I write on a very muggy day in central Illinois. It’s a day made for thinking about bad air, toxic humors, fuzzy minds, and muddled actions. The concerns around the unhiring of Steven Salaita have preoccupied me for a month. I will not go over ground so ably covered elsewhere, but I need to sort […]
Aspiring to Democracy through Media
Fred Turner’s 2013 book, The Democratic Surround: Multimedia & American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties (University of Chicago Press), is a readable prequel (as he called it) to his previous book, From Counterculture to Cyberculture. In researching the earlier book, Turner was intrigued with the ways in which the 1940s and […]
Fixin’ It Ourselves
I spent most of the spring in Bristol, UK, as a Colston Fellow, thanks to the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Bristol. I worked with an amazing group of people involved with the Productive Margins research programme. Here’s a link to my blog post on the IAS site, about the work I […]
Video Dialogue with Dorothy Roberts and Karen Flynn
Professor Dorothy Roberts visited the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, campus in early November 2013. Professor Karen Flynn, who holds appointments in the Departments of Gender and Women’s Studies and African American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, joined Professor Roberts in this video dialogue (embedded above) with me about the keyword, BODIES. Professor Flynn […]
Feminist Engineering Education
On October 10, 2013 I went to hear Professor Alice Pawley from Purdue University talk about her research on engineering education at the Electrical and Computer Engineering Colloquium at the U of I. She has funding from the National Science Foundation to incorporate feminist theory into different educational research studies: an ADVANCE grant that looks at […]
“All the animals and birds around Taksim Square are dying”
Architectural historian HEGHNAR WATENPAUGH wrote a very useful post for the Society of Architectural Historians on the urban planning aspects of the unrest in Taksim Square and its broader implications. Thanks to her, I also read Orhan Pamuk‘s reflections in the New Yorker on some of the history and his memories of Taksim Square. Amnesty […]
Institutional Racism and the Morrill Act
I was recently on a panel at the University YWCA in Champaign called “Institutional Racism 101.” This is part of a series the YW presents that provides participants a “racial justice certificate” when the series concludes. Gia Lewis-Smallwood organizes the series. Kudos to her and the Y! I was pleased to meet a whole new […]
Mozilla Ignite “Killer” Apps
The Mozilla Foundation has joined with the National Science Foundation and U.S. Ignite to sponsor a “killer app” challenge. The deadline is August 23. Today I submitted my idea, which you can see here along with many, many others. (There are monetary prizes.) This is the 150th anniversary of a mass execution of 38 Dakota […]
“All that We Let In”
Metaphorically speaking, I agree with the lyrics of The Indigo Girls’ song when they sing “we’re better off for all that we let in.” The song reminds me to be open to challenges and growth, but of course sometimes “all” the suffering of the world is too much and needs to be balanced by celebration […]
Prairie Alert: Act NOW!
Today, David Monk asked help spreading the word about this state of affairs: “Heartland Pathways has received very late notification from the Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT) that an important relocated remnant prairie at the I-57 rest stop near Pesotum is about to be destroyed to make way for expanding sewage facilities. This prairie has […]
