"Maybe that’s one thing the pandemic has allowed—for us to be a bit more honest about our struggles."
Higher Education
Editor: Roopika Risam
Past Editor: Carolyn Dever
Now the Humanities Can Disrupt “AI”
The world’s humanists might just be the new MVPs in the struggle for the future of critical thinking.
Shoptalk: Overheard at ASA and ASTR 2022
In this special mega edition of Shoptalk, guess which performative utterance was said at which conference.
Student-Centered Pedagogy’s Activist Roots
For at least 150 years, Black and feminist educators understood that how one is taught effects how one participates in society.
Reading after the University
If you want to support readers, the best hope will always be helping do away with economic compulsion and the division of labor.
Taking Our Time: How Australian Universities Measure Academic Work
“Who gets to decide what is valuable and necessary work for an academic today?”
America’s “Land Grab” Universities: Robert Lee on Colonial Extraction by “Treaty-Like Agreements”
“It’s not about the land underneath campuses. It’s land at a distance, that can be sold or managed to raise funds for endowments.”
The Best Classroom Is the Struggle
“As a historian and educator of college students, my experience teaching on US imperialism is one of disappointment.”
Private Pain, Public Disinvestment: Talking Student Debt with Elizabeth Tandy Shermer
“Individual Americans thought they were the only ones who could not afford to send their kids to college.”
Habits of Mind: John Warner on Teaching Writing
“You fall short and then you wonder, 'what could I do differently next time that gets us a little bit closer?' I love that process.”
Walking Among the University’s Ruins
Some wager that the end is not inevitable: that universities can reassert their centrality to the American liberal democratic project.
Ahmed’s Good Grief
Institutions separate complainers from one another and from their own support networks. But what if we complained as a collective?
Grounding the Humanities
A “regional” humanities abandons academia’s tepid globalism, and confronts local oppressions like prisons, schools, housing, and the police.
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.