Is love an emotion or an act? I recently asked this in a student working group where we discuss topics including whether men have a right to contribute to the shaping of public discourse about sexual harassment (appropriate as the #MeToo movement has emerged to inspire and to generate new questions) and how community college students can…
I voted today: getting from one place to another, together in New York City
I love to vote. Some people find the process tedious, full of long lines and old-fashioned procedures involving paper and bubble-filling, but I love going to my local school, finding my council and assembly district, signing my name in exchange for the ballot in its huge long sleeve, and heading over to the area where…
A case against charter schools: send back your saviors
As a professor, I work with public school teachers who are in the process of becoming certified to teach in the New York City Department of Education in a program called the New York City Teaching Fellows. These new teachers support students from all over the world, many of whom are immigrants or children of…
“Zines as creative resistance”: authoring the world, authoring ourselves
The Graduate Center library and first-floor hallways have spaces for exhibitions of art by artists with a variety of commitments and visions, some of which are beautiful, raw, terrifying, playful, and sometimes – in my favorite cases – all of the above. Below I’ve collected a group of images of zines which explore topics of race, queer…
Trunk or Treat: silly, spontaneous community in a cemetery
Yesterday I was walking in my neighborhood along a path that includes a beautiful cemetery with winding paths and lovely bent old trees. A cheerful orange-and-black clad woman greeted me from her seat at a welcome table as I walked up to the gates. “What’s happening today?” I asked, as kids in Spiderman and gorilla…
“Time Enough at Last”: screens and the elusive book
I’ve been watching episodes of “The Twilight Zone,” an old black-and-white TV series that ran from 1959 to 1964 and told weird, sometimes futuristic, often Kafkaesque tales that made the viewer twist uncomfortably or stare rapt in suspended horror at the screen. Unknown, mostly White male actors, limited and mundane sets (by today’s standards), oddly-rhythmed…
A Night at the Garden: White supremacy and collective forgetting
“A Night at the Garden” is a short film that depicts a pro-Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City in 1939. Billed as a “pro-American” rally, the images of the columns of white, uniformed men from the ethnic German group called the German American Bund striking drums, carrying swastika-adorned banners, and displaying…
Education is a right
Just got home from teaching at City College, where I work with public school teachers developing their pedagogical practice and scholarship as grad students in the City University of New York, arguably the oldest public university system in the country (rivaled only by the University of California). I am a teaching fellow in the same…
The intellectual’s desperate need for self-parody as a Professional Smarty Pants
After the inspiring first class of Introduction to Dialectics with Stanley Aronowitz this weekend among many seasoned thinkers and established intellectuals, I felt the need to reflect on the experience of being a Professional Smarty Pants and my socialization, for better or worse, into this motley group. I’m increasingly convinced that self-awareness is in desperate…
Learning with lions: public pedagogy in NYC
Recently, a friend of mine shared with me an amazing opportunity to join a reading group with Stanley Aronowitz, professor emeritus and world renowned public scholar in the fields of sociology, political science, and critical theory who taught at the Graduate Center for over 30 years. My advisor at UMass Boston had mentioned Aronowitz specifically…
