ENG 102: Fall 2023 Resources #5

Adam, Barbara. Time. Wiley, 2004. ["What is time? How has our relationship to time changed through history and how does time structure our social lives? In this lively introduction, Barbara Adam explores the changing ways in which time has been understood and how this knowledge is embedded in cultural practices. She takes the reader on a journey of discovery that extends from ancient mythology and classical philosophy to the contemporary social world of high-speed computer networks and globalized social relations. The book poses key questions about the nature of time, how it is conceptualized, what it means in practice and how the parameters set by nature have been transcended across the ages by the human quest for time know-how and control. It provides the reader with a good basis for understanding the role of time in contemporary social life. This book assumes no previous knowledge. Through its broad perspective and transdisciplinary approach it provides an accessible and wide-ranging introduction for students and teachers across the social sciences."]

Abdelfetah, Rund, et al. "Before Roe: The Physicians Crusade." Throughline (June 8, 2023) ["Abortion wasn't always controversial. In fact, in colonial America it would have been considered a fairly common practice: a private decision made by women, and aided mostly by midwives. But in the mid-1800s, a small group of physicians set out to change that. Obstetrics was a new field, and they wanted it to be their domain—meaning, the domain of men and medicine. Led by a zealous young doctor named Horatio Storer, they launched a campaign to make abortion illegal in every state, spreading a potent cloud of moral righteousness and racial panic that one historian later called "the physicians' crusade." And so began the century of criminalization. In the first episode of a two-part series, we're telling the story of that century: how doctors put themselves at the center of legal battles over abortion, first to criminalize — and then to legalize."]

Allen-Hermanson, Sean, Philip Goff, and William Seager. "Panpsychism." The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (February 13, 2022) ["Panpsychism is the view that mentality is fundamental and ubiquitous in the natural world. The view has a long and venerable history in philosophical traditions of both East and West, and has recently enjoyed a revival in analytic philosophy. For its proponents panpsychism offers an attractive middle way between physicalism on the one hand and dualism on the other. The worry with dualism—the view that mind and matter are fundamentally different kinds of thing—is that it leaves us with a radically disunified picture of nature, and the deep difficulty of understanding how mind and brain interact. And whilst physicalism offers a simple and unified vision of the world, this is arguably at the cost of being unable to give a satisfactory account of the emergence of human and animal consciousness. Panpsychism, strange as it may sound on first hearing, promises a satisfying account of the human mind within a unified conception of nature."]

Austin, Thomas. "Horse-People and White Voices: Neoliberalism and Race in Sorry to Bother You." Senses of Cinema #105 (May 2023) ["The comedy drama Sorry to Bother You (2018), written and directed by Boots Riley, follows the trials and tribulations of Cassius, aka “Cash”, Green (played by Lakeith Stanfield), a new employee at RegalView, a fictional telemarketing firm based in “an alternate reality” version of Oakland, California.1 Here I consider two of the many sonic and visual devices through which the film develops its social commentary and political critique of contemporary America."]

Barndt, Deborah, et al. "Learning for Liberation: The Life & Legacy of Paulo Freire." Darts and Letters #79 (May 25, 2023) ["Paulo Freire offers activists and academics everywhere a lesson in what it means to be a radical intellectual. He is known as the founder of critical pedagogy, which asks teachers and learners to understand and resist their own oppression. His subversive books have been banned and burned in many countries, including his native Brazil, where the military dictatorship of the 1960s imprisoned and then exiled him. On this episode, we learn about Freire’s life and the basics of his foundational text, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, with help from professor emeritus John Portelli. Then, we explore how Freire’s legacy is still shaping our ideas of teaching and learning today. Academic/activist/artist Deborah Barndt takes us to York University’s faculty of Environmental and Urban Change, which is rooted in the work of Freirean scholars. Next, we learn about how Freire’s pedagogy is put into practice to advocate for disabled learners, with Marc Castrodale, a teacher, disability officer, and scholar of critical disability and Mad studies. Finally, social worker Sharon Steinhauer tells us the story of the University at Blue Quills, and how an act of Indigenous resurgence led to the beginning of a network of decolonial universities in Canada."]

