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“Where are your people?”: Cai Emmons in conversation with Madeleine Barnes on Weather Woman
Friday, November 30, 2018
Weather Woman by Cai Emmons is a Climate Fiction novel about the life of Browyn Artair, a graduate student turned meteorologist who discovers she possesses the unique ability to control the weather. Feeling isolated and unsure of how to use her newfound power, she voyages around the world to Siberia where climatologists are studying methane…“Our shelf is a table with shared stuff”: From VHS to Analog Archives
Friday, August 16, 2019
Alexandra Juhasz The VHS Archives working group closed out its second year with an End of the Year Party, Workshop, and Demo. While “party” had been serving as a metaphor during our 2018-2019 meetings to express our commitments to creating opportunities for enjoying and using archives together, this time we were not…Recent
The Uses of Blue-Sky Thinking in an Imperfect World (of Graduate Education)
Monday, May 10, 2021
Michelle May-CurryProject director, Humanities for All, National Humanities Alliance I entered the Graduate Education at Work conference wearing two hats. As a doctoral candidate completing a dissertation this summer in American Culture from the University of Michigan, I came excited to learn from my peers about the ways that they are utilizing their humanities research…
Podcasting and Pedagogy
Friday, April 30, 2021
Ellen Meiser In August 2017, I sat with a group of classmates and faculty from University of Hawaii in a dimly lit hotel restaurant in Montreal. Plates and silverware clinked. A low hum of conversation filled the room. We were in Montreal for the annual American Sociological Association conference, and the meal was a…
Creating Space within Constraints: A Reflection on Conference Planning in a Pandemic
Monday, April 12, 2021
Cihan Tekay There is nothing like a pandemic to make one question what an academic conference is for. Especially if you are one of the conference organizers. When CUNY went remote a year ago, I was in the final stretch of planning Graduate Education at Work in the World, as part of my…
“Love is the most subversive praxis.” On reading together as a working of love
Wednesday, March 10, 2021
Ángeles Donoso Macaya and Marco Saavedra In this blog post, we offer a written exchange about the practice of reading together as a form of community building and about our process of building a syllabus that doesn’t shy away from big words: ‘creation’, ‘love’, ‘inspiration’, ‘beauty.’ Our syllabus is not centered on specific topics…
The Craft We Didn’t Learn: Retroactive Writing Advice from the Archives
Friday, March 5, 2021
Iris Cushing, Megan Paslawski, Zohra Saed, and Kendra Sullivan reverend angel kyodo williams, founder of Transformative Change, a center dedicated to taking care of the inner lives of leaders in social, racial, and broad-based justice movements, writes about purpose and meaning being two mutually reinforcing drivers in her life. To paraphrase, she says purpose…
Meet the Mellon Seminar Cohort: Ryan Mann-Hamilton
Friday, February 19, 2021
Queenie Sukhadia The Andrew W. Mellon Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research is an initiative hosted by the Center for the Humanities that allows creative practitioners, activists and scholars to cohere and work together to undertake research, teaching and other public humanities projects driven by social justice goals. As I have mentioned…
“A Plurality of Voices”: Global Literature to Combat White Privilege
Monday, February 1, 2021
Nadia Kalman Three white, privileged people sitting around a table in a radio studio do not guarantee a plurality of voices or respect for anyone who doesn’t share those privileges. . . . This is why we, as the least privileged in society, have to keep up the daily fight, to enter those spaces…
Meet the Mellon Seminar Cohort: Ángeles Donoso Macaya
Friday, January 29, 2021
Queenie Sukhadia The Andrew W. Mellon Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research is an initiative hosted by the Center for the Humanities that allows creative practitioners, activists and scholars to cohere and work together to undertake research, teaching and other public humanities projects driven by social justice goals. As I have mentioned…
Researching—Mae West—in the 2020 Pandemic
Thursday, January 28, 2021
Carolyn A. McDonough with Virginia Heath In December 2019, the Center for the Humanities put out a call for research assistants (RAs) for a documentary entitled Mae West—The Constant Sinner, directed by Virginia Heath and produced by Grant Keir, the creative duo behind notable projects such as the BAFTA-nominated documentary From Scotland with Love….
