#pedagogy tag

[pinkcupboardwitch]

genuine question, where would you recommend someone start with improving media literacy and critical thinking skills? :o

I love this question! Thank you - it really pushed me to figure out how to distill my own process, so it was very helpful for me too.

“Media literacy” is such a big topic that it can very easily get overwhelming, so I would recommend finding a specific type of media you want to practice these skills in first. This is handy because 1) it breaks the learning process up into a much more manageable goal 2) a lot of the mindsets you acquire here will be helpful once you start branching out into different media types, even if the specifics of that genre might be different.

For example, I’m a historian; I’m trained to read both historical documents and texts produced by other professional historians with an eye for particular characteristics. My personal specialty is the study of historical gender and medicine, which means that even when I’m reading texts from periods outside my own, or even modern media, I can pick up synergies of gender and/or medicine more intuitively than others. A really fun example of this is when I watched Blue Eye Samurai with a friend who is also a historian of the same period as I am, but with a focus on religion. A very obvious flag to me that Mizu is queer in some way is that they only realized they were attracted to [censored for spoilers] when they witnessed two men kissing. When I brought that up to my friend, he said he had completely missed that thread. He is, however, continually able to bring in sociological arguments that I miss, because he’s trained to see those patterns and I’m not.

A less intimidating way to approach these skills then, which are often very vaguely defined and have a reflexive anxiety about them because they feature so often in grading rubrics without being clearly defined, is pattern matching. Are you able to identify the patterns the authors are drawing on? And are you able to draw new connections between these texts that are unique to you?

Examples of specific specialties you might be interested as a way to get started could include political journalism, scientific reports, historical texts, or romance novels, to give you an example of the balance between specificity and generalization I usually find helpful. Once you have your set, start reading as many examples of that as you can. It’s more helpful to consume this material consistently, rather than amass a huge source base in a very short period of time. The goal here is to start picking up on patterns between the various examples you’re reading. Patterns of shared values, of similar ways of constructing an argument or a message, of different conversations going in between the authors of this shared space.

“Active reading” tends to get a bad rap because I think a lot of us have bad memories of being told simply to do it without ever being explained what it actually is or how to tell if we’re doing it. But it is a very useful tool. Instead of simply taking in information (that is, “passive” reading), we engage in a conversation with the information as we read. I find that the following is a handy checklist for me when I read material that’s new to me:

- What is the author’s message? How can I tell?

- Why are they presenting this message? Do their stated goals match their implicit goals, or is there a mismatch? How can I tell?

- Who is the message for? How can I tell?

- Do I agree with this message completely? With some parts of this message but not others? Not at all? Why? And how can I tell?

- If I don’t agree in part or entirely, what is my stance on the issue? (“I need more information to know my stance” is a perfectly good one to have)

(Note: this is biased towards my training as a historian. Someone trained in a different field, or even in a different method of doing history than I am, would likely have a different answer. But I find that this set is flexible enough to be used in many different contexts, not just academic ones.)

That “how can I tell” is, for me, the crux of the matter. Being able to answer that question pushes us to really pick apart the different strands of a text and helps us see the overall meaning of that text as something that is constructed, not inherent.

At first, you might need to consciously have this list next to you as a reminder whenever you’re reading your text of choice. You might even need to read a particular text multiple times, each time focusing on a single question from the list instead of juggling all five parts at the same time because it’s so hard to find those answers. That is totally fine! More than fine, it’s normal.

Eventually, as you get more and more comfortable with practicing this kind of thinking and reading, you’ll be able to do it in a way that’s less conscious and more like muscle memory. This also means that over time, it will get less tiring. Which is to say - at the start of this practice, it will be tiring, mentally and physically so. That doesn’t mean you’re lazy or stupid. It just means this is a part of your brain that’s starting a new exercise routine and is slowly building up endurance. “Learning things” is a skill in itself, and something that we can also practice and get better at. I know some very smart people who are terrible at learning new things and being beginners, because they’re so used to excelling at a very narrow sphere of activities.

This is such a long response already, but I hope it is helpful and makes sense! Just two more points for now, and please also feel free to jump back into my inbox or DMs if you have more questions about this.

