Teaching

Concepts in Motion (or, Why You Should Assign Short-Films in Philosophy Courses)

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Film, Open Source Pedagogy, Philosophy, Pop Culture/Film/Literature, RMWMTMBM Archive, Teaching, Thinking in Images Comments Off on Concepts in Motion (or, Why You Should Assign Short-Films in Philosophy Courses)

“I say that I do philosophy, which is to say that I try to invent concepts.  What if I say, to you who do cinema: what do you do?” –Gilles Deleuze French philosopher Gilles Deleuze famously speculated in Cinema 1 (1983) that what he called the “movement-image,” a unique creative product of cinema, makes it…

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Facebook Privacy Dis-Agreement

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Digital Humanities, Philosophy, Pop Culture/Film/Literature, RMWMTMBM Archive, Teaching Comments Off on Facebook Privacy Dis-Agreement

It’s been a little while since the inhabitants of Facebookistan got all fired up about something–  where are you now Kony2012?— so I was half-delighted and half-disheartened to see the newest brouhaha to hit the social media site, which I’m calling the Facebook Privacy Dis-Agreement (FPD).  As these things tend to happen, FPD had been…

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Why I Stood With The Students

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Human Rights, Occupy Movement, Politics, RMWMTMBM Archive, Teaching Comments Off on Why I Stood With The Students

As I reported in my previous post, students at my college organized an event last Monday night, the Rhodes Solidarity Vigil, which was meant to demonstrate solidarity with the nonviolent student protesters at UC-Davis (and elsewhere) who were brutalized by police while peacefully exercising their right to assemble. This is why I stood with the…

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Kyle Ference Mans Up

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, Politics, RMWMTMBM Archive, Teaching, Women and Gender Issues 6 Comments

The picture to the left is of a former student and advisee of mine, Kyle Ference (author of the Refudiating Through Life blog). During his time at Rhodes, Kyle was in many ways the very ideal of a liberal arts student. He was smart and hardworking, affable and well-liked, committed to socially-conscious extracurricular activities, a…

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REPOST: Picking A Fight… Like A Girl

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, Politics, RMWMTMBM Archive, Teaching, Women and Gender Issues 4 Comments

[NOTE: This is a post that was originally published on this blog a year ago (10/08/09), which I am re-posting now because of recent interest in the newly-developed and eminently revealing What Is It Like To Be A Woman In Philosophy? blog. It is interesting to me to see this issue resurface with such force…

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Morehouse Mean Girls

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Politics, RMWMTMBM Archive, Teaching, Women and Gender Issues Comments Off on Morehouse Mean Girls

I’ll admit that I hesitated, more than once– more than a dozen times, to be honest– before posting this entry. So, allow me a few caveats here at the start. First, I’m not a Morehouse grad, not even a Spelman grad– two of the most prestigious HBCU’s in the country– and I can appreciate that…

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Deconstructing Sasha Fierce

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Music, Open Source Pedagogy, Philosophy, Politics, Pop Culture/Film/Literature, RMWMTMBM Archive, Teaching, Women and Gender Issues 10 Comments

I’m guessing that many of us have those fleeting fantasies from time to time in which we conjure up what we imagine would be the AWESOMEST. COURSE. EVER. For example, my fantasy courses: “I’m Not Here To Make Friends: Ethics and Reality TV” (sort of a cross between ethical theory, applied ethics, and existentialism), or…

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Details, Details…

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, Pop Culture/Film/Literature, RMWMTMBM Archive, Teaching 6 Comments

In the Humanities, we like to emphasize the importance of what we call “close reading,” by which we mean concentrated attention to the details of a text: syntax, specialized vocabulary, nuance and conditions, logical order, the manner in which ideas develop and are connected. We do this because we aim to achieve, I hope, precision…

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The Secret Little Book-Banner Inside You (and Me)

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, Pop Culture/Film/Literature, RMWMTMBM Archive, Teaching 11 Comments

This week is Banned Books Week, so designated by the American Library Association, which created the week in the hopes of motivating us to celebrate our “freedom to read.” The ALA keeps a list of the most frequently challenged books each year, including a list of banned “classics,” and my guess is that a quick…

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Cold War In The Classroom

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Open Source Pedagogy, Philosophy, Politics, RMWMTMBM Archive, Teaching 5 Comments

Dr. Miller, aka Anotherpanacea, has called me to account for my post a few days ago (“Why I Won’t Turn It In“), in which I detailed my objections to the pay-per-plagiarism-police service known as Turnitin.com. AnPan does use the service, and he offers his own justifications for that choice in his post titled “Why I…

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