A great friend of mine, a microbiologist who is now a postdoc in Seattle, used to talk about her lab’s journal club. As I understood it, journal club was exactly like fight club, although with less violence and more microbiology.
Informal reading groups have come and gone in my department, not least because we dissertators always want to excise unnecessary commitments from our schedules—we could cut down on the blogging, but surely it’s more important to cut down on discussion groups.
To jump-start the modblogging community I am so eager to see, and to increase the Googleability of some compelling and perhaps under-discussed scholars, I’m hoping to give shape to a completely haphazard journal club here on this blog.
The rules of journal club:
- There is a journal club
- However, there are no rules
My goal is to write 300-word-max discussions of articles I’m tackling, with a short critique or a question or two.
Watch for the first Modbogging Journal Club post later today. The article will be Sheng-Mei Ma’s “Kazuo Ishiguro’s Persistent Dream for Postethnicity: Performance in Whiteface” (PDF) from Post Identity 2.1 (Winter 1999).
[...] March 2008 by Mike Shapiro This is the first in what I hope will be at least 2 Modblogging Journal Club [...]
Completely unrelated, but there was a great article by, I think, Jessica Burstein in The Chronicle riffing on this … “Tenure Club.”
I only hope I will end up as bad-ass as her…