Posts Tagged ‘critical university studies’
At Long Last: Links!
* CFP: Paradoxa 31: Climate Fiction. CFP: Technologies of Feminist Speculative Fiction. CFP: Fantasy and Myth in the Anthropocene. CFP: Radical Perspectives on Horror Cinema. CFP: New Perspectives on Contemporary German Science Fiction. CFP: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. CFP: The David Foster Wallace Society Annual Meeting. CFP: Poverty and Literature.
* Applications for The Roddenberry Fellowship are now open. $50,000 will be awarded to up to 20 Fellows in the areas of civil rights, immigration, environmental protection, LGBTQIA & women’s rights. Are you or someone you know a future Fellow?
* University of Pittsburgh Acquires Romero Collection, To Found Horror Studies Center.
* What Milwaukee Can Teach the Democrats about Socialism.
* A Union Fight at Marquette University. Spadework. Letter from a Graduate Instructor: Why We Need a Union @ Marquette University.
* Microsyllabus: Critical University Studies.
* What Really Happened at Stanford University Press: An Insider’s Account.
* Ex-Players Sue UCLA, Coaches, NCAA For Injuries, Abuse.
* Enrollment Shortfalls Spread to More Colleges.
* Want to save the humanities? Make college free.
* The Humanities Without Nostalgia.
* The Party of Utopia: A Report from the 43rd Annual Society for Utopian Studies Conference.
* As the Hungarian prime minister systematically undermined his own country’s education system, one institution stood defiant: a university in the heart of Budapest, founded by George Soros.
* This Is What It Sounds Like Hiding In A Dark Classroom During A School Shooting.
* It’s 2059, and the Rich Kids Are Still Winning. And speaking of which: read Ted’s new book! Really!
* Profiles of young Americans who entered voluntary exile rather than paying their student loans.
* What’s Scarier Than Student Loans? Welcome to the World of Subprime Children.
* It is here that Afrofuturism offers not just significant thought and art but praxis in the development of black posthumanism – or better, exhumanism. Ditto with the call to enact innovative forms of cooperation: we need to think of who is joining whose cooperative, and for what purposes beyond liberal tenets of equality or socialist tenets of economic equity. I want to point out that the infiltration of Afrofuturism into the popular unconscious by way of black popular music, remix culture and science fiction marks but one of the sociopolitical forces of its versatile imaginary, yet perhaps its most potent: it seeds Afrofutures that destabilize the unthought aspects of whose future is at stake. When Afrofuturism, even as an “aesthetic,” enters popular discourse, its black speculative futures and revisionist histories tend to question whose worlding of the world “we” are speaking of – whose social movements, whose politics, whose “we”?
* How golf explains Donald Trump.
* The deaths of multiple Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainees were preventable, according to internal agency documents obtained by The Young Turks. One ICE official told TYT the problem is “systemic.” She Stopped to Help Migrants on a Texas Highway. Moments Later, She Was Arrested. “I can tell which migrant children will become gang members by looking into their eyes.” What doctors found US officials have done to caged kids. DHS watchdog finds 900 people at border facility with maximum capacity for 125. Pretty grim.
* A review of the Facebook accounts of thousands of officers around the US — the largest database of its kind — found officers endorsing violence against Muslims, women, and criminal defendants.
* ‘So much land under so much water’: extreme flooding is drowning parts of the midwest. Extreme Heat Wave Forces South Carolina Bridge to Close for Several Hours. Levees Won’t Save Louisiana from a Climate “Existential Crisis.” Record-Breaking Heat in Alaska Wreaks Havoc on Communities and Ecosystems. This Town Didn’t Want to Be a Radioactive Waste Dump. The Government Is Giving Them No Choice. Flooding leaves Houston area students stranded at school. The U.S. put nuclear waste under a dome on a Pacific island. Now it’s cracking open. This map shows millions of acres of lost Amazon rainforest. Los Angeles Fire Season Is Beginning Again. And It Will Never End. What remains of Paradise. Jay Inslee promised serious climate policy and he is delivering. Ireland becomes second country to declare climate emergency. Why Carbon Credits For Forest Preservation May Be Worse Than Nothing. Humanity must save insects to save ourselves, leading scientist warns. 2050 or bust. No Happy Ending.
