I found myself seated at the front of a lecture hall on the campus of Ithaca College in New York. It was March 30, 2023. Philosopher Craig Duncan of Ithaca College and Raza Rumi, Director of the Park Center for Independent Media (PCIM), were there with me to...
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The Epistemology of Ignorance in DeSantis World
“What is happening in Florida?” asked a recent headline in The Chronicle of Higher Education. “Since the New Year, Gov. Ron DeSantis and his Republican allies have ramped up efforts to eradicate ‘woke’ ideology from public colleges,” its reporters responded. This...
The End of the Latin American Migrant Trope
Myriad films across the history of Latin American cinema explore the trope of the migrant. These films document the trek from Latin America to the U.S. and migrants’ lives afterwards. Classic films such as “Espaldas mojadas” (Alejandro Galindo, 1995) and “El Norte”...
The Migrating Documentary Cinema of Yi Cui
Augmentation is not defined exclusively by emerging digital media forms, software, and interfaces. Instead, augmentation explores how to generate new processes about how to think through, with, and within place that spans the digital, the analog, and the embodied. Not...
AI and the Fears of Being Thrown Away: Reflections on a Classroom Incident in Dallas
The day: Monday, February 27, 2023. The place: A large lecture class in the new Engineering and Computer Science West building at the University of Texas-Dallas. It’s a wide space, accommodating 300 students. Great windows and elegant wood window treatments allow for...
Teaching the War in Ukraine
It wasn’t long after Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, that I knew I would need to teach a course on it. Six months later, with the war in full force, I launched a semester-long course titled “The Global Politics of the War in Ukraine.” I am an...
Picture the Book: A Photo Essay of a Memoir
The first time I drove on Route 13 in Ithaca, New York, after my mother died, I crept along at the 40 mph minimum speed limit. On the gentle descent into town on that summer’s day in 2016, Cayuga Lake lay in the west as it should. But in front of me, the road’s white...
Dear Joe, What about Us?
You say that the state of the union, SOTU, is strong. That our democracy is working. Really? It is my birthday today. I promised my friends I was taking the day off. That means no writing or calls to action. But then I kept stewing over your talk last night. All the...
The Racism of American Capital Punishment
The death penalty in America always incites controversy. Last year, Alabama took three hours to administer their lethal injection drugs. Idaho had to pause an execution for the lack of those drugs. And two people on death row were exonerated. The larger long-term...
The World Is Burning — Whatever Tops the BFI’s ‘Best Films of All Time’ Won’t Help
The British Film Institute (BFI) just released its Best Films of All Time poll for 2022 to much fanfare and self-congratulation among liberal whites. I can almost sense them patting each other on the back — or exchanging poorly executed high fives — for a job well...