Maybe my first post should've been more along the lines of a throat-clearing, existence-justifying effort. Here, then, I make amends:
I hadn't really thought about blogging--despite the fact that gazillions of my friends and peers seem to be doing it--until I read this post by the sociologist Kieran Healy. Healy pokes a little fun at the pretensions of his peers who disdain blogging as a tenure track-derailing frivolity, then makes a forceful case for the importance of blogging for academics by reproducing an essay on journaling by C. Wright Mills and replacing every occurrence of the word 'journal' with 'blogs'. In doing so, he convincingly updates Mills' dictum to the scholar to unify 'life' and work. 'You must learn to use your life experience in your intellectual work: continually to examine and interpret it', Mills exhorts us. As an urbanist and political theorist (self-described), that's what I aim to do here, and that's why blogging is an imperative--whether the audience turns out to be one (i.e., lil' ol' me) or a thousand (although I could get closer to the latter by requiring my students to read and post--hmmm....).
So there you go: existence justified?
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