Blogging…

It’s the afternoon of a warm October day, teaching term has just started and we are sitting in my living room, Stamatia Portanova, Roberto Terracciano, and myself. The three of us are about to launch the official blog of the Technoculture Research Unit – a group born within the Centre for Postcolonial and Gender Studies directed by Iain Chambers, at L’Orientale University in Naples. Many of the members of the group have been PhD students in the programme in Cultural and Postcolonial Studies of the Anglophone world at L’Orientale over the past ten years and now are living a more or less precarious scattered existence in schools, universities, research centres all over Europe, striving to do research amidst the necessity to make a living somehow. We came together as a group of researchers working at the intersection of cultural/postcolonial studies, feminism and new media studies. As the PhD programme succumbed to cuts and the Gelmini law, there is a ‘we’ out there that refuses to dissolve, which cannot be satisfied living as a series of scattered ‘I’s – at least in relation to the field of studies we all love. The blog is a way to exit both the narrow possibilities for expression afforded by a platform such as Facebook, but also to find each other again, to find some kind of resonance in our different voices. ‘How to Make a We in a (Social) Network Culture’, for example, could be the title of an article I am planning to write with a member of TRU, Antonia Anna (Nina) Ferrante, about the Netflix hit Sense8. The relation between singularity and universality, the individual and the group in these new technocultural conditions seems to me an absolutely central question and one I would like to develop further in these short blog entries for the TRU blog.