Baynham, Jacob. "The Myriad Lives of People and Water." NOEMA (May 4, 2023) ["Our lives are grand voyages, far more entangled with everything around us than we know. This is as true for a person as it is for a creek."]

Blackston, Dylan McCarthy and Susan Stryker. "The Transgender Studies Reader Remix (Routledge 2022)." New Books in LGBTQ Studies (April 24, 2023) ["This is a book that’s as big as it is rich. It brings together 50 previously published articles that track both the history and the current directions in the interdisciplinary field of transgender studies. The reader shows the conversations taking place not only within transgender studies but also between transgender studies and such fields as feminist theory, queer theory, Black studies, history, biopolitics, and the posthumanities. In our conversation, editors Stryker and Blackston gives us a sense of this range and also the crucial issues that inform the creation of the reader itself and the importance of transgender studies as a field. Blackston is an Assistant Professor of Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies in the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies at Appalachian State University. Stryker is Professor Emerita of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona, founding co-editor of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, founding co-editor of Duke University Press’s ASTERISK book series, and co-editor of Routledge’s two previous transgender studies readers. And here’s our conversation."]

Brown, Krista and Moe Tkacik. "Taylor Swift Tickets." On the Media (June 7, 2023) ["On January 24, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on Ticketmaster. The hearing followed in the aftermath Taylor Swift's "Eras Tour" tickets going on sale last November, a debacle during which Ticketmaster broke down during the presale, leaving millions of fans without tickets. Senators convened to hear testimony from a top Live Nation executive (Ticketmaster’s parent company), competitors in ticketing and concert promotion, antitrust experts, and a musician. The hearing represented a step toward a potential antitrust case against Live Nation and Ticketmaster, which merged in 2010. Moe Tkacik and Krista Brown are researchers at the American Economic Liberties Project, a left-leaning think tank which is part of a consortium that is pushing for the DOJ to break up the Live Nation monopoly. In February Micah Loewinger spoke to them about an article they co-wrote for The American Prospect about Ticketmaster’s forty-plus-year-history, and how the company came to dominate, and in some ways reshape, the live music landscape."]

Chungking Express (Hong Kong: Wong Kar-Wai, 1994) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Online Archive) ["The whiplash, double-pronged Chungking Express is one of the defining works of 1990s cinema and the film that made Wong Kar Wai an instant icon. Two heartsick Hong Kong cops (Takeshi Kaneshiro and Tony Leung Chiu Wai), both jilted by ex-lovers, cross paths at the Midnight Express take-out food stand, where the ethereal pixie waitress Faye (Faye Wong) works. Anything goes in Wong’s gloriously shot and utterly unexpected charmer, which cemented the sex appeal of its gorgeous stars and forever turned canned pineapple and the Mamas & the Papas’ “California Dreamin’” into tokens of romantic longing."]

Craze, Joshua. "After Solidarity." New Left Review (May 18, 2023) ["Tori et Lokita (2022), the latest film by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, opens with a shot that has become a signal part of their visual repertoire: a face in the centre of the screen, crumbling under the voice of an unseen speaker. We see Lokita as she is interrogated by an immigration officer. At first, she seems impassive, but eventually she hesitates, and then breaks down in tears, unable to answer the officer’s questions. We witness the consequences of power, inscribed on a face."]

Denbeaux, Mark and John Kiriakau. "From Waterboarding to Rape, Abu Zubaydah Depicts Torture at Black Sites & Gitmo in Graphic Sketches." Democracy Now (May 18, 2023) ["The Center for Policy and Research has just published a new report titled “American Torturers: FBI and CIA Abuses at Dark Sites and Guantánamo,” which compiles a series of 40 drawings by Guantánamo Bay prisoner Abu Zubaydah that chronicle the horrific torture he endured since 2002 in CIA dark sites and at Guantánamo Bay, where he has been detained without charge since 2006. The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has issued a new call for the United States to release him immediately. We speak with one of his attorneys, Mark Denbeaux, and CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou, who exposed the Bush-era torture program and was the only official jailed in connection to it."]