The Employee updates

Dear Josh,

Good to hear from you, and to learn the publication is so close to
emerging into existence!

I'm okay, juggling a bit with the recent move to Vienna, the new job,
health stuff and learning German/various small culture shocks.

Would be happy to send the short text, but not sure I've written one
along those lines before - do you have any templates or more info on
what it should be like?

all the best,

Marina

Dear Josh,

Don't really know what to say about living in a German-adjacent country in a time like this, but it sure is bleak. Never regretted leaving the UK more, where you can get half a million out in the street for a solidarity march rather than 1,000,.1% of them white Austrians. Plus Austria, along with the US and several Micronesian nations whose budgets are no doubt wholly propped up by US military spending, was the only larger or EU country to veto the ceasefire motion at the UN. Given Austria has never actually properly engaged in any 'memory politics', with the official narrative still being of nazi victimhood rather than perpetrator, it's not even the bloodthirsty narcisstic delusions Germany suffers from but just garden variety spite. It all feels very stultified. Maybe I should try to provoke more debates on these matters in my classes, like two of my colleagues just did at their seminar today.

Okay then if an average bio will do, here's the one I've been using - feel free to edit and re-shape.

Marina Vishmidt is a writer and educator. She is currently a professor of art theory at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. Her work has appeared in South Atlantic Quarterly, Artforum, Afterall, Journal of Cultural Economy, e-flux journal, Australian Feminist Studies, Mousse, and Radical Philosophy, among others, as well as a number of edited volumes. She is the co-author of Reproducing Autonomy (with Kerstin Stakemeier) (Mute, 2016), and the author of Speculation as a Mode of Production: Forms of Value Subjectivity in Art and Capital (Brill 2018 / Haymarket 2019). Most recently she has edited Speculation for the Documents of Contemporary Art series (Whitechapel/MIT 2023). She is a member of the Marxism in Culture collective and is on the board of the New Perspectives on the Critical Theory of Society series (Bloomsbury Academic). She has taught at Goldsmiths, University of London and in 2022, she was the Rudolph Arnheim Visiting Professor in Art History at the Humboldt University in Berlin. Her research has been funded by the DAAD, the European Social Research Council and the Swedish Research Council.

all my best,

Marina