Tag: Humanities
Beyond Disciplinary Bounds: Engaging with Haunted Archives
“Archive,” as defined in the Oxford English Dictionary, refers to “a place in which public records or other important historic documents are kept.” This definition not only locates them within a particular physical space, but also within the bounds of what is considered “important” and “historic”. This raises a few questions: who determines what is
Dear Diary…
Dear Diary, Today I find myself in graduate school, I look around and still wonder how it is that I came to be here. In the fourth grade I cried while reading The Lord of the Rings because I believed that one of my favorite characters died. I would sneak out of the lunchroom to
Clark’s
I’m at a local beer place. They have three dozen beers on draft and a menu that consists of roast beef, roast turkey, pickled eggs, and maybe sometimes beef stew. I am tired, I am breaking my alcohol fast, and I am trying to revise a shitty document into something less shitty so that when
Empathy and the Danger(s) Disengagement
For the past couple of years, I’ve been keeping a list. Admittedly, it’s not an original concept, being a mental exercise adapted from one of many optimistic Pinterest boards encouraging meditative mindfulness and gratitude in the upcoming New Year. Instead of coming up with a soon-to-be neglected resolution, this effort at self-improvement
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
Sharing Space: “Proteus” and the Personal
It seems like academia (or any professional forum, for that matter) encourages us to keep our feelings out of things. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve crossed out passages of student essays this month for being “off topic” or “too praisy,” for bringing in “irrelevant” value judgments on the film they’re writing about.
Appreciating Space: “Minecraft” and Empowerment
For the last two summers, I’ve worked as an instructor for the University of Alaska Anchorage’s Kid College program, which is basically a mix between a summer camp and course series about technology for kids aged 9-14. Most of the classes I taught were about game design, and the most popular courses by far were
“Isn’t That All in the Past?”: History and the Privilege of Cultural Amnesia
As I’ve been stressing throughout this month’s series of posts, privilege works in a number of pernicious and insidious ways in our everyday lives. Much as we might collectively like to believe that it doesn’t exist, it is only by dragging it kicking and screaming into the piercing light of day and scholarly/critical inquiry that
“Of Course You Know…”: Deconstructing the Privilege of Knowledge
Some time ago, a colleague of mine was leading discussion in class, and he offhandedly remarked that, of course, we all knew that Aristotle had spoken of the same issue we were discussing in his Nichomachean Ethics. The way in which he made the utterance made it clear that, if we did not, in fact, know this reference, we