“Zines as creative resistance”: authoring the world, authoring ourselves

The Graduate Center library and first-floor hallways have spaces for exhibitions of art by artists with a variety of commitments and visions, some of which are beautiful, raw, terrifying, playful, and sometimes – in my favorite cases – all of the above. Below I've collected a group of images of zines which explore topics of race, queer …

A Night at the Garden: White supremacy and collective forgetting

"A Night at the Garden" is a short film that depicts a pro-Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City in 1939. Billed as a "pro-American" rally, the images of the columns of white, uniformed men from the ethnic German group called the German American Bund striking drums, carrying swastika-adorned banners, and displaying …

Educators as political participants, sanctuary as co-authored activity toward radical hope: Politico article about CUNY professors and our syllabi

On Wednesday, Politico published an article about the opening statement I and other professors use on their syllabi at City College, Hunter College, and other CUNY campuses in New York. The statement, which I adopted in January 2017 and have included for all of my classes since, reads:  As an educator, I fully support the …

We ready, we comin’: the end of DACA and getting started

Hi Diana, I feel you, I know it's scary... Tonight I took part in a phone call last night held by United We Dream, a national organization fighting for social justice run by and for immigrant youth. Apparently over 2,000 people from all over the country including Virginia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Oregon …

The question of community: climate change, DACA, and environmental racism

Hurricane Harvey is striking Houston and 50 other counties in Texas, pounding the region with enough water to fill the football stadiums of the NFL and all colleges across the country 100 times. Nearly impossible to imagine. At the same time, one-third of Bangladesh is under water in a monsoon season that has been strongly …

Speech, whistleblowing/leaking, and silence: languaging as a political force

Today's news in many ways is not remarkable, in the sense that we've been submerged in a swampy mess of falsehoods and fictions that choke off our view of the world around us (see my recent post about Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation, which asserts that our definition of reality is served up to us, hot and …

Immigrants can be funny

Weird post title, right? I'll explain. It's not typical to think of immigrants as funny, indeed, it's rare to think of immigrants as individuals in general. They are a group of (usually) poorer, (usually) browner, (usually) slightly strange people who come to this country to live. They are people we see in the news being deported, …

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 …

Migration is natural

On May 11th, PBS featured a fascinating story for its "Brief but Spectacular" segment that inspires thinking around (im)migration and identity. Jess X. Snow, a young first-generation Chinese-American artist illuminates her experiences as an immigrant, a child of immigrants, with force and insight: Imagination is daring to love what is not in front of us. So what then, …

My first publication: The limits of pedagogy: diaculturalist pedagogy as paradigm shift in the education of adult immigrants

I've published my first solo article, "The limits of pedagogy: diaculturalist pedagogy as paradigm shift in the education of adult immigrants"! Please find the prepublication "Accepted Manuscript" version of "..." here. Enjoy, share, and give feedback! the-limits-of-pedagogy_-diaculturalist-pedagogy-as-paradigm-shift-in-the-education-of-adult-immigrants PLEASE NOTE: This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Pedagogy, Culture …