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 …

Education is a right

Just got home from teaching at City College, where I work with public school teachers developing their pedagogical practice and scholarship as grad students in the City University of New York, arguably the oldest public university system in the country (rivaled only by the University of California). I am a teaching fellow in the same …

The intellectual’s desperate need for self-parody as a Professional Smarty Pants

After the inspiring first class of Introduction to Dialectics with Stanley Aronowitz this weekend among many seasoned thinkers and established intellectuals, I felt the need to reflect on the experience of being a Professional Smarty Pants and my socialization, for better or worse, into this motley group. I'm increasingly convinced that self-awareness is in desperate …

Learning with lions: public pedagogy in NYC

Recently, a friend of mine shared with me an amazing opportunity to join a reading group with Stanley Aronowitz, professor emeritus and world renowned public scholar in the fields of sociology, political science, and critical theory who taught at the Graduate Center for over 30 years. My advisor at UMass Boston had mentioned Aronowitz specifically …

Crisis → recovery → crisis → recovery, etc…and the alternative: Bakhtin’s/Tina Turner’s co-authored future

19 minutes ago, my phone lit up with a headline from the New York Times: Top Stories: President Trump's reckless threats could set the nation "on the path to World War III," said Senator Bob Corker, an influential Republican Headlines like this feel relatively common, a reminder that crisis upon crisis has become the status …

“If we can think, feel, and move, we can dance”: Anna Halprin’s radical pedagogy

At Hunter College last week, I saw an installation which accompanied a dance performance taking place this fall on campus entitled Radical Bodies, which features the work of choreographer Anna Talprin. Halprin, whose experimental workshops took place on a beautiful outdoor stage, did work that "rejected the high style and codified technique of reigning modern-dance …

Abstract art and the proceduralization of physicality

While the title of this post is ambiguous at best and horribly abstruse at worst (by the way, linguist's nerdy moment: the word "abstruse," which means "difficult to understand, obscure," is in itself abstruse), I think it's the best way to describe a piece of installation art by Jeff Kasper in an exhibit I saw at …

Is this the Matrix?: Reality in the era of bots

/////////////////////NPR's Tom Ashbrook hosts a show called On Point, which covers a multitude of topics ranging from schooling to online dating to genetics to The Beatles' Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Available as a podcast, On Point featured a story on August 9th about bots, which I listened to in curiosity and dismay, and not as …

Violence, animals, and the stopping-of-thinking

I am a new-ish vegan, a feature of my existence that I consider to be less of an identity and more of a commitment. I don't eat meat, dairy, eggs, honey, or anything else that comes from animals (to my knowledge – this is a looooong process of learning about animal exploitation, the differences between animal …

“We don’t ride on railroads they ride on us”: raucous listening against apathy

The title for this blog post is a slight misquote of Henry David Thoreau, a 19th-century social and political commentator best known for Walden who wrote about topics including the abolition of slavery and the value of civil disobedience, which he explores in an essay by the same name. Thoreau was concerned about, among many things, …