the mythical job.

There’s a tenure-track academic job I hear students talk about – one with work-life balance and a forty-hour work week and at least two weeks (but hopefully an entire summer) of carefree, completely unplugged vacation; one where you have all the autonomy and prestige of a professor, along with job security and a professional level paycheck, but there aren’t external pressures on your time except for those that you select because they’re consistent with your values and life goals…that job – that does not exist. And, even if it did, you would not increase your chances of landing such a job by eschewing the professional advice of faculty or colleagues because they are seen as somehow biased toward a different kind of job, one that just doesn’t fit you or your life goals.

translating habitus from bourdieu to english

The following is a guest post by Steve Vaisey.

Last Friday I was in the airport, coming back from a talk at Emory when I saw this tweet from Paula England.

At one level, I shared her pain. “Structured structures predisposed to serve as structuring structures” is not exactly the clearest phrase ever written. But, that said, I get a lot out of Bourdieu and I think this passage is a pretty good summary of the entire argument of the Logic of Practice.

So, foolishly, publicly, I claimed that, when rendered in plain English, this was actually a pretty good passage. Then, doubling down, I offered to try such a translation. A number of people expressed interest in seeing what I came up with, so here it is.

the $7bn myth: isis and the antiquities black market

The following is a guest post by Fiona Rose-Greenland.

Last week the FBI posted a new bulletin warning American citizens to be careful when purchasing antiquities of Iraqi or Syrian origin. The risk, according to the FBI, is that “purchasing an object looted and/or sold by the Islamic State may provide financial support to a terrorist organization and could be prosecuted under 18 USC 233A.”

Media outlets responded with a new round of articles, resurrecting the specter of a “$7 billion black market in antiquities”, in which the Islamic State (IS) is apparently making a killing.