Firstly, a very useful strategy I have found for getting more literate in genres and ways of thinking I am not familiar with is to ask an expert in that field to “check your work”. For me, this is scientific articles and @dr-dendritic-trees. Again, I’m a historian, I wasn’t trained to read science reports in any field, but I still want to parse the interesting science that comes my way. In the early stages of getting familiar with science writing, “checking my work” usually looked like me sending an article her way, asking her to translate it into layman’s terms, and then, armed with that prior explanation, reading the article myself to see if I could understand how she’d gotten there. As I got more familiar with the particular kinds of thinking that scientists are trained to do, I started reading the articles first, reaching a tentative conclusion, and then asking her if she agreed (example: “Their conclusion feels fishy to me but I can’t fully say why. Would you say that’s right?”). The goal here is not simply to acquire new scientific information. The goal is to practice thinking like a scientist.

(Incidentally, this approach is also why I encourage my students to use SparkNotes or Wikipedia if they’re really struggling with a particular text so they can get a summary of what’s happening. Once you know what’s happening, you can focus on the much more interesting and critical aspect: how the argument is constructed and how you can tell).

Secondly, Toulmin’s Method is another handy checklist for breaking down arguments that you can use as an alternative to or in conjunction with the checklist I provided above. I’ve taught it in my own classes and a particularly handy exercise I like to do with them is to practice going, “I agree with your X because ABC, and I disagree with your Y because DEF.” [example: “I agree with your claim because my own experience backs that up, but I disagree with your warrant because you’re falsely connecting these two elements.”]

This is so long! Thank you for asking the question and for reading all this! It’s probably pretty obvious that I care deeply about this topic*. This is a hard skill to pick up, especially if you haven’t consciously worked these mental muscles out in a while, but it’s also a profoundly valuable one, and one that greatly enriches our lives as people in a shared and communal world. I wish you the best of luck on your journey of practice!!

*for extra credit: how can you tell? ;)

EDIT: I said I only had two points left, posted this, and then immediately thought of two other exercises that are very helpful for practicing these skills! One, learn to write a précis, which is a very formal, four-sentence summary that is extremely helpful for organizing your thoughts. Two, learn to identify logical fallacies. A really central part of critical thinking is being able to recognize when others are not thinking critically and explain why.

[chicago-geniza]

Today instead of doing anything productive I am thinking about a preliminary lesson plan where this essay would function as a "critical frame" for us to read Prus's "The Waistcoat/Kamizelka" and Peretz's "Bontshe Shvayg" and discuss:

November + January Uprisings

Positivism as an intellectual-historical response to the violent repression of the Uprisings, the Romantic literature & philosophy associated with them (including idealism!), & harsh state reaction in the Russian partition especially

Jewish vs. Catholic theology on worldly suffering (important)

Nietzsche

Polish & Yiddish print culture

Rhetorical vs. nonrhetorical speech, how each can be misconstrued as the other, willfully or otherwise (DISCOURSE ANALYSIS, BABY) - connect to Current Events as per

[iphigeniacomplex]

it’s very easy to tell the good satires and pastiches from the bad ones because the bad ones are too afraid to live within the form. like if you are doing work with fairy tales and you are refusing to look closer at the underlying logic and unspoken rules of what can seem at first to be a senseless form, you are not going to create meaningful work. to borrow a turn of phrase originally used by maria tatar, if you refuse to enter “the house of fairy tale” as anything more than a gawking tourist, you will miss the particular order to the way the table is set, the rooms that are locked vs the rooms that are simply difficult to enter, the set of the floorboards and the position of the furniture. whatever you build will then be a gilded imitation of how you believe the house of fairy tale ought to look, the table set according to your educated specifications and every door open. there can be no interrogation of themes from a writer who views the form as beneath them!

[r0tting-rat]

Studying pedagogy basically means spending hours on books telling u how sick and stupid the (modern) educational system is, except it's some guy from the 1760~ telling u that, and he's talking about how students will never learn anything if forced into terrible conditions and that such system will simply turn the "lil prodigies" into useless and mindless machines.

Anyway I have a test tomorrow. Guess the subject.

