My poem draws on two threads of American history in the West, contact of indigenous peoples with European immigrants and the experience of workers at the Nevada Nuclear Bomb Site during the 1950s and '60s. In my mind, the decimation of the native population and confiscation of their land paved the way for bomb-building experiments that poisoned thousands of government workers and...
The extensive amount of academic labor of minoritized faculty, especially at research institutions, has been well documented in the academic literature. Three tenured associate professors at The University of Texas present the genesis, evolution, and postscript of leading and serving in an initiative to de-silo and encourage collaboration across the university, culminating in a...
"Collateral Survivorship" analyzes my collegial friendship with a renowned fiction writer recently described as a “skilled predator” in an investigation of sexual harassment and abuse at an elite private academy in New England. Written for an audience of other scholars and writers, my essay is neither an indictment nor a defense; it’s an investigation of the forms of...
Two Poems by MEH
This paper, based on my experiences teaching Africana Studies at a Northeastern public university, argues that anti-racist pedagogy must include a RaceSyllabus which reveals to diverse students the artificiality of race as a man-made ideology, neither biologically rooted nor divinely-inspired. Barbara Jean Fields and Karen Fields use the term racecraft to describe how race...
This is a review of the film - Awake, A Dream From Standing Rock.
This articles explores ways to incorporate the issue of fake news into my teaching.
“Thin Edge of Barbwire,” a reference to Gloria Anzaldúa’s poetry, doubles as the title of this paper and a collaborative art project undertaken by university art students resulting in the creation of a 30’ wall. This project was, in effect, a response to the Trump presidency and students’ fear of increased violence on the border. This paper describes in detail the month-long unit...
Shortly after the presidential election of 2016, a group of faculty and staff at Elon University committed to developing and offering a one-credit course designed to provide students with intellectual and practical skills that would be useful in facing contemporary social and political challenges. This article describes the process of developing the course, its structure and...
This essay will outline what we did in the 15-week course, Education in the Age of Trump, and will document the ways in which it made us all vulnerable. It will analyze the possibilities and perils of creating an overtly political classroom in an era of political polarization and widespread fear.
When I went to Nicaragua for the first time during the Contra war, I had no idea that I would soon wind up helping a Nica friend start two literacy programs and then a Free High School for Adults. It opened in 2002, and now, only 15 years later, we have 1001 graduates, 54% women, 45% rural (mainly from subsistence farm families)--all of them excluded from the regular high schools...
This article describes the newly launched CUNY Digital History Archive (CDHA), a project of the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning at the CUNY Graduate Center. The CDHA is designed to provide open, online access to a rich array of digitized historical sources that detail the important history of the City University of New York (CUNY). The article...
This issue of Radical Teacher focuses on why we should teach courses and collaborate with students in research in Critical University Studies (CUS)— a handy label, but please take “university” is a stand-in for many kinds of post-secondary institution.
While undergraduate student loan debt continues to be “hard to register,” there are other conditions and effects of the student loan debt spiral that remain relatively invisible, unexamined, and certainly receive less attention in news headlines or on the op-ed pages about the fiscal cliff of education debt. These are the effects of this debt spiral on graduate education, faculty...
This article is a reflection on how select oral histories and witness accounts about the partition of India and Pakistan, especially those by Urvashi Butalia and Veena Das were used in a graduate seminar in Bengaluru. The article explores the strength of oral archives as repositories of radical enquiry that may be used in classrooms to understand the complex nature of history...
This article examines the pedagogical implications of teaching about the past in a way that establishes continuity in relation to present and future moments. I describe and analyze how my Trinity College students navigated my course, “Crossing the Color-Line,” which aimed to eradicate boundaries and entangle the professional and personal, social and political, past and present...
This article argues that performing the recovery of pacifist art and actions through archival research of the modernist era encourages students to engage in radical ethical inquiry. Based on four sections of a writing class at Haverford College, this article walks the reader through the construction of a student digital humanities and special collections exhibition, Testimonies...
This paper is the story of a critical archival pedagogy that emerged through the undergraduate course Radical Lesbian Thought. As teachers and students, we dialogically co-constructed the praxis and content of the course throughout the semester. We employed archives throughout the course as theory, site, and pedagogy. In this paper we identify three archival frameworks: dialogue...
In Pedagogies of Crossing (2005), M. Jacqui Alexander asserts that human rights are not rights at all; in fact, human rights does little to mitigate the violence perpetuated by late capitalism and the legacies of imperialism and colonialism. Alexander’s point of contention brings to bear the fact that the passing of human rights by the United Nations, among other groups...
Based on an analysis of classroom discussions and online reading responses, this essay explores how an all-women group of University of Pittsburgh undergraduates responded to The Lowell Offering, a collection of writings by mid-19th century women textile workers. While Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg equates “leaning in” to claim one’s place in the male-dominated...
It’s 100 degrees in Yangon (formerly Rangoon), and I am trying to explain to a student that when she analyzes irony in Hamlet in her MA thesis, she may want to consider politics and the ways in which Shakespeare commented both on Elizabethan England and the nature of power more generally. Ophelia doesn’t even come up in the conversation. I pause for a moment to adjust the feeble...
Teaching critical thinking at the International Islamic University - Islamabad (IIU-I) in 2008 gave me a chance to reflect on religion and politics, leftism and anti-imperialism, and to learn more about the region. Some reflections for radical teachers.