Flipping It Horizontal
Monday, January 25, 2021
Katherine E. Entigar August 2020 In 2018, I wrote a piece for Left Voice about the ecological nature of CUNY education, “I believe that CUNY is an educational ecology with relations flowing in many directions, meaning that what affects us as adjunct professors affects our students, which in turn affects their engagement in…
Meet the Mellon Seminar Cohort: Yarimar Bonilla
Friday, January 22, 2021
Queenie Sukhadia The Andrew W. Mellon Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research is an initiative hosted by the Center for the Humanities that allows creative practitioners, activists and scholars to cohere and work together to undertake research, teaching and other public humanities projects driven by social justice goals. As I have mentioned…
Meet the Mellon Seminar Cohort: Chloë Bass
Friday, January 15, 2021
Queenie Sukhadia The Andrew W. Mellon Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research is an initiative hosted by the Center for the Humanities that allows creative practitioners, activists and scholars to cohere and work together to undertake research, teaching and other public humanities projects driven by social justice goals. As I have mentioned…
Centering Global Literature in the English Studies Classroom
Wednesday, January 13, 2021
Sonia Adams In September 2020, the City University of New York announced that it had established a Commission to regenerate its Ethnic Studies programs across its campuses. The Mellon Foundation granted a 10 million dollar grant to CUNY to expand its academic curriculum in ethnic studies. Chancellor Félix V. Matos Rodríguez and Executive Vice…
My journey with Lost & Found, 2014-2020 (and onward)
Monday, January 11, 2021
Iris Cushing (September 2020) Before I came to the CUNY Graduate Center as a student, I came to the physical building as a small-press publisher, back when the Chapbook Festival was hosted on the “C level” of the building on 34th St. and 5th Ave. My press, Argos Books, set up a table…
Brewing memories, sustaining life in common
Wednesday, December 9, 2020
The workshop “Hello, my name is Carolina Saavedra. I am the daughter of Natalia and Antonio, two farmworkers displaced by NAFTA. I learned traditional indigenous cuisine from my grandmother in Oaxaca; back in the US I studied French cuisine at the International Culinary Arts Center (ICC). Agriculture is ingrained into my DNA.” This is…
Academia for All: A Public Humanities Project
Monday, November 16, 2020
Queenie Sukhadia I formally created Academia for All––an Instagram account where I ‘translate’ scholarly humanities texts into bite-sized summaries for public audiences––in March this year. But this single, originary moment gathers hundreds of others, strewn across the years, within its folds. For instance, there was the moment when I turned the last page of…
Prefigurative Activism as an Inspiration for Expanding Pedagogical Possibilities
Friday, October 30, 2020
André Luis Leite de Figueirêdo Sales There is no better time to affect change in our teaching styles than now; in order to do so, each one of us must spend some time thinking carefully about our own goals and desires as educational workers. Introducing the concept of prefiguration and its relevance to contemporary…
The Public Humanities: An Annotated Bibliography
Wednesday, September 23, 2020
Queenie Sukhadia As the Distributaries Writer-in-Residence and someone who cares deeply about creating pathways for exchange and collaboration between those within the university and those outside of it, I have been tirelessly scouting out predecessors—those who have struggled with the questions before me and have put writing out in the world that may serve…
Communities and Emotions in the Digital Classroom
Monday, September 21, 2020
Nga Than This blog post uses the ideas “community of practice” and “emotional energies” to explore the challenges that students in Data Mining, a graduate methods course at Hunter College, faced when the class suddenly switched to online instruction mid-semester because of the COVID-19 Pandemic. First, using the idea community of practice, I argue…
#SaySomething – The Importance of Black Women Teachers for Black Girls
Monday, August 24, 2020
As a follow-up to the public discussion #SaySomething, The Problem with Kindness: What Should Educational Leaders Know, Dr. Terri N. Watson speaks with her former student Dr. Gina Charles, reflecting on their relationship and the importance of Black women teachers for Black girls. — Dr. Gina Charles: I am a product of New…
Practicing Distance (Part 4): Public
Wednesday, August 19, 2020
Short description: Practicing Distance is a multi-part guide for preparing for our futures together post-quarantine. In each part, Jeff Kasper offers a series of short practices, beginning with an introduction on four proxemic distances—intimate, personal, social, public—then facilitating guided creative exercises to engage with solo or with a partner in imagined physical proximity during…
Practicing Distance (Part 3): Social
Monday, August 17, 2020
Short description: Practicing Distance is a multi-part guide for preparing for our futures together post-quarantine. In each part, Jeff Kasper offers a series of short practices, beginning with an introduction on four proxemic distances—intimate, personal, social, public—then facilitating guided creative exercises to engage with solo or with a partner in imagined physical proximity during…
Practicing Distance (Part 2): Personal
Thursday, August 13, 2020
Short description: Practicing Distance is a multi-part guide for preparing for our futures together post-quarantine. In each part, Jeff Kasper offers a series of short practices, beginning with an introduction on four proxemic distances—intimate, personal, social, public—then facilitating guided creative exercises to engage with solo or with a partner in imagined physical proximity during…
Why the Humanities Need to Go Public, and the Ways in Which They Already Are
Monday, August 3, 2020
Queenie Sukhadia As George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Tony McDade’s murders, among many others, at the hands of the police, ignited a raging blaze across the United States, I saw people choosing to engage with racial oppression in diverse ways. On one hand, thousands took to the streets to chant “Black Lives Matter,” the…