Category: Activism & Civic Engagement
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The People’s Classroom: The Future of Student Activism
Why We Can’t Just “Stick to the Books”: The Campus Contradiction Let’s be real. College life today is nothing like the movies or our parents’ experience. It’s not just late-night studying and caffeine addictions; it’s a total pressure cooker. We’re constantly dealing with life-altering problems that the university is supposed to help us solve. Though…
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Agents, Not Victims: Faith-Based Feminism and the Muslim Women Leaders of Northern Nigeria’s NGOs
Introduction In one of my ethnographic visits, in a modest office in Kano, northern Nigeria, I see Aisha scanning over a project budget on her tablet. Her hijab is carefully styled, and her voice is calm and strong as she tells her staff how to use their resources for a new maternal health program. Later…
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We All Live in Phantom Country Now
A haunted house. A ghost. A spirit. A phantom. We know these things aren’t real, but when you’re anxious and afraid they sure seem so. And anyway, the fear is real. It’s a disturbing feeling, having no control in a fluid and uncertain situation. We begin to doubt that we were ever in control. …
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Measuring the Impact of Urban Renewal: DH that Counts!
This remarkable project on redlining, race, and reparations shows the real world impact that Digital Humanities can have when rooted in community, activism, values—and done with mission and determination. The project began by documenting redlining primarily against Black and brown communities, beginning back in the 1930s with federal housing laws and continuing to the present,…
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Design Justice: “Design Values: Hard-Coding Liberation?” A Review
Sasha Costanza-Chock’s Design Justice is a framework that questions and re-imagines the role of design, power and justice in technology systems. Design Justice is a widely cited framework that complicates current technology design practices, testing, and conception. It’s an attempt to grapple with and align the numerous technological, ideological and social entities such as social…
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Not a conclusion, but a pause
As much as this project has been about telling other women’s stories, this has also been about telling my own. I have delved into the origins and mythologies of the madwoman. I’ve explained the subjective definitions and looked at how madwomen are portrayed across various mediums and genres. But I can hear my skeptical readers…
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Scholar Spotlight: Katrina Rbeiz
Hi everyone! My name is Katrina Rbeiz, and I am a Lebanese-American first-year Clinical Psychology Ph.D. student at Vanderbilt University. I’m excited to share more about my motivations and experiences as a HASTAC scholar, and to connect with other like-minded individuals! If you’d like to connect: Twitter Personal Website 1) Why did you…
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On the origin of language: A feminist analysis of ableism and speciesism as they relate to dominant feminist discourses
Language is so central, so fundamental to social interaction, to our becoming who we are that no one interested in influencing and inflecting their society can ignore it. —Margaret Gibbon, Feminist Perspectives on Language Language is such an intrinsic part of our everyday lives, ingrained even into the muscle structures of our faces and…
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Reflections on Black History Month 2021
2020 has been a seminal year for Black history, present and future in the US, as well as globally. Black Lives Matter protests against police brutality, which have been ongoing since 2013, have spread across the world. Only in the US, an estimated 15 to 26 million people participated in the protests by mid-2020, making…