It is May. In the U.S., Italy, Japan, Mexico, and many other countries, it is a month that celebrates mothers. Deconstructed, it heralds women bearing and caring for children to ensure the health and welfare of the family. For many, celebrating Mother’s Day means...
Commentary
The Drifting Smoke of the Burned-Over District
South Butler, New York, is a forgotten byway in American history. Its moment of notoriety came and went. Now it is just a crossroad hamlet struggling to matter like so many other such places in rural America. But once it did matter. In the decades before the Civil...
Capturing the Latino Vote
The 2024 election season has begun. Candidates identify political and policy priorities. Voters constantly wonder where on the political spectrum the country will land. At the same time, a political messaging battle about voter turnout and possible voter suppression...
How Bill Morrison’s “Incident” Accesses Police Body Cams to Give Voice to a Crime
Bill Morrison is known for his often-magical transformations of archival film in various states of decay into new works that speak to both past and present. Until the recent success of “Dawson City: Frozen Time” (2016), “Decasia” (2002), which was admitted to the...
Further Stirring the Ashes of the Burned-Over District
Because a number of my maternal ancestors settled in South Butler, New York, and surrounding communities in the first decades of the 19th century, I have mused on any possible connections between my family and the social ferment bubbling around them. In the course of...
The Epistemology of Ignorance in DeSantis World
“What is happening in Florida?” asked a recent headline in The Chronicle of Higher Education. “Since the New Year, Gov. Ron DeSantis and his Republican allies have ramped up efforts to eradicate ‘woke’ ideology from public colleges,” its reporters responded. This...
LSU vs. Iowa: Black Female Bodies on the Basketball Court
I haven’t thought about playing on the Brown High School girls basketball team in decades. But as I was thinking about the controversies surrounding the National Collegiate Athletics Association (NCAA) Women’s Basketball Championship — racism, hood-talk, great...
The End of the Latin American Migrant Trope
Myriad films across the history of Latin American cinema explore the trope of the migrant. These films document the trek from Latin America to the U.S. and migrants’ lives afterwards. Classic films such as “Espaldas mojadas” (Alejandro Galindo, 1995) and “El Norte”...
The Migrating Documentary Cinema of Yi Cui
Augmentation is not defined exclusively by emerging digital media forms, software, and interfaces. Instead, augmentation explores how to generate new processes about how to think through, with, and within place that spans the digital, the analog, and the embodied. Not...
Women’s History Month: Latina Invisibility
March is Women’s History Month. It celebrates women's contributions, struggles, blocked opportunities, and ultimate triumphs. It is also a time for issuing empty promises that things will improve, a refrain often heard but only partially fulfilled. For Latinas,...