* Studies in the Novel 50.1: The Rising Tide of Climate Change Fiction.
* What Would It Mean to Deeply Accept That We’re in Planetary Crisis?
* Of course you had me at hello: The Radical Plan to Save the Planet by Working Less.
* One Year Off, Every Seven Years.
* After 4 Years Of Not Throwing Away His Trash This Photographer Created A Powerful Photo Series.
* Why Are Americans Ignoring the Most Important Movie of Their Times, China’s The Wandering Earth?
* The average lifetime of a civilization is 336 years.
* A Green New Deal Needs to Fight US Militarism.
* Stalling on Climate Change Action May Cost Investors Over $1 Trillion.
* After Standing Rock, protesting pipelines can get you a decade in prison and $100K in fines.
* The end of the Grand Canyon.
* Koalas declared functionally extinct.
* The other side of climate grief is climate fury.
* America’s Cities Are Unlivable. Blame Wealthy Liberals.
* America’s educational system is an ‘aristocracy posing as a meritocracy.’
* Hell is a YouTube algorithm.
* Americans with diabetes are forming caravans to buy Canadian insulin at 90% off. How the U.S. health-care system puts people with diabetes in danger.
* American kids are 70 percent more likely to die before adulthood than kids in other rich countries.
* Angry Birds and the End of Privacy.
* 5G networks could throw weather forecasting into chaos.
* Boeing Built Deadly Assumptions Into 737 Max, Blind to a Late Design Change.
* Amazon’s Size Is Becoming a Problem—for Amazon. Cofounder of Facebook calls for breakup of Facebook. Facebook auto-generates videos celebrating extremist images. Worry About Facebook. Rip Your Hair Out in Screaming Terror About Fox News.
* Of course it’s even worse than all that.
* ‘I Did My Best to Stop American Foreign Policy’: Bernie Sanders on the 1980s.
* The kids won’t save us. Teenage Pricks: Trumpism’s Boy Power.
* The Birth-Tissue Profiteers.
* The $3.5 billion shaving industry is secretive and litigious — and disrupting itself silly.
* Parents who raise children as vegans should be prosecuted, say Belgian doctors.
* Uber rang in its IPO with champagne and mimosas. Then the hangover began. The Ride-Hail Strike Got Just Enough Attention to Terrify Uber. Lyft’s First Results After I.P.O. Show $1.14 Billion Quarterly Loss. How Corporate Delusions of Automation Fuel the Cruelty of Uber and Lyft. Uber, Lyft account for two-thirds of traffic increase in SF over six years, study shows.
* This Bird Went Extinct and Then Evolved Into Existence Again.
* Weird science: Jeanette Winterson talks writing, teaching and queer visions of the future.
* There is no depression gene. Decades of early research on the genetics of depression were built on nonexistent foundations. How did that happen?
* NASA Accidentally Destroys NYC in Attempt to Save Denver.
* No One Is Prepared for Hagfish Slime.
* Buffoonery, or laying the groundwork for heads-we-win-tails-you-lose impeachment proceedings? Or both? Probably both.
* Who wins from public debate? Liars, bullies and trolls.
* My Cousin Was My Hero. Until the Day He Tried to Kill Me.
* Twenty-five years later, The Bell Curve’s analysis of race and intelligence refuses to die. Reckoning with its legacy may help redirect the conversation in urgently needed ways.
* What I’m saying here is that the Georgia law is NOT an overturn of “Roe v. Wade.” We’re not headed back to pre-“Roe” days. We’re headed for something much worse.
* Countervailing powers: the forgotten economic idea Democrats need to rediscover. Democrats need a power agenda, not just a policy agenda.
* How A Black Psychiatrist Shaped ‘Sesame Street’ Into A Tool To Fight Against Racism. “Sesame Street” was a radical experiment in challenging institutional racism.
* What Would Happen to Earth If the Avengers Undid Thanos’ Snap?
* In perhaps the richest city in the richest country in human history. And again.
* Suicide rates in girls are rising, study finds, especially in those age 10 to 14. For the past two decades, a suicide epidemic fueled by guns, poverty and isolation has swept across the West, with middle-aged men dying in record numbers. Over the past year, a spate of suicides has revealed a financial crisis in New York’s cab industry. Officials have blamed Uber, but much of the crisis can be traced to a handful of taxi tycoons. As Suicides Rise, Insurers Find Ways to Deny Mental Health Coverage.
