We continue awaiting the decision of a grand jury on whether or not to indict Darren Wilson, a white police officer, who shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, exactly 15 weeks ago today on a suburban street in Ferguson, Missouri. News reporters from across the globe have been camped out in Ferguson for…
Read MoreAs someone who has spent the better part of her career researching, analyzing and teaching not only about the structure and nature of oppressive power regimes, but also better and worse ways to resist or transform such regimes, I’ve nevertheless been unable to settle in my own mind, to my own satisfaction, my position with…
Read MoreMany of you have probably seen the excellent “Ferguson Syllabus” created by Sociologists for Justice, which has been circulated widely over the last several days and which provides a collection of research articles used to inform the arguments and positions represented in their Statement on Ferguson. I strongly encourage you to keep circulating that document, and…
Read MoreFor they know they are not animals. And at the very moment when they discover their humanity, they begin to sharpen their weapons to secure its victory. –Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth America has always been and remains an apartheid state. The latter part of that sad but increasingly undeniable fact was made apparent last night in…
Read MoreI had the very good fortune to attend my first Spillit event last night in (local photographer/visual anthropologist, Jamie Harmon‘s) Amurica studio space. Spillit is one of the newer additions to what has become, over the last several years, an incredibly rich, astoundingly diverse, mostly DIY and impressively self-sustaining (for lack of a better descriptor)…
Read MoreI was recently asked by a colleague, Dr. Lisa Guenther (Philosophy, Vanderbilt University), to add my signature to an open letter to Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam, petitioning him to suspend the scheduled execution of 10 inmates beginning in January. I agreed to lend my name to the petition alongside several others in a coalition named…
Read MoreSeveral weeks ago, I saw Beasts of the Southern Wild (adapted from the one-act play Juicy and Delicious by Lucy Alibar), the first feature-length film by director Benh Zeitlin and possibly one of the toughest films to characterize that I’ve ever seen. Whatever other faults it may have– and I will get to those shortly–…
Read MoreLast week, my Philosophy and Film class took up the theme of “documentary truth.” In preparation for our Tuesday night seminar, students were required to choose one film from a list of documentaries (Grizzly Man, The Thin Blue Line, Night and Fog, Bowling for Columbine, Capturing the Friedmans, Man on Wire, Super Size Me, Ghosts…
Read MoreI’m guessing I’m not the only one who saw the trailers for the new film Young Adult (directed by Up In The Air and Thank You For Smoking auteur Jason Reitman, penned by Juno screenwriter Diablo Cody) and thought to myself: that looks really funny! I want to see it! I mean, I didn’t expect…
Read More[This is a continuation of my (now numerous) reflections on the Uncanny Valley. You can read the previous seven installments here if you’re interested.] Late last semester, as a part of my department’s semi-regular Philosophy Film Series, we screened Mechanical Love, a 2007 documentary about the ever-evolving relationships between humans and robots. The film focuses…
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