Being less silent: exceeding the safe confines of U.S. academic rightness

I try to listen to various podcasts, read blogs, and watch YouTube channels and vlogs in order to supplement, and sometimes to correct or exceed, the reading I do in my doctoral studies as much as possible. The best work, I think, includes collaborations led by immigrant and immigration-focused creators and activists, like Chat It …

The threat of blindness: the problems with merging education and labor

Something that has gotten little attention in the news lately is the fact that under discussion is the merging of the U.S. Department of Labor and the Department of Education at the federal level, a conversation that was apparently inspired by businesswoman and First Daughter Ivanka Trump. The fact that this momentous change is under …

Trunk or Treat: silly, spontaneous community in a cemetery

Yesterday I was walking in my neighborhood along a path that includes a beautiful cemetery with winding paths and lovely bent old trees. A cheerful orange-and-black clad woman greeted me from her seat at a welcome table as I walked up to the gates. "What's happening today?" I asked, as kids in Spiderman and gorilla …

Education and civil society: a mini-festo and a short reading list (for starters)

I'm starting, with several fellow graduate students at CUNY, a Working Group on Philanthropy and Civil Society. We come from the fields of sociology, political science, social welfare, and other disciplines which, we argue, do not speak to each other nearly enough and share learning and language around the core questions we must face as …

The struggle to define who is worthy: mass incarceration and mass deportation

I just finished watching an interview with Susan Burton, author of "Becoming Ms. Burton" and founder of A New Way of Life, a re-entry program for women of color who are adjusting to their new lives after prison, and Michelle Alexander, author of "The New Jim Crow," on Democracy Now!. Alexander wrote the introduction to Burton's book, in …

“Who are you?”: Art as disruptor, generator of public space

At a graduate student conference called Radical Democracy at The New School a couple of weeks ago, I attended a panel in which several students discussed art and artists who sought to disrupt the status quo about how information is shared and important social issues are discussed among the people of any society. Institutionalized processes of dissemination …

Rancière and the role of education in political conformity/contestation

Yesterday I read a paper by Gert Biesta, a professor of education drawing from philosophy and political science whose interdisciplinary thinking inspires those of us like myself who are unconvinced by the all-too-often superficiality and dilettantism of the field of education. (I will write about this this week, as it bothers me greatly that those …

Freedom of thought and the future American citizen

In my Modern Political Theory class, I am reading John Stuart Mill. Mill wrote about utilitarianism – a concept he and Jeremy Bentham forged in the 19th century – and the idea that freedom of thought, not just freedom from a despotical leader, was necessary for human beings to achieve their full intellectual potential. Really …

The tyranny of common sense

“We may occasionally see some man of deep conscientiousness, and subtle and refined understanding, who spends a life in sophisticating with an intellect which he cannot silence, and exhausts the resources of ingenuity in attempting to reconcile the promptings of his conscience and reason with orthodoxy…” - John Stuart Mill, On Liberty We are reading …