Skip to main content

Week 5 Questions

 Kiang in “Crossing Boundaries, Building Community” brings forward the complications of being a tenure track professor while also trying to challenge academia and create communities with students that engages with race, power, and culture. In this challenge, Kiang reflects on the positionality of a particular professor as they rejected being the pillar of such a movement considering their tenure track position. Examining Kiang’s example, there is an interesting dynamic between responsible modes of community building with POC students/ faculty relationships and the tokenization's of POC faculty members in the workspace by their peers and students. How can these dynamics be examined and what are the implications for higher education institutions and the environment they create? 

 

In “Crossing Boundaries, Building Community” Kiang describes his approach in the classroom as an adoption of Mae Tse Tung ’s basic organizing principle (unite with the advanced to win over the middle and isolate the backwards). When assessing his relationship with this framework he asks “Who are the advanced that I must not take for granted? Where can I have the most meaningful impact for both the short-term and long-term? As a scholar and educator that is attempting to break hegemonic practices in the classroom and academia, how do we further this discussion on who the “advance” represents in our daily practices? 

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

On Journals and Prose

My two questions from this week have emerged from the Judith Butler piece, A 'Bad Writer' Bites Back , both centered around the journal, Philosophy and Literature —which Butler describes as the self-proclaimed “arbiter of good prose.”  I agree with Butler’s staunch defense of questioning common sense and provoking “new ways of looking at a familiar world”, and was reminded of David Harvey’s quote in the introduction to his Companion to Marx’s Capital : “Real learning always entails a struggle to understand the unknown.”   Butler describes Philosophy and Literature as a “culturally conservative academic journal” which naturally led me down a longer-than-anticipated visit to the journal's website . I was greeted with a video presented by the Philosophy and Literature’s editor Garry L. Hagberg, who rails against the “jargon infested” work that litters the journal’s field, locating Philosophy and Literature in clear opposition to such bothersome clutter.  However, Hagberg...
Post a Comment
Read more

Week 6 Discussion Qs

 Hall brings up the concept of interpellation as applied to social formations. (p 335) How is interpellation related to articulation? How are the two different, if at all? Must the two be discussed together? I have more difficulty conceptualizing interpellation than I do articulation. If we are to take up Hall's warning not to study racism as a set of "historically specific racisms" (336) nor as something with a "universal structure" (337). What balance can we strike today between these two approaches in our current historical moment? Eduardo Bonilla-Silva has written that certain forms of modern racism have been impacted by the prevalent ideology of "colorblindness." Are we still in this moment or are new specificities arising?
Post a Comment
Read more

Corrine's Op Ed

       Although the Grammy’s “rebranded” their “urban” music award in 2020 after being taken to task by Tyler, the Creator for using the term to cover all black artists, regardless of their chosen genre, its lingering presence can still be felt in the new “Progressive R&B” award that has taken its place. Where Tyler, the Creator and other artists argued for more diverse genres that allow for broader categorizations for “people who look like [him],” the Grammy’s simply tucked one category into the other, reflecting how “urban” and R&B are both intrinsically linked and coded to the Grammy’s board as “black music.” This neat folding away of urban back into R&B seems to be unhelpful at best and reductive at worst, and has serious repercussions for us all, artist or otherwise: the pigeonholing of black art/ ists into essentialized categories allows for only a few forms of blackness to be legitimated through the Grammy system, but it also reflects the rigid bo...
Post a Comment
Read more