[rontra]

i mean that could take a while but. okay

[gradling]

A friend of mine was talking the other day about how, during his lectures, he sets a timer on his phone for 15 minutes and then, when the timer goes off, stops for 1 minute to let students ask questions, ask him to go back to earlier points, or to just sit in silence for a minute (and let them process what they just heard) if they didn’t have questions, and then they move on for another 15 minutes and so on. I normally don’t lecture exactly because I’m either leading discussion or having students workshop writing, but I was introducing some concepts today and decided to try his method. And it worked SO WELL. I got more questions from the class than I normally do, and they were thoughtful and interesting questions! We did sit in silence for the second of the 1 minute breaks I had for them, but it wasn’t awkward because the silence had an expected, set duration. Definitely using this again next time I have to lecture.

[metamatar]

is there a way to search for tags used on a blog before?

[luthienne]

Do you have a day job or do you support yourself entirely with music?

it’s very rare, the person who can support themselves entirely with music — at least in the usa the way contracts and freelancing work in classical music. i have several day jobs — one main one and then a couple of side sources of income (photography, editing). i’ve considered pivoting to private voice lessons but i really do enjoy my current day jobs and they give me the flexibility to take singing jobs with evening rehearsals and auditions

[essektheylyss]

I was reminded today that asynchronous courses means being able to listen to lectures at higher speeds and thank fuck

[deanscasanova]

they are literally making me read books and critical theory for this masters degree about books. sick and twisted

[liesonthefloordramatically]

incredible news, everyone

[screambirdscreaming]

This is very well articulated and true to many people's experiences, BUT with the diagnostic landscape as it stands, I think its really dangerous to assume that children who *do* get diagnosed are treated any more kindly.

Many kids who are diagnosed are not actually given words to explain their experiences. Their needs are simply dismissed as "symptoms" they have to "work on" and "get past".

Some kids are actually diagnosed with "Oppositional Defiant Disorder" - whereupon ANY need they express - even those which would be treated as reasonable from undiagnosed or neurotypical children! - is pathologized as "defiance". And yes, this diagnosis is highly racialized.

Honestly, knowing that ODD exists as a diagnosis really forces a person to challenge their perspective on what diagnosis is and means. Yes, diagnosis *can* be a tool of understanding, a way of banding together around shared struggles and generating shared language, tools, and resources. But it can also be a tool of opression and social control. And it *is*, currently for many people, a tool which is used to opress them. Even if it is also currently, in other people's experience, a tool of solidarity and support.

I think people who have experienced adult diagnosis as a relief, a breakthrough, a finding of community and tools of understanding - are sometimes prone to projecting this experience onto an imagined experience of childhood diagnosis, without looking into what childhood diagnosis actually entails.

It shouldn't be surprising, given the way children are dismissed, corralled, managed, and expected to conform to adult expectations at all times - that childhood diagnosis lacks the experience of autonomy, self-realization, and support found by those seeking diagnosis on their own terms as adults.

And it's understandable for people to say, "I wish I'd had this experience [of finding a diagnosis as an adult] as a child." But you can't just say, "I wish I'd been diagnosed as a child", and expect it to mean that - without MAKING childhood diagnosis mean something completely different than it currently does.

And I do absolutely think that it's crucial to change childhood diagnosis to mean eduction *of parents and caregivers* about the diagnosis, to mean kids are given tools and resources to express their needs and to process their experiences, to mean kids are given access to the same sort of supportive community that adults find through diagnosis.

But I actually don't think that's the first step. I think the first step is to create a cultural shift where we LISTEN TO CHILDREN WHEN THEY EXPRESS THEIR NEEDS, IN THEIR OWN WAYS, ON THEIR OWN TERMS. In general. For all children.

Where adults take seriously kids who are upset over problems adults find absurd. Where adults are willing to make accommodations that kids request even if they don't understand why it matters. Where kids aren't ridiculed or shut down for asking for things that don't make sense. Where kids who say they're in pain are treated as if they're in pain, not as if they're trying to get out of something. Where kids who say they need to sit something out are allowed to sit something out. Where adults make an effort to understand what kids are trying to communicate, even if they cant "use their words".

It turns out that having been dismissed by adults over something that really mattered to you as a kid is a near universal experience. And I'm not saying it's not *worse* for neurodivergent kids. I'm just saying that it's treated as bizarrely normalized in childcare that kids won't come to adults with really serious issues, like abuse. That they'll try to hide it. Why? Because they've learned that adults don't really understand them, and won't try to understand them. That adults don't really listen.

