Category
Essays
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Law, Written in Spray Paint
“Paying attention to the temporary markings etched onto the asphalt, we are afforded a glimpse into the otherwise hidden world that lies below the city’s surface.”
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“Poetry City”: Iowa City, Iowa
Iowa City is the place where contemporary English literature matters more than anywhere else on earth.
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“A Safe Haven”: Huguenots, Jews, and Bangladeshis in Brick Lane, London
Jamme Masjid, the famed mosque at 59 Brick Lane, used to be a Jewish synagogue; before that, a Methodist church; and even before that, a Huguenot chapel.
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How to Forget Alvin Ailey
Even as “Edges of Ailey” gathers such intimate documents, it does not make them legible to its visitors.
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“Origine Asiatique”: The Anticolonial and Communist Chinese That Flocked to Paris
Asian migration has been kept out of most official histories of Paris, but walking in the quartiers chics and populaires/mixtes uncovers a portrait of the lives and history.
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Care Work is Necessary for Anti-Imperialist Struggle
As a means of disrupting the university’s predominant ways of being and relating, the encampment’s ethic of care was not extinguished by the raid.
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A Brief Queer History of Going to Bed with Your Hot Friends
I worried that, in obscure but consequential ways, I had already begun to fail her.
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Speak, Mario?
If video games work generally as showcases of players’ ability, then why has the ability to speak fluently been relatively unnecessary for the medium’s icons?
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In Search of Logged Time
When we leave the work of remembering to digital tools, we risk the loss of our histories to technological obsolescence.
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Archives of the Surveilled
Arthur Huff Fauset’s elision from literary history was not merely a scholarly oversight but a reality constructed in advance by powerful forces.
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Bad Beef
Rap beef is form of capitalist accumulation that enriches artists—and, most of all, the corporate suits that run their record labels.
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A Heaven Reflected on Earth: The Golden Temple, Amritsar
Gleaming turrets reflect in the still water, just as, according to the Sikh faith, heaven is reflected on earth.
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A Public Art College in Crisis: Art, Activism, and Solidarity After October 7
SERCs serve as both artistic gestures and practical solutions, aiming to balance the two while addressing critical questions such as: How will we feed people—and their hunger for justice?
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Cheap Speech
By the time the tear gas came we were ready for it. The police had already been gathering for hours along the university’s serpentine walls, forming ranks and donning battle gear.
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How campus protests exposed the flaws in higher education diversity initiatives
Universities across the US pay lip service to diversity, equity and inclusion, while suppressing calls for Palestinian liberation.
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What Is a “Student” Politics?
To risk enfranchisement, suffer its penalties, apologetically—on behalf of a political sympathy with others—is revolutionary. This is the kind of action to which humanist knowledge must be bound.
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Leaving a Mark
I found myself constantly asking other participants their thoughts and reflections, to the point where I simply decided to sit down and record these conversations as a sort of informal oral history project.
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Being Columbia
This article was born as critique, but has grown into an elaboration of emotion, reflection, and reaction.
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Reckoning With Our Collective Failure
We were collectively failing in our mission to help students become informed, engaged citizens.
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Liberation, Education
In April 2024, Sofia Rivera captured stark close-ups of scenes from the Columbia University campus, from barricaded buildings to clipped versions of the campus’s famous statues, obscured in favor of the images of protest surrounding them.
