On March 15, U.S. Representative Debra Haaland (D-New Mexico) was confirmed as Secretary of the Interior. The appointment makes Haaland the first ever Native American person to hold this position, and the first ever Native American cabinet member. The confirmation vote was largely along party lines, with only four Republican senators voting in favor: Lisa Murkowski …
Continue reading Deb Haaland’s confirmation is about more than identity politics
It’s like we’re in an endless car ride with a drunk at the wheel. No one knows when the pain will stop. PSYCHOLOGIST DAPHNE DE MARNEFFE, ON OUR CURRENT TRAUMAS First published January 26, 2021 The events of the last month or so have gotten me thinking a lot about the issue of closure. Many of …
So here's one way to spend your downtime while practicing social distancing. After getting yet another spam solicitation for articles from the Journal of Liberal Arts and Humanities --this time, promising a TWO DAY turnaround from submission to publication-- I decided to check in with them, and see if they were still misusing my name and photo …
About a month ago, I got an irate email from a stranger. This person, another academic at an American university, wondered how I could possibly agree to be on the editorial board of a journal that had recently spammed her inbox with an invitation to contribute a paper. She noted the ungrammatical and unidiomatic prose with …
Continue reading Predatory Journal of Liberal Arts and Humanities Stole my Identity
LIT6856: Modernity, Rationality, and Irrationality, Fall 2018 Course Meetings: Fridays, periods 3-5 (9:35 AM-12:35 PM); in TUR 4112 Instructor: Professor Susan Hegeman / shegeman@ufl.edu/ 352-294-2815 / TUR 4119 Office hours: Tuesdays, 11:35-1:35, or by appointment Course Description A nearly axiomatic definition of modernity, usually associated with Max Weber, emphasizes the increasing rationality – and rationalization …
Continue reading Syllabus for 6856: Modernity, Rationality, and Irrationality
(first published February 19, 2018) Last Wednesday, the day that seventeen young people were murdered in their school in Parkland, Florida, one of my own children’s teachers interrupted the regular curriculum to talk to them about what to do if an “active shooter” showed up at their school. Here’s what he told them: If the shooter is in the …
Continue reading Normalized Gun Violence…or a New Student Movement?
I added a University of Florida building to the Living New Deal map of buildings and monuments created under the New Deal. "Albert A. Murphree Hall was undertaken during the Great Depression with the assistance of the Federal Administration of Public Works. The building is a residence hall on the northern side of the University …
I just submitted my first entry for the collaborative Living New Deal Map Project. This very cool public history project maps New Deal agency works of art, public works projects, Civilian Conservation Corps. projects etc. all over the US. There are quite a few missing entries for Florida, including my first submission, Murphree Hall, on …
In the context of the apparent closure of neoliberalism, I can think of no more profoundly humanist statement than “no mode of production and therefore no dominant social order and therefore no dominant culture ever in reality includes or exhausts all human practice, human energy, and human intention” (Williams 1978: 125). Raymond Williams’s comment, which …
This post is about the artwork I'm using in the header of this blog. Currently, I'm working on a project on MACOS, or Man a Course of Study. MACOS was an innovative and lavishly-funded social studies curriculum that was created in the late 1960s and early 1970s US that emphasized anthropology and behavioral psychology. For …