* Life, Liberty, and Advanced Placement for All.
* Susan Sontag was true author of ex-husband’s book, biography claims.
* Autoreply. Real college. Revenge. Love. Winning. Nausea. Brains. Aliens. Vegetarianism. The real climate change was the friends we made along the way.
* Of course I’d want $150,000. Please go away — I’m reading! There’s only one rule I know of. It could work.
* Some people just want to watch the world burn.
* Nice work if you can get it.
* Alternate history, 500 levels in.
* The Martian Base in the Gobi Desert.
* The Net Libram of Random Magical Effects version 2.00.
* “Here follows my ongoing thread of Game of Thrones characters as Dril tweets.”
* Physicists Discover Our Universe Is Fictional Setting Of Cop Show Called ‘Hard Case.’
* Take the red pill, and find out how deep the rabbit hole goes.
* Trump’s hasty plan to get Americans back on the moon by 2024, explained.
* And okay FINE I’ll get excited about all these UFO reports.
Course Descriptions for Fall 2015 (Yes, Already!)
Course Number: 4610/5610
Course Title & Subtitle: Individual Authors: J.R.R. Tolkien
Course Description: This decade will see the hundredth anniversary of J.R.R. Tolkien’s earliest writings on Middle-Earth (The Book of Lost Tales, begun in 1917) alongside the completion of Peter Jackson’s career-defining twenty-year project to adapt The Lord of the Rings for film (1995-2015). This course asks the question: Who is J.R.R. Tolkien, looking backward from the perspective of the twenty-first century? Why have his works, and the genre of heroic fantasy which he remade so completely in his image, remained so intensely popular, even as the world has transformed around them? Our study will primarily trace the history, development, and reception of Tolkien’s incredible magnum opus, The Lord of the Rings (written 1937-1949, published 1954-1955)—but we will also take up Tolkien’s contested place in the literary canon of the twentieth century, the uses and abuses of Tolkien in Jackson’s blockbuster films, and the ongoing critical interests and investments of Tolkien fandom today. As Tolkien scholars we will also have the privilege of drawing upon the remarkable J.R.R. Tolkien Collection at the Raynor Library here at Marquette, which contains the original manuscripts for The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and Farmer Giles of Ham.
Major Readings: The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, and selected additional readings
Assignments: two shorter papers, one final paper, weekly forum posts, one presentation, class participation
Course Number: 6700
Course Title & Subtitle: Studies in Twentieth Century American Literature: American Literature after the American Century
Course Description: In 1941, Time Magazine publisher Henry Luce called upon the twentieth century to be “the first great American Century,” and it’s been ending ever since. This course takes up American literary and cultural studies from the post-everything standpoint of the “after.” What is it to study American literature today, after the American Century, after American exceptionalism, after modernity, after the university, after the idea of the future itself? Our shared investigation into contemporary critical and scholarly practices will focus on key controversies in twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary study, including the ongoing reevaluation of “the canon” (Lolita), popular culture studies (The Body Snatchers), identity and identity politics (Dawn), nationalism and transnationalism (Tropic of Orange), postmodernity and neoliberalism (the short stories of David Foster Wallace), and ecocriticism in the Anthropocene (We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves). Our reading will also draw heavily on recent scholarship in critical theory, especially “the new American studies” and the emerging discipline of critical university studies. Alongside weekly reflections and enthusiastic class participation, students in this course will produce a 15-20 page seminar paper on a subject of their choosing related to the themes of the course, as well as present their work to their peers in a conference-presentation format and develop a sample syllabus for an undergraduate course in American literary or cultural studies.
Readings: Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita; Jack Finney, The Body Snatchers; Octavia E. Butler, Dawn; Karen Tei Yamashita, Tropic of Orange; Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves; the short stories of David Foster Wallace; selected additional readings
Assignments: weekly reflections, class participation, conference-style presentation, seminar paper (15-20 pages), sample syllabus
Tuesday Afternoon!
* PSA from Charlie Stross: Ignore the news.
