Monday, August 21, 2023

ENG 102: Fall 2023 Resources #4

Abdelfetah, Rund, et al. "Affirmative Action." Throughline (June 15, 2023) ["The Supreme Court is expected to rule on affirmative action sometime this month. Most of us understand that some colleges use race as a factor in college admissions. But journalist Jay Caspian Kang argues that this focus is too narrow, and that it avoids harder conversations we need to have as a culture. In his view, focusing on the admissions practices of a select few universities creates "a fight for spots in the elite ranks of society" — and blinds us to the bigger problems plaguing American democracy. On today's episode, we talk with Kang about affirmative action's origins in the civil rights era, what it does and doesn't achieve, and what a more equitable education system could look like."]

Murtha, Tara. "Ode to Billie Joe." AllMusic (March 13, 2023) ["The backstory of one of the all-time great songs and Bobbi Gentry, the woman behind this masterpiece."]

Nayman, Adam. "The Words Don’t Really Matter." The Ringer (April 14, 2023) ["Thirty-five years later, there’s still nothing quite like Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro."]

Rodriguez, Randall. Otto the Barbarian: Patriarchy, Feminism, and Romanian New Wave Cinema.” Film Matters (March 15, 2023) ["This article aims at bringing to light some of the underlying themes in Ruxandra Ghițescu’s 2020 film Otto the Barbarian. One way to interpret the film is as an examination of adolescence, anger, and the old ways of life clashing with new ones. I believe that there is another (less obvious) way of interpreting the film: as a criticism of phallocentric cultural norms. Ghițescu does this by turning phallocentric storytelling tropes in on themselves and executes this in a way that keeps the first interpretation of her work intact."] 

Scovell, Adam. Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange. Liverpool University Press, 2017. ["Interest in the ancient, the occult, and the "wyrd" is on the rise. The furrows of Robin Hardy (The Wicker Man), Piers Haggard (Blood on Satan's Claw), and Michael Reeves (Witchfinder General) have arisen again, most notably in the films of Ben Wheatley (Kill List), as has the Spirit of Dark of Lonely Water, Juganets, cursed Saxon crowns, spaceships hidden under ancient barrows, owls and flowers, time-warping stone circles, wicker men, the goat of Mendes, and malicious stone tapes. Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful And Things Strange charts the summoning of these esoteric arts within the latter half of the twentieth century and beyond, using theories of psychogeography, hauntology, and topography to delve into the genre's output in film, television, and multimedia as its "sacred demon of ungovernableness" rises yet again in the twenty-first century."]

Singer, Peter and Tse Yip Fai."What AI Means for Animals." NOEMA (April 18, 2023) ["There is an urgent need to expand AI ethics so that it considers nonhuman life."]

Triangle of Sadness (Sweden: Ruben Östlund, 2022: 147 mins) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive) ["Models Carl and Yaya are invited for a luxury cruise with a rogues’ gallery of super-rich passengers. At first, all appears Instagrammable, but the cruise ends catastrophically and the group find themselves marooned on a desert island."]

Upholt, Boyce. "Saguaro, Free of the Earth." Emergence (May 23, 2023) ["Imagine a world where the mountains and glaciers, trees and waterways and animals—everything comprising our living, breathing planet—had as much a right to exist, legally, as humans. In this narrated essay, author Boyce Upholt travels to meet with the O’odham peoples of the Sonoran Desert, who have long revered the Saguaro cactus as a being with personhood. As Saguaro are bulldozed to make way for a segment of the US-Mexico border wall through Organ Pipe Cactus National Park, existing legal protections for the cactus come up against human-centric and extractive attitudes towards the Earth. Talking with elders from the Tohono O’odham Nation who are acting on behalf of the rooted beings of the desert, Boyce wonders how our Earth might transform if we recognized the dignity of all life."]

Walker, Sara. "AI is Life." NOEMA (April 27, 2023) ["Technology is not artificially replacing life — it is life." "Sara Walker is an astrobiologist and theoretical physicist."]

Warren, Robert. "Ant Dispersal Revisited." In Defense of Plants #419 (April 30, 2023) ["What started as a question about some strange "seeds" in an ant nest turned into an explosion of scientific investigations into the links between oaks, gall wasps, and ants. We revisit a conversation with Dr. Robert Warren in which we discuss the mind-blowing evolutionary insights that can come from natural history observations and what they could mean for seed dispersal in spring ephemerals."]

Zadeh, Joe. "The Tyranny of Time." NOEMA (June 3, 2021) ["The clock is a useful social tool, but it is also deeply political. It benefits some, marginalizes others and blinds us from a true understanding of our own bodies and the world around us."]

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