A Moment of Unrepentant Horn Self-Tooting

So I walk into a session after lunch on Friday, a workshop entitled “An Economy of the Gift”: Should Scholarship Be Available for Free?, where I am handed a handout. Said handout has, at top, a summary of the workshop’s purposes, which begins as follows:

In Cinema Journal recently, Kathleen Fitzpatrick notes the “insupportable economics of the current publishing system.” She argues for a “return of intellectual labor to an economy of the gift.” This workshop explores the practical and theoretical issues of a gift economy of academic publication.

It’s the first time I’ve really encountered myself in the third person like this. The world is suddenly a very strange place.