And it's hard, actually - as an adult working with kids, they'll come to you with a concern that seems absolutely ridiculous. Like, their classmate was bragging about how he's going to borrow his uncle's helicopter and fly to the north pole to meet santa. And THEY know santa isn't real and that the north pole is very dangerous - but they think it's absolutely credible that the kid could steal the helicopter, and they're terrified he's gonna get hurt. And you can't laugh! Not even a tiny little bit! You have to treat absolutely seriously their concern, and work it through with them. Because to them it's not ridiculous. They don't have the perspective you do, about what's real and possible and plausible and what isn't. All they'll see is that you've dismissed their real fear - and after that, why would they come to you with anything else they're scared of?

So you have to meet them where they are. You have to treat their experiences and perspectives as genuine, even when they don't make sense to you. You have to work towards understanding their reality, and what they're trying to convey to you, and what they want you to do for them in response. Even if they don't know what they want you to do! They're coming to you as an adult who will fix a problem for them, but if you fix the problem your way and it turns out that's not actually what they wanted, they *still* learn that adults don't understand them and can't help them. You have to learn to unpack all your concepts of what goes on in kids heads, and really meet them where they are. As complex individuals whose ways of thinking and being are probably totally different from your own, regardless of whether they - or you - are neurodivergent.

And this unpacking goes beyond kids. Not only do we need to take kids seriously, we need to take each other seriously. We need to build a world where people are able to understand and respect that other people are different from them without having to know Why and How. Where you don't NEED a diagnosis to be allowed to exist in a way that is different from other people.

anyway I don't mean to detract from the conversation about how alienating and destructive it is to your ability to relate to yourself, to grow up neurodivergent and having your own experiences constantly denied to you. I just think that while we're at it, we may as well address the problem at the root.

[alex-the-bringer-of-chaos]

I'm in the last year of college, and I've been feeling very anxious about it. Especially the final paper.

I'll post what the theme is when it gets published, but I've been on the edge of my seat for half a year now. It's a project that will not end with the final paper (if everything works out), cause there aren't enough papers and it's definetely something of social importance, material and line of work that needs further research (aka I'm aiming for a masters and then doctors degree with this bad boy).

I was basically vibrating the whole class and our teacher acknowledging how much he is aware of my theme and my excitement/anxiety. He's really great, I love him (not in a weird way, my ass is aroace)! Also, I need to find out who's gonna orient me cause I'll be annoying af! Poor souls.

[wesstars]

crush

cairo sweet x fem!reader (no pronouns used)

summary: when cairo goes home, what comes to mind are thoughts of you. wc: 2.3k tags: explicit, minors DNI!! all characters 18+. university au. masturbation, smoking, non-linear narrative. reader is cairo’s teaching assistant, reader described as masc presenting. a/n: let me know what y’all think :) for the vibes

masterlist

“Is Professor Miller not coming?” Winnie had just dropped into her unassigned assigned seat next to Cairo, two minutes before Greco-Roman Literary Theory started. The flipping of pages punctuated the chatter of other students waiting, a comfortable sound.

“He said he’d be gone today,” Cairo replied absently. “There’s a ‘guest lecturer,’ our teaching assistant.”

“Oh, right. Who’s that?”

Cairo shrugged. “Who knows.” 

As if on cue, the door swung open. Cairo didn’t even look up—Miller mentioned that he kept a handful of research assistants that would be there to help with the advanced reading. But honestly, Cairo wasn’t sure what they could tell her that she didn’t already know. A melodic hum fell through the air for just a moment, a chorus. 

“Good morning.” At your lilting voice, rough with the edge of 10am, Cairo started. She watched you set your messenger bag on the desk. Your white shirt pulled over your shoulders; there was a glint at your collar, a necklace peeking through. A thin watch adorned your wrist. Winnie, along with some of the class, echoed your greeting, and Cairo blinked.

Late spring afternoon draped across the furniture in Cairo’s room, the quickly waning light giving easy way to a blue hour. Dropping her bag at the door, she tore off her shirt and skirt with the confidence of one standing before a crowd. Running a hand up from her sternum to her neck, she stretched languidly, sinking down onto her bed. After so many uneventful days—when she applied to Yale, she didn’t think that there would be any uneventful days—she finally had a story to turn over in her mind. 

