Politics

Anonymity

Listening to the Digital Dialogue conversation about Identity the other day, coupled with reading way-too-many of the “comments” sections on the Skip Gates’ arrest story, has gotten me thinking a lot about the merits and demerits of online anonymity. Anyone who spends more than a second on the Internet surely knows the drawbacks– “flame” wars,…

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Hotel Bar Sessions, Ep 30: Robots

The HBS hosts discuss how robots and intelligent machines are upending our social, moral, legal, and philosophical categories. For this last episode of Season 2, the HBS hosts interview Dr. David Gunkel (author of Robot Rights and How To Survive A Robot Invasion) about his work on emergent technologies, intelligent machines, and robots. Following the…

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Hotel Bar Sessions, Ep 29: Defending the Humanities

  The HBS hosts present their best defense of humanities-based education and, in doing so, try to justify their existences. As higher education has become more corporatized and STEM-focused, areas of study are often “pitched” to students on the basis of their future income-earning potential. However, college students now are entering a workforce where more…

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Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, Ep 28: Generations

  The HBS hosts discuss whether or not generational tags– “Boomer,” “GenX,” “Millennial,” and “Gen Z”– are useful descriptions or just gerrymandered groups. Are you Gen Z, a Boomer, Gen X? We don’t know either but in this episode Dr. Rick Lee leads a discussion to try to figure out whether these generational designations have…

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Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, Ep 27: The Hustle

  The HBS hosts discuss scams, cons, gig work, and what drives us to live and work at full speed. In the immortal words of Clifford Joseph Harris, Jr. (aka, T.I.) “If you don’t respect nothing else, you will respect the hustle.” In this episode, Dr. Leigh M. Johnson takes the lead in an analysis…

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Hotel Bar Sessions, Episode 25 Guns

  The HBS hosts try to figure out why there are 150 guns for every 100 Americans.  In the midst of a pandemic, as COVID-related deaths creep close towards 1 million, it’s easy to forget to the other public health epidemic plaguing the United States, namely, gun violence. Nearly 10,000 people have already been killed…

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Hotel Bar Sessions, Episode 24: Specialization

  The HBS hosts discuss academic specializations and how to make the humanities more inclusive. Over the last several decades, there has been a long-overdue push for professors in the humanities to diversify their curricula to include more women, BIPOC, queer, disabled, and other under-represented thinkers and texts. Yet, theh “add diversity and stir” model…

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Hotel Bar Sessions, Episode 23: Superheroes

  The HBS hosts discuss the role of superheroes in culture and popular media. In American graphic fiction and contemporary film, the superhero stands at the center of many popular narratives. Superhero stories published by DC Comics and Marvel are a multi-million dollar per year industry and, in 2019 alone, superhero movies grossed 3.19 billion dollars…

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Hotel Bar Sessions, Episode 22: White Working Class

The HBS hosts take a critical look at the white working class and their grievances. Leading up to the 2016 election of President Donald Trump, and even more so afterwards, the U.S. found itself inundated with analyses of the allegedly “overlooked” grievances of the white working class. Were those legitimate grievances that should have been…

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