Building Spaces and Places for Conversation

By Dustin Harp

Chair

As the final weeks of my semester fast approach, I’m finding it a little hard to believe that it was only a few months ago when we gathered in Chicago. Along with all the stimulating panels and research presentations, we had some great discussions about the future of the Commission. Many of us expressed wanting to find ways to build our community though we weren’t necessarily talking about doing this in a quantitative manner. We want to build spaces and places where members of the Commission can talk and listening to one another. In other words, places where we can have informal conversations–somewhere to mentor, to share ideas, problems and solutions, to find research partners and announce our successes.

Through these conversations we came up with the idea to create a CSW blog. Not only can we post announcements and keep the community updated on CSW issues and events, but we can discuss gender and media issues, university life, issues about working as an academic, our research and teaching, etc. In other words, the same topics we discuss during the convention panels and business meeting and our during our hotel hallway conversations. But rather than once a year, we can talk all year long and form a deeper sense of community.

We’re hoping this will be a web space you visit often and contribute to as well. We’re envisioning this as something that will grow to become what we want it to be. Blogs, after all, are community driven.

That brings me to my next point: blogs are participatory and without participation they aren’t successful. We need a team of bloggers who are committed to posting. We’re hoping to have a core team of bloggers who will post at least once a week. I’ve signed on for that duty along with our new reporter Spring-Serenity Duvall. Please think about joining us on this venture and email me if you’re interested. We really do need you to make this work. Plus, it’ll be fun. And remember, in true blog style these would not need to be long, well-edited essays, just short posts about what’s on our minds.

CSW members who aren’t ready to commit to weekly posts can still join the conversation, posting and commenting when they are inspired. CSW officers will post relevant information as it comes up.

We haven’t determined rules and boundaries for the blog. I think there are two reasons for this. As I stated, blogs are community driven. We want the CSW community to help shape it, not a few members that happen to be officers this year. Also, we’re not exactly sure how the blog will develop and what boundaries and rules might be needed. We’re going to kick it off and then watch closely. As a community we’ll deal with issues as they arise.

That said, we could use a community leader in this area. So along with the blogging team, we would like a CSW member willing to take the lead on organizing and maintaining the blog. A sort of blogger-in-chief, if you will. If you’re interested, please email me.