course doesn’t need to be specified) or that I only teach (so it should be obvious the mail relates to me as a teacher, rather than to me in various other roles). I spend hours sending out requests for additional information: who are you? what class are you taking? are you already registered? what are the details of your registration? This step then doubles the interaction, since they’ll reply, and I then need to respond to that. Sometimes we have to go round the bend again, if their response isn’t particularly forthcoming…

I’ve spent so much time on this, this term, that I’m seriously considering putting an auto-responder in place next term, that advises anyone who emails that I will need specific information before I can help them. This would prove mildly embarrassing when it responds to colleagues who are emailing for other reasons. But at this time of year, colleagues are perhaps 2% of my incoming email traffic – and presumably they can judge that I’m not demanding extra information from them before I’ll reply… ;-P

I’ve occasionally considered writing into my course guide that certain kinds of emails should never be sent. These are the ones that come later in the term: the ones that ask “Did I miss anything important today?” If the first type of mail causes me to want to go into Taylorist, assembly-line, auto-response mode, this second kind brings out my anarchistic tendencies – I’m always tempted to reply, “Well, there was a pop quiz worth half the course mark…”

But all this aside: I think mainly I’m just sort of shell-shocked at the quantity of email traffic generated while I am teaching. My inbox fills up – exceeds its capacity and starts bouncing messages – if I don’t log in and trim it every few hours… I type extremely quickly, but it still takes immense amounts of working time to slog through the backlog. There must be some better way of managing this… What do other people do?

*sigh* A few days ago, I was dragged from my coffee shop by an urgent phone call, begging me to stand in at the last minute for a lecture that needs to be given next week to an advanced undergraduate course in social and political theory, aimed at students currently preparing their honours thesis. The request was presented in terms of the need to have someone discuss the sociology of scientific knowledge – to provide a sort of massive-brush-stroke narrative of Enlightenment degenerating into postwar technocratic myth, the anti-technocratic backlash in critical theory, and then contemporary rapprochements between social theory and science. Although I wince every time I do this sort of “bottled modernity” lecture, I have actually delivered lectures with this particular narrative line in the past, and so the request seemed “do-able” around my extremely packed schedule.

Now, though, I’ve received the course materials and seen how the lecture has been advertised to students, what readings they have been assigned, what their tutorial activities will be. And it turns out that I should have paid more attention to a sort of muttered mention of “you know, global warming sorts of things” when my interlocutor mentioned that the lecture should also include a discussion of rapprochements between social theory and science. As it turns out, as far as the course materials and therefore the students are concerned, this is a lecture on global warming. The students will be watching An Inconvenient Truth after I shut up and send them off to their tutorials. The “point” of the lecture, as far as I can tell, is to talk about the social theory of global warming denialism.

Now, as much as I love lurking the wonderful Real Climate site, I have no particular competence to lecture on the topic of global warming. I have not researched social theoretic interpretations of climate change scepticism. I have no idea what to say. I’ve done some work on parallel forms of imagery in conceptualising the economy and the natural environment over time, but that hardly seems on target for a lecture of this sort. I can talk (possibly endlessly) about capitalism and the compulsive transformation of material nature – on production become a runaway end in itself… But these shreds of competence seem to flutter past the “point” of this lecture…

If you were called on at the last minute to give a lecture on this topic, what sorts of things would you want to say? Any ideas? Anyone? What I’m trying to do is get my head around how to link what I already know, with a narrative structure that might be useful for a lecture of this sort… So any suggestions around which my ideas can begin to crystallise, would be most welcome…