A “regional” humanities abandons academia’s tepid globalism, and confronts local oppressions like prisons, schools, housing, and the police.
Higher Education
Editor: Roopika Risam
Past Editor: Carolyn Dever
Pedagogy of the Depressed
“At a certain point, it seemed like all my students were depressed… This was depressing.”
Imagination or Regulation? Challenging the Incorporation of Antiracism as a Response to Crisis
The way we talk about racial justice matters. In fact, corporation’s embrace of antiracist slogans can actually advance racism.
To Teach Shakespeare for Survival: Talking with David Sterling Brown and Arthur L. Little Jr.
“Nostalgia is not what Shakespeare represents for me; I don’t want to make Shakespeare great again. He doesn’t need that, and neither do we.”
Quilting: An Archive of Hand, Eye, and Soul
Once, Black women employed textile arts both as a mutual aid network, and as a safe space to envision a Southern Black liberated life.
Antiracist Praxis
Antiracism challenges us to wholly reimagine what it means to study human and inhuman conditions in their various forms.
How College Teaching Can Have a Future
Do we want a university built around managers and cops, or around students and their teachers?
COVID Won’t Change Higher Ed, but Anti-racism Might
Racial-justice movements in higher education offer a template for how to dislodge education’s focus on entrenching prestige.
Harvard–Riverside, Round Trip
In the contemporary United States, higher education does more to exaggerate than relieve class and cultural divisions.
How the Campus Becomes the Border
Since all data can now be used for immigration enforcement, universities cannot assume that collecting data on their students is safe.
Academia Trained You—but the World Needs You
Does leaving the academy mean someone failed? Or does it mean, instead, that their scholarly strengths can now be made useful to the public?
Building a Postcolonial Knowledge Commons
In responding to COVID, how should research libraries use the opportunity to tackle the ongoing crisis of postcoloniality?
The Indifference Engine
Nobody knows what will be useful in the future. And this is why we so often find humanistic activities in the seeds and roots of STEM.
Like Sands through the Hourglass
What will our children remember of this time, when their play and freedom are confined—or freed—by the digital?
Don’t Save the University—Transform It
“Why read and write about literature while the world burns?” Because, in working to end the oppression faced by so many, the humanities can help.
How to Educate an American Citizen
What should schools teach about the Constitution? And should they teach feelings, aspiration, or fact?
Good Teachers Know That Bodies Matter
Students must choose to do the work that will facilitate learning, so teachers must give them reasons to make that choice, again and again.
What Was the Classroom?
As many COVID-era courses have moved from seminar rooms to Zoom meetings, the haptic nature of teaching has changed. Is anything lost?
Poor Queer Use: Repurposing the Ivory Tower
Outside elite institutions, queer studies has the potential to go hand in hand with broader struggles of racial and economic justice.
Shoptalk: Overheard at the Virtual Conference
In this parodic installment of Shoptalk, we salute the year of conferences that have tried to be.