Tag: activism
Time and Authenticity in Visions and Images of Abraham Joshua Heschel
[7 minute read] “Can we have snack right now? When we get back to the classroom?” “We usually have snack at 10:00 or 10:30am. It’s only 9:30am now. Don’t you think you’ll want it later?” I ask one of my students doubtfully, walking beside him as we head towards the seventh-grade classroom at Temple Concord. We
Empathy and Education: Fight or Flight
“A good teacher will lead the horse to water; an excellent teacher will make the horse thirsty first.” – Mario Cortes Inside the academic classroom, we instructors face a number of pedagogical challenges, ranging from constant apprehension regarding proper time management, to confusion over how to best incorporate new media technologies in diverse lesson plans.
Empathy and Education: The Double Burden (Part II)
In the numerous fields comprising that artistic and cultural field we call “the humanities,” we who self-identify as scholars must constantly be on the defense regarding our own choice of profession. An increasingly corporatized world sees banks encouraging ballerinas and actors to become engineers and botanists instead, and federal agencies such as the CBO actively
Empathy and Education: The Double Burden (Part 1)
A couple of weeks ago, toward the end of our class’s unit on “Thrills, Sensations, and the Ethics of Nonfiction,” I assigned my students the University of Chicago’s Welcome Letter to the Class of 2020 alongside Sara Ahmed’s thought-provoking “Against Students” (June 2015). The former, a document separately decried or praised as patronizing and oppressive
Hidden mental health troubles in the ivory tower
An initial reason for not sharing my experiences with depression was a persistent fear that people would think I was not strong enough for academia. My identity was so tightly wrapped up in my productivity, my latest department seminar, and my C.V. that the very thought of someone questioning my academic grit was enough to
“The Illusion of Choice”: Forced Freedom in Mr. Robot and Late Capitalist Society
I experience a fleeting feeling of freedom whenever I go to the grocery store. It offers me a reprieve from the stress and anxiety that creeps up on a daily basis as I worry about deadlines approaching or what I’ll do next after I finish graduate school. And then there’s always the peripheral flutter of
“Show me a good time”?: Madonna, Drake, and Police Brutality
If you’re fortunate enough to have the self-control to avoid at least moving your cursor over the “trending” links on Facebook: apparently, Madonna kissed Drake at Coachella, and to paraphrase Drake “it was it was [sic] not the best.” I base that reading on Drake’s body language: stunned immobility, a wide what is happening gesture,
History’s Fiction Problem: “Selma” and the Value of Fictionalized History
In a recent piece for Salon, Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg take aim at both Selma, the newly released film about the activism of Martin Luther King, Jr. Through Selma, they critique Hollywood more broadly for its lack of anything truly meaningful to say about history. In the process, they also dismiss seemingly all (or at least most) historical fiction. They suggest
Feminism doesn’t (t)werk that way: “Booty Culture,” race, and pop feminism
As Pippa Middleton recently remarked, “What is it with this American booty culture? It seems to me to be a form of obsession.” Who doesn’t love the booty?** Whether we’re talking about Miley Cyrus’s twerking, Nicki Minaj’s “Anaconda,” Meghan Trainor’s “All About That Bass,” Jennifer Lopez and Iggy Azalea’s “Booty,” Kim Kardashian’s “break the internet”
Leave your Message, not your Trash
On a frigid yet sunny day in January 2014, I happened to find myself a couple of blocks away from the annual March for Life in Washington, DC. I was in the capitol visiting the Folger Shakespeare Library for some research, and had arrived early in the morning for a long day of archival exploration