by Margaret Randall* Editor’s note: Margaret Randall is a poet, essayist, photographer, and social activist, and she has authored more than 100 books. This is the excerpt of an essay narrating her 2011 return to Cuba, where she had lived throughout the 1970s. Her encounters with familiar as well as new sites and faces sparked her insightful […]
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Education and Censorship
by Rachel Reinhard* The teaching of history is inherently political and, consequently, plays a unique role in K-12 classrooms. As an area studied by elementary and secondary students, it is one of the most divorced from its disciplinary home in the academy. Science classes engage in lab work and experiments that replicate those conducted by […]
Reentry to Nothing #2 — The Working Poor
by Alessandro De Giorgi* The materials presented in this blog series draw from an ethnographic study on prisoner reentry I have been conducting between March 2011 and March 2014 in a neighborhood of West Oakland, California, plagued by chronically high levels of poverty, unemployment, homelessness, drug addiction, and street crime. In 2011, with the agreement of […]
Mind Control: Censorship in Education
by Rick Ayers* Banned books are back in the news. This is not simply because the American Library Association has just sponsored the annual Banned Books Week, but also because activist conservatives are once again whipping up cultural wars via censorship. It was not so long ago that the Tucson School Board banned Ethnic Studies classes and […]
Sex, Politics, and Faith: Tony Kushner’s American Drama
by Janelle Reinelt* Last June I saw Tony Kushner’s epic new play, The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures, at Berkeley Repertory Theatre. It is directed by Tony Taccone. Since then, I haven’t been able to get it out of my mind . . . . Kushner is […]
Open Letter to the UN Security Council Special Meeting on the Ebola Crisis: Women of the Mano River Union Member States Speak
by MARWOPNET/REFMAP (Mano River Women’s Peace Network/ Réseau des Femmes du Fleuve Mano pour La Paix) For only the third time in its history, the UN Security Council has convened an emergency meeting on a health issue, on Thursday, 18 September 2014. Member States will discuss a plan of action to address the unprecedented escalation […]
Fear and Violence in the NFL
by David Meggyesy* The only reason parents hit their children is because they can get away with it — A. S. Neill, Summerhill As a physically abused child, as many of us are, I read the above quote as a young adult, then the parent of a three-year-old son, and a professional football player with the […]
Spaces of Suspicion and Forbidden Existence in Palestine
by Judah Schept* “The question is, how do you interpret the alley? Do you interpret it as a place, like every architect and every planner does, to walk through, or do you interpret it as a place forbidden to walk through? This depends only on interpretation. We interpreted the alley as a place forbidden to […]
Ferguson and Human Dignity
by Jonathan Simon* Michael Brown is to be buried today (August 25, 2014) in St. Louis, near his hometown of Ferguson, Missouri. As the world knows by now, two weeks ago the eighteen-year-old recent high-school graduate was shot six times and killed by Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson. Michael Brown was unarmed, and the reasons […]
Ferguson and Beyond: “Justifiable Homicides” and Premature Death in the Urban Ghetto
by Alessandro De Giorgi* Image by Jenna Pope (@JennaBPope). Original tweet here. • According to a recent FBI report on cases of “justifiable homicide” annually reported by a sample of police departments across the nation, between 2008 and 2012 law enforcement officers have “justifiably” killed an average of 400 civilians each year. An analysis of […]