Just a brief reminder that news is bad for you. No, seriously: publicly available news media in the 21st century exist solely to get eyeballs on advertisements. That is its only real purpose. The real news consists of dull but informative reports circulated by consultancies giving in-depth insight into what’s going on. The sort of stuff you find digested in the inside pages of The Economist. All else is comics. As there’s an arms race going on between advertising sales departments, the major news outlets are constantly trying to make their product more addictive. And like most other addictive substance, news is a depressant, one fine-tuned to make you keep coming back for more.
* As if you needed a reason: Tetris may treat PTSD.
* Inequality and the New York City subway.
* Why you can’t have nice things: pro-austerity economicists are liars or incompetents (take your pick). How Much Unemployment Was Caused by Reinhart and Rogoff’s Arithmetic Mistake? It’s great that when challenged they retreat to the more defensible claim that their work is actually irrelevant, but many policymakers and pundits seem to feel otherwise.
* “What companies like is just-in-time learning that gives somebody a skill they need at the time they need it,” says Mark Allen, a Pepperdine University business professor and author of The Next Generation of Corporate Universities. “What traditional universities do to a large extent is just-in-case learning.”
* Our bubble-headed, zombie-creating reliance on high-stakes testing.
And contrary to the claims of test-makers, the tests aren’t getting better. Despite hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer funds, they’re getting worse.
* Universities Need to Innovate, But Put Down the Sledgehammer.
* The birth of critical university studies.
* The Chronicle profiles David Graeber as academic in exile.
* Software to detect student plagiarism is faced with renewed criticism from the faculty members who may confront more plagiarism than do most of their colleagues – college writing professors.
* Lost Generation: The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment.
* Is nothing sacred? NC governor takes aim at addiction on campus.
* New App Prevents Icelanders from Sleeping With their Relatives.
* And your 2012 tax receipt. Enjoy those fighter jets!
Sunday Night Links
* Famous movies, behind the scenes.
* Austerity doesn’t work, Iceland edition.
* Time to Get Angry Again: All About Pussy Riot.
* Missouri’s next senator, ladies and gentlemen.
Senate Candidate and Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO) told a local television station on Sunday that “legitimate rape” rarely produces pregnancy because “the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.” Akin cited conversations with unnamed doctors for the bizarre claim.
Nate Silver says there’s hope this lunacy could erase Akin’s lead overnight. Growing Number Of Conservatives Call On Akin To Withdraw After ‘Legitimate Rape’ Comments.
* Elsewhere in American politics: “I guess I really actually feel we shouldn’t contort the voting process to accommodate the urban — read African-American — voter-turnout machine.” I mean really.
* The headline reads, “Inmates forced into Gladiator-style fighting by St. Louis jail guards.” WHAT THE HELL AMERICA.
* College Degrees Cost 1,120 Percent More Than They Did 30 Years Ago.
* At home with Alison Bechdel.
* The birth of critical university studies.
* Lenin’s Tomb tries to split the baby on Assange.
* More Mitt Romney tax return follies: he still hasn’t released his full returns for 2010. And another why-won’t-he-just-release-them theory: voter fraud!
* A Lesson Is Learned but The Damage Is Irreversible is coming back. Amazing.
* When Robert Wood Jr. disappeared in a densely forested Virginia park, searchers faced the challenge of a lifetime. The eight-year-old boy was autistic and nonverbal, and from his perspective the largest manhunt in state history probably looked like something else: the ultimate game of hide-and-seek.
* The many lives of Frédéric Bourdin.
Over the years, Bourdin had insinuated himself into youth shelters, orphanages, foster homes, junior high schools, and children’s hospitals. His trail of cons extended to, among other places, Spain, Germany, Belgium, England, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Bosnia, Portugal, Austria, Slovakia, France, Sweden, Denmark, and America. The U.S. State Department warned that he was an “exceedingly clever” man who posed as a desperate child in order to “win sympathy,” and a French prosecutor called him “an incredible illusionist whose perversity is matched only by his intelligence.” Bourdin himself has said, “I am a manipulator. . . . My job is to manipulate.”
More from MeFi.
* And Sir Patrick Stewart, soliloquy on the letter B. I almost feel better.
Gerry Canavan 