In this Dr. Phil Episode, an adult daughter says she was kicked out by her mom at 15, and the show sits down mother and daughter to talk about what happened. From the start, mother and daughter disagree on key details, and at one point the mother describes her daughter’s testimony as “false statements.” But…
Autobiography within the frameworks of Berlant’s intimate publics becomes a telephone game. “Normative” expectations become warped as informational integrity becomes attenuated. One person says something, then another person has to say something “more real” (i.e. more extreme) as a way to maintain authority within a shifting political framework. This doesn’t always happen. People like Ghandi,…
I have trouble “trusting” books by Susan Forward and some others because the examples seem rather inflammatory, possibly even exaggerated. But the experiences described are very, very relatable – clearly effective rhetorically due to that sense of interpersonal resonance, but does this also indicate epistemic validity? Is the ethos “real” as in authentic? Or manufactured…
When giving advice to train infants to sleep on their own through “cry it out,” the corollary to “it will help them sleep better in the long run” is “they won’t remember it anyway.” Questions: what do we actually know about the sleep quality? Is all memory conscious? (Answer: no.) Can trauma still exist even…
Time is a resource. “Dwell time” is used to measure how long visitors spend reading a website. A similar concept might apply to issues of social justice – but in the classroom, instructors can curate the readings, and then grade student’s based on their performance of active “engagement.” This gets at the crux of Amato…
​ N. Katherine Hayles is concerned that the increasing disconnect between digital media scholars and traditional (i.e. print-based) scholars will lead to significant losses in knowledge: Print-based scholars would become increasingly marginalized, unable to communicate not only with Digital Humanities colleagues but also with researchers in the social sciences and sciences, who routinely use digital…
In The Unthinkable, Amanda Ripley describes how people who are in the middle of a disaster tend to “collect” things, such as carrying a stapler down dozens of flights of stairs in the World Trade Center on September 11th (citation). She also talks about how flight attendants are can more effectively calm people (or at least control…
Ferron, Michela and Paolo Massa – “Studying collective memories in Wikipedia.” They found that Wikipedia articles related to traumatic events (such as September 11th, Chernobyl, and the London Train Bombings) received more editing during anniversary periods than during the rest of the year. Although I do find this interesting and perhaps useful, I feel as…
From Hayles: Refractory elements that must be subordinated in verbal presentation for an argument to make sense and be compelling can now be given weight in their own right. (4) This provides an interesting contrast to Sarah Allen’s work in the argumentative bias.
If emotional abuse is prevalent in relationships, is it also common in the classroom? Many people are unaware of verbal abuse as abuse – given the hierarchies of power in the classroom, one could easily see a perpetrator trying to establish or maintain vantage. Some hypothetical examples: Creative writing teacher feels that most students “can’t…