You. You were a mystery. Even as you had started the class with an introduction, telling Cairo you’d graduated from a middle-of-nowhere college in California and sought a writing career in Vermont before delving into research, she longed to lay out the details and pull them out from under the rug. Where did you learn to teach? Did you like to drive, or be driven? Mountains, or the sea? Where did you grow up? Was there coffee or tea in your cupboard? Cairo’s stomach burned to know. Her dark eyes burned the ceiling with smoke signals, searching for you even though you were god knows where in that seaside state.

Arching her back, Cairo let her hand travel down, palm flat against her stomach, to trace the seam of her upper thigh. As the class had progressed, your keenly observant nature did not elude Cairo. Maybe listening was something that your pedagogy instilled in you, but the way you held each student’s question in the cant of your head, an answer in your crinkling eyes, listening seemed to be in your nature. It was meticulous, the way you picked apart the class text, weaving in references and tying it all in. In that two hour lecture, Cairo learned that you watched the same way you listened. 

Balmy as it was, the humidity made her dark waves cling to her skin, and she shivered as she brushed them back, thinking of a different pair of slim hands. Your scrutiny of each student had an intention that she couldn’t quite place; a determination that thrilled her. Cairo imagined that you’d observe her the same way, that she would be the one you were most fond of. It was only natural that her own attention would draw yours onto her. Holding the weight of your envisioned gaze made Cairo’s core twist, a pleased little flush that she prayed you could see. Your affected impartiality didn’t bother Cairo—in fact, it pulled her into your shadow. In her bed, she rolled onto her stomach then her knees, shaking her hair out. 

Her hands were steady as she reached for her bedside table, thumb rolling on the wheel of her zippo as she held the cigarette to her lips. Cairo took a drag, blowing out neat smoke rings as she settled back on her heels. The skin of her own fingers was cool against her lips, and when she took the smoke away, she studied the pattern of her lipstick on the white paper as she had so many times before.

She’d watched, unabashedly and unafraid of being caught, as you drummed your fingers on the chalk tray. Would your fingertip be soft or work hardened if it pressed down her tongue? Would your skin carry the stain of her red lip as deeply, as obediently, as the malleable wrapping paper?

“Alright, class,” you cleared your throat, turning slowly around the room to make eye contact with each student. “As you know, Jonathan’s away on a conference today. I’ll start with a bit of roll, just so I can learn your names. Not many of you come to my office hours, I know.” You smiled easily. It was so guileless, Cairo mused, nearly childlike. You had the class go around the rooms with names and majors, a circuit that Cairo gave no attention to other than your lilting rhythm of hums, the tapping of your foot on the floor, the way you flicked the corner of the role sheet with your thumb. Your gaze was soon on hers, waiting expectantly. She looked right back with a blink.

“Cairo Sweet. English major.”

“Cairo.” Her name rolled off your innocent little grin, making her cock her head. “Wonderful.” Fascinating. Would you whisper midnight black desires in her ear, so deep and dark they might be murmured into the ink of your own empty room?

You continued, circling back to the front and easily transitioning to the lesson plan. You had an awfully effortless way of grasping the class’ attention, holding gently and never forcing. It wasn’t like Professor Miller, who always seemed to hasten through the lecture so he could return to his research. She could tell you liked the woods of the text, to fall down into the depths of each word, feeling its weight in you and letting it rock. Just like Cairo. 

She sighed into the warm air prickling up her skin, the curl of your voice around her name making her nipples harden in her bralette, even in retrospect. Exhaling around her cigarette, Cairo brought her hands up to palm her breasts, feeling the drag of her rubied nubs on her palms. Was it the high of the nicotine, the blur of smoke ridden air that made her float straight up into the lofty space you’d created in her mind? Though the feel of her own fingers scraping the lace against her skin was familiar, she found herself keen to think of your soft or callused hands. She was wet already, and she couldn’t remember the last time she’d gotten wet so fast.

The weight she imagined of your touch on her flushed skin was completely, deliciously foreign. Unbidden but intimately welcome, Cairo wished that your caress would find the map of her chest as familiar as a classic, something you had searched a million times over yet always managed to find something new. Shamelessly, Cairo trailed her fingers down her stomach, nails catching on every rib as she arched her back in the spilled moonlight. The mystery in the crossing of your long legs as you’d leaned back on the desk climbed up her belly, curling in the thump, thump, thump, of her heart. The uneven roll of your sleeves clung to the corners of her eyes, eidetic and oh, so, tempting. She had watched you so ardently—did you like to watch? Would you watch? 

