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...
“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...
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...
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”...
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...
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,...
Work is killing Latinos. Loss of life expectancy due to COVID, especially for marginalized groups, has become a common trope in the mainstream media. The reality for Latinos counters these assumptions. Their life expectancy began declining long before COVID. That...
The day: Monday, February 27, 2023. The place: A large lecture class in the new Engineering and Computer Science West building at the University of Texas-Dallas. It’s a wide space, accommodating 300 students. Great windows and elegant wood window treatments allow for...
Among revolutionary thinkers, Thomas Paine (1737-1809) is one of the most famous. In the current era of robotic automation and artificial intelligence, Paine’s argument for ever-greater sharing of society’s riches is worth thinking about. How can Paine’s writings from...
It wasn’t long after Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, that I knew I would need to teach a course on it. Six months later, with the war in full force, I launched a semester-long course titled “The Global Politics of the War in Ukraine.” I am an...
