We had a bit of a scare a few weeks ago. As any consistent reader of our robot/cyborg army thread is aware, we have been slowly plugging away, quietly building our robot army. While some early plans were made public at the end of the last semester, the extent of our plans have flown under the radar for the most part. Then some serious storms blew through Kutztown and knocked out the stealth cloaking device we have our on robot army headquarters. For almost a day, our headquarters were exposed for all to see.

I know, it’s not a whole lot to look at, but we did the best we can. We are, after all, the emergent group in the English department. And frankly, there is not a whole lot of funding available for robot/cyborg army building.

We actually got some of our inspiration from Star Wars: Attack of the Clones. “Clones” had a nice irony to it. After all, the lingering dominant logic concerning writing and the teaching of writing is an assembly-line logic. Produce thousands of identical skill sets for the marketplace even though our globalized, digitized economy doesn’t work on that model any longer. Somehow, concepts of literacy–especially at non-elite colleges and universities–are still cast in an industrial mold. Perhaps this comes from the class distinctions still reinforced in our stratified (higher) education system. Perhaps it’s what Edward Bernays called the “retrogressive force” of tradition.

In any case, given the recent “budget shortfalls” for the PA State System of Higher Education–of which Kutztown is a part–I suspect that CRLS will be a punk ethic/DIY project. We will have to slowly reverse that assembly line model of how writing/literacy is articulated as well as slowly introduce our robot army into the department and university. In a perfect world, we could have created an HQ that called to mind Tipoca City on Kamino from Attack of the Clones. However, we quickly found that such an undertaking was non in the budget. So we settled for our little shrouded piecemeal HQ pictured above.

So, it’s July 21st now. That means just about a month before the semester begins. Time to shift gears and get back to building. It really has been quite a summer so far…and at the same time, I am looking forward to all this year promises.

Partly cloudy. 84 degrees. Slight chance of thunderstorms.