Skip to main content

Viewing COVID through Cultural Studies

I am interested in connecting some of the concepts from the reading to the current social reality of the COVID pandemic:

1) How can we apply the idea of the isolated expert and the need to disrupt disciplinary thinking to the current wave of anti-intellectualism facing all of the various disciplines/ professions within our society and culture (think: physical health, mental health, education, law enforcement, etc.)?

As a high school teacher, this pandemic (and the social response to it) has given me a particular sense of existential dread, so my second question is more specific to my own work in secondary classrooms:

2) What role do educators, who are typically burdened with "healing" the woes facing society, play in addressing the resistance to any sort of meaningful cultural critique (See: recently proposed legislation banning curriculum in Iowa--House File 222--or the legislation seeking to ban language in Wisconsin schools)?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Corrine Contemplates the Funk

 I will keep my intro brief, as I think I will mainly just be echoing my classmates, but what a delicious book! I have really be enjoying reading two great minds converse through "the mundane to the profound" (2). Gilroy mentions in his introduction that "readers...are invited to appreciate the tone and timbre of these interlocked voices in the same spirit with which the participants listened carefully to each other" (x). I was reminded of this early in the reading, through hooks and Hall's mediations on conversation as pedagogy, especially Hall's comments on page 7: "It is as much about rhythm as anything else. If you are living the rest of your life at a certain intensified rhythm, it just doesn't fit the rhythm of conversation. You can't hurry." This seems to be compounded for academic readers by their reflections on how being "paid to talk" or teach in the academy changes the status of talking or teaching. My question then rev...
Post a Comment
Read more