I created a game, Admin Lingo Bingo, to play at meetings where administrators are talking about diversity. I pulled the terms used in the bingo cards from the MASSMAILs from the University of Illinois administration this fall. First was the August 22, 2014, email from Chancellor Phyllis Wise, “The Principles on Which We Stand,” in which […]
On Not Moving On
I am reading Glen Sean Coulthard’s Red Skin, White Masks (2014). One strategy I use when I am confused and trying to figure out next steps in politico-cultural action is to pick a book like Coulthard’s and find passages in it that help me understand what might be going on. Not that Coulthard is or […]
The Swamp
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 […]
Of Mouses and Men
What became known as a mouse was demonstrated in 1968 by Douglas Engelbart of the Stanford Research Institute (SRI). The idea occurred to Engelbart in 1964, when he attended a computer graphics conference and wanted to have a way to move the cursor on the screen. He then worked with engineers and drafters at Stanford to […]
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 […]
Women, Information Technology, and Scholarship (WITS) Revisited
In September 2013, I was privileged to be part of a conversation with four former members of the Women, Information Technology, and Scholarship (WITS) group, which was active at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign through most of the 1990s: Jenny Barrett, Leigh Estabrook, Gail Hawisher, and Angharad Valdivia. Here is the video recording of our […]
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 […]
