Category: Ethics
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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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Lessons from Rhythms of Anger(s): Learning to Listen to them
Lessons from Rhythms of Anger(s): Learning to Listen to them Anger is my crutch I hold myself upright with it —Chrystos, I Walk in the History of My People Women of Color in America have grown up within a symphony of anger at being silenced at being unchosen, at knowing that when we survive,…
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Race, Racism, and Scholarship on Premodern Race Today
Dear colleagues, It’s been a long time since I’ve posted on HASTAC—for which, my deep apologies—but just before the holidays, I published a blog essay entitled “Why the Hate? The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, and Race, Racism, and Premodern Critical race studies today”: https://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2020/12/why-hate-invention-of-race-i… The essay uses a 46-page screed (published as a book…
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January 2021 is not June 2020
The attempted coup yesterday and its contrast with the Black Lives Matter movement invites serious reflection about the difference in motivations between a seditious, antidemocratic personality cult, and legitimate dissent. Prejudice long held that the already powerful will do what is just and what is orderly, since the powerful are order by definition. Yesterday proved…
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A Philosophical Review So Far of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me
“But all our phrasing … serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence,…
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The Problem of Defining Civilization
“Civilized” is often used as loaded ethical language. Traditionally, whenever we praise human action, we call it “civilized,” whether it is table manners or peacemaking. This use of the word civilized leads us to the assumption that civilization is good, and hunter-gatherer culture bad. The view that civilization is bad and hunter-gatherer culture…
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Surveillance Rhetorics – Issue 2
“Lyft Atlanta” by danxoneil is licensed under CC by 2.0 News about ride-sharing services seem to be popping up wherever I go. I used an Uber for the first time this past fall when I traveled to Georgia for a conference (too far for me to drive). I found the experience interesting not just because…
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Surveillance Rhetorics Newsletter – Issue 1
Early on in my coursework I started to examine the rhetorical implications of surveillance, thinking epitomized by the rather broad question: “What can rhetoric tell us about surveillance and also what can surveillance tell us about rhetoric.” This series of newsletters is an attempt to answer this question. I plan to pull from an interdisciplinary…