The space between her thighs was achingly empty, craving the set of your narrow hips. She was comfortable there, and she remembered the taut stretch of wool as you dropped into your chair and set one ankle over your knee. There was something endearing about the way your trousers had pulled up to reveal slouchy black socks, and darker her mind went as the material pulling creases around your lap made her shudder and—she reached behind to pull one of her fluffy pillows under her, smoke billowing into the air. 

Cairo gave her hips an experimental roll, imagining it was the soft fabric of your slacks against her aching cunt, and grinned around her cigarette. Unlike the pillow, you would be ever so solid under her, grabbing for her thighs like a dog yearns to please. Were you more likely to bruise her skin, yanking her into you without care for blood—or would you guide her gently, make a home in her innocence and hold her more dearly than life ever could? Either way, your desire for Cairo would be so apparent that you couldn’t help yourself.

The dip of your tongue in her navel, the little smirk you’d undoubtedly wear as you went down further—would you go for her throbbing clit first, or would your lips press so warm—she didn’t know. She didn’t have to, content with all those different versions of you unfurling before her. In her bedroom, each time she moved her hips, it became easier to imagine you guiding her actions, the bump of your nose on her folds, damned if not addicting.

Cairo grinned as she fell onto her forearms, hips pushing into the soft pillow without abandon. The slide of her panties soaked with slick against her sensitive clit felt like the delicate press of your splayed hand on her desk as you’d passed, eyes occupied by the text you were holding. It had only been a split second, but it was enough for her to memorize every crease, every vein. Cairo let out a whine, a demanding little sound, as her movements grew erratic. Looking up into the heaven where you must be, she imagined that you’d murmur to her, “I’m here, I’m here, how could I be anywhere else but here?” as you traced the dip in her back. Her arousal took her down every sullied path she’d ever dreamed of, but her mind stuck on one gesture that made her mouth go dry. 

She remembered the way your shirt got just a bit untucked when you stretched during the class break. You’d instinctively tucked it back in, quick as you surveyed the class. Cairo thought that you’d dress yourself back up the same way after you bent her over the desk after class, pushing her skirt up and shoving your fingers into her, painting bruises onto her hip bones with how tight you held her.

The two of you would share a mutual understanding that she wanted this, wanted it bad enough for you to take it whenever you saw fit. Cairo decided that today, this time, you’d be as rough as you pleased, a cup of pens clattering to the ground as you pushed her down, forearm across her shoulder blades. Your necklace would be cold on her warm skin, would it be cold on her tongue? You’d put two, three fingers inside, humming in that absentminded way you did. She thought you’d nuzzle into her ear, all lips and sharp teeth, asking if she’d sprayed your favorite hair mist of hers because she hoped you’d notice—she did—and take her, break her, whatever you wanted. 

You’d send her plummeting down towards a deeper hell (or was it higher, up to your majestic heaven?), already knowing everything that her body needed. Cairo imagined herself coming so helplessly around the stretch of your fingers, so high strung from nights of trying to mimic the press of your touch on her clit, unable to reach the same heights you sent her to. As she held back tears, eyes on the ceiling in reverence, feeling herself drip to the floor, you’d sigh as your mind wandered to other things already, carelessly running a hand down her back. 

Cairo gasped, dropping her nearly finished cigarette in favor of gripping the bed sheets. The white fabric wrinkled around her fingers, reminiscent of your shirt creasing as you’d rolled your sleeves up. This was something new you could show her, just how fast she could come and just how wet it made her. It was a marvel, feeling the fabric cling to her cunt, almost as good as how you’d feel. Resting her forehead in the crook of her elbow, she murmured your name over and over again, a little susurrus of a litany, so similar to your preoccupied hum. Panting, Cairo giggled in her bliss, soft and bright as Californian oranges clinging to rich leaves. You were dark enough to be tucked into the wrinkles in the soft pillow, dark enough for Cairo to love, as a journal loves a secret.

Sated, Cairo grabbed her phone and typed your name in. The results spilled out, and she scrolled, looking for all of the details in the background of your social media posts, curiously drunk on the year’s gap in your CV. Cairo noticed the perfect little circle where the cigarette had burned when she dropped it, and she brushed away the remnants. The gesture smeared the ash on the sheets.

