Category: Uncategorized
-
New Book! ~ Generation Now: Millennials Call for Social Change
In the spring of 2018, a group of Union College students took my class called “Millennials and Social Change”. They were in for a surprise. They registered for a course about the rise of the everyday changemaker. It was a class that focused on the current student generation, the Millennials (b. 1980-2000), and the changes […]
-
Ann Petry Un-Surveilled: Strategy and Survival for Black Leftists During the Cold War
Charlene Obernauer Professor Shelly Eversley and Professor Cathy Davidson EGL 80300: Blacklisted May 24, 2018 Ann Petry Un-Surveilled: Strategy and Survival for Black Leftists During the Cold War During the Cold War, surveillance was a way of life for leftists in the United States, but particularly for black leftists. Surveillance was so ubiquitous among […]
-
Our Lives Matter
“The freedom and human capacities of individuals must be developed to their maximum but individual powers must be linked to democracy in the sense that social betterment must be the necessary consequence of individual flourishing.” — Henry Giroux “What I really feel is radical is trying to make coalitions with people who are different from […]
-
Super Bowl Sunday
Click here to check out my recent post about how I felt about watching professional football this year. Peace, Jeff
-
Notes from an Irreducible Conversation: Fred Moten and Arthur Jafa #BlackandBlur #IntellectualPublics
Last Monday, December 11, I was lucky enough to hear a public conversation between two of the most brilliant and creative minds of our generation, poet and theorist Fred Moten (the subject of this event), and his interlocutor (and old friend) artist, director, and cinematographer Arthur Jafa. Fred Moten is the author, most recently, of […]
-
Social Media and Our Emotional State
Social media has become a huge part of our everyday life. We have consumed ourselves with this obsession of posting, sharing, filtering, selfieing, liking, commenting, and worrying. But what do we actually worry about? Many people would say that their social media pages do not affect how they see themselves or how happy we are, […]
-
Black Code, Guest Edited by Jessica M. Johnson + Mark Anthony Neal
The Black Scholar is proud to announce the release of “Black Code,” by guest editors Jessica Marie Johnson and Mark Anthony Neal. Johnson and Neal have assembled a collective of digital soothsayers working on the margins of Black Studies, Afrofuturism, radical media, and the digital humanities. Black Code Studies is queer, femme, fugitive, and radical; as […]
-
Using Cytoscape to Visualize Police Shootings
This blog post is a review of my experience using the data visualization tool Cytoscape to map out police shootings across the United States. I found the Cytoscape visualization tool rather unsatisfying for analysis. It lacks the contextual data to draw rigorous conclusions, nor provides sufficient levels of clustering to generate much new insight. […]
-
Textual Analysis of LBJ and Barry Goldwater’s Convention Speeches
I chose to analyze Barry Goldwater and President Lyndon Johnson’s convention speeches using Voyant’s text analysis tools. This election has fascinated me because it portrays two radically different visions of American politics but whose candidates are remembered for different reasons. Comparing these two speeches makes these differences all the more […]
-
Social Media and Social Justice
The recent spate of police violence stories has been credited to the proliferation of smartphone cameras uncovering examples of excessive force. What is missing from that equation is the role of social media. Being able to record the event is not enough. The death of Eric Garner serves as an example where video […]