—

Walking into your office with barely a knock, Cairo took in the familiar room of an academic, but with your unfamiliar knick knacks around the place. A lighter, a leather wallet, glasses and wired headphones. You didn’t look surprised as you glanced up from your laptop. Instead, you smiled. 

“Cairo, isn’t it?” 

A flush of pleasure shot straight into her—you remembered. She nodded. Your shelves were covered in books and stacks of reviews, the morning’s leftover cup of coffee sitting on one of the ledges. Did you smoke before, or after your coffee? The terrible, terrible want to replace the taste of smoke on your tongue with the taste of her gave Cairo just the confidence she needed. 

“What can I do for you?”

Cairo leaned over your desk, watching the way your eyes dropped to her burgundy lipstick. “Would you be able to help me on the Aristophanes reading?” She pushed her copy of The Clouds towards you. “I can’t seem to grasp it.” Your eyes met hers. “Of course.”

--

a/n cont'd: can you read my mind, i’ve been watching you… there’s just something about you, baby… ♪ / hope you enjoyed @woewriting :)

please do not repost, reproduce, copy, translate, or take from my work in any way. thank you!

masterlist

[fatehbaz]

When you tag things “#abolition”, what are you referring to? Abolishing what?

Prisons, generally. Though not just physical walls of formal prisons, but also captivity, carcerality, and carceral thinking. Including migration prevention; detention; fences and hard national borders; indentured servitude; inability to move due to, and labor coerced through, debt; de facto imprisonment and isolation of the disabled and medically pathologized; privatization and enclosure of land; sacrifice zones at the periphery; the urge to punish; categories of “criminality"; etc.

In favor of other, better lives and futures.

Specifically, I am grateful to have learned from the work of these people:

Ruth Wilson Gilmore on “abolition geography”.

Katherine McKittrick on "imaginative geographies"; emotional engagement with place; legacy of imperialism/slavery in conceptions of physical space and in devaluation of other-than-human lifeforms; escaping enclosure; plantation “afterlives” and how plantation logics continue to thrive in contemporary structures/institutions like debt colonies, workplace environments, prisons, etc.; a range of rebellions through collaborative acts, refusal of the dominant order, and subversion through joy and autonomy.

Macarena Gomez-Barris on landscapes as “sacrifice zones”; people condemned to live in resource extraction colonies deemed as acceptable losses; place-making and ecological consciousness; and how “the enclosure, the plantation, the ship, and the prison” are analogous spaces of captivity.

Liat Ben-Moshe on disability; informal institutionalization and incarceration of disabled people through physical limitation, social ostracization, denial of aid, and institutional disavowal; and "letting go of hegemonic knowledge of crime”.

Achille Mbembe on co-existence and care; "necropolitics" and bare life/death; historical evolution of chattel slavery into contemporary institutions through control over food, space, and definitions of life/land; the “explicit kinship between plantation slavery, colonial predation, and contemporary resource extraction” and modern institutions.

Robin Maynard on "generative refusal"; solidarity; shared experiences among homeless, incarcerated, disabled, Indigenous, Black communities; to "build community with" those who you are told to disregard in order "to re-imagine" worlds; envisioning, imagining, and then manifesting those alternative futures which are "already" here and alive.

Leniqueca Welcome on Caribbean world-making; "the apocalyptic temporality" of environmental disasters and the colonial denial of possible "revolutionary futures"; limits of reformism; "infrastructures of liberation at the end of the world."; "abolition is a practice oriented toward the full realization of decolonization, postnationalism, decarceration, and environmental sustainability."

Stefano Harney and Fred Moten on “the undercommons”; fugitivity; dis-order in academia and institutions; and sharing of knowledge.

AM Kanngieser on "deep listening"; “refusal as pedagogy”; and “attunement and attentiveness” in the face of “incomprehensible” and immense “loss of people and ecologies to capitalist brutalities”.

Lisa Lowe on "the intimacies of four continents" and how British politicians and planters feared that official legal abolition of chattel slavery would endanger Caribbean plantation profits, so they devised ways to import South Asian and East Asian laborers.

Ariella Aisha Azoulay on “rehearsals with others’.

Phil Neel on p0lice departments purposely targeting the poor as a way to raise municipal funds; the "suburbanization of poverty" especially in the Great Lakes region; the rise of lucrative "logistics empires" (warehousing, online order delivery, tech industries) at the edges of major urban agglomerations in "progressive" cities like Seattle dependent on "archipelagos" of poverty; and the relationship between job loss, homelessness, gentrification, and these logistics cities.

Alison Mountz on migrant detention; "carceral archipelagoes"; and the “death of asylum”.

Pedro Neves Marques on “one planet with many worlds inside it”; “parallel futures” of Indigenous, Black, disenfranchised communities/cosmologies; and how imperial/nationalist institutions try to foreclose or prevent other possible futures by purposely obscuring or destroying histories, cosmologies, etc.

Peter Redfield on how metropolitan residents try to hide slavery and torture/punishment on the periphery of Empire; early twentieth-century French penal colony in tropical Guiana/Guyana; the torture of the prison relies on the metropolitan imagination's invocation of exotic hinterlands and racist civilization/savagery mythologies.

Iain Chambers on racism of borders; obscured and/or forgotten lives of migrants; and disrupting modernity.

Elizabeth Povinelli on "geontopower"; imperial control over "life and death"; how imperial/nationalist formalization of private landownership and commodities relies on rigid definitions of dynamic ecosystems.

Kodwo Eshun on African cosmologies and futures; “the colonial present”; and imperialist/nationalist use of “preemptive” and “predictive” power to control the official storytelling/narrative of history and to destroy alternatives.

Tim Edensor on urban "ghosts" and “industrial ruins”; searching for the “gaps” and “silences” in the official narratives of nations/institutions, to pay attention to the histories, voices, lives obscured in formal accounts.

Megan Ybarra on place-making; "site fights"; solidarity and defiance of migrant detention; and geography of abolition/incarceration.

Sophie Sapp Moore on resistance, marronage, and "forms of counterplantation life"; "plantation worlds" which continue to live in contemporary industrial resource extraction and dispossession.

Deborah Cowen on “infrastructures of empire and resistance”; imperial/nationalist control of place/space; spaces of criminality and "making a life at the edge" of the law; “fugitive infrastructures”.

Elizabeth DeLoughrey on indentured labor; the role of plants, food, and botany in enslaved and fugitive communities; the nineteenth-century British Empire's labor in the South Pacific and Caribbean; the twentieth-century United States mistreatment of the South Pacific; and the role of tropical islands as "laboratories" and isolated open-air prisons for Britain and the US.

Dixa Ramirez D’Oleo on “remaining open to the gifts of the nonhuman” ecosystems; hinterlands and peripheries of empires; attentiveness to hidden landscapes/histories; defying surveillance; and building a world of mutually-flourishing companions.

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson on reciprocity; Indigenous pedagogy; abolitionism in Canada; camaraderie; solidarity; and “life-affirming” environmental relationships.

Anand Yang on "forgotten histories of Indian convicts in colonial Southeast Asia" and how the British Empire deported South Asian political prisoners to the region to simultaneously separate activists from their communities while forcing them into labor.

Sylvia Wynter on the “plot”; resisting the plantation; "plantation archipelagos"; and the “revolutionary demand for happiness”.

Avery Gordon on haunting; spectrality; the “death sentence” of being deemed “social waste” and being considered someone “without future”; "refusing" to participate; "escaping hell" and “living apart” by striking, squatting, resisting; cultivating "the many-headed hydra of the revolutionary Black Atlantic"; alternative, utopian, subjugated worldviews; despite attempts to destroy these futures, manifesting these better worlds, imagining them as "already here, alive, present."

Jasbir Puar on disability; debilitation; how the control of fences, borders, movement, and time management constitute conditions of de facto imprisonment; institutional control of illness/health as a weapon to "debilitate" people; how debt and chronic illness doom us to a “slow death”.

Kanwal Hameed and Katie Natanel on "liberation pedagogy"; sharing of knowledge and subversion of colonial legacy in universities; "anticolonial feminisms"; and “spaces of solidarity, revolt, retreat, and release”.

[gradling]

As one of the university instructors who asks students to just shout things out instead of raising hands…I’ve had to learn to accept that if I’m teaching a class where I can’t acclimate students to a system when they just talk during class without being called on (no time, room set-up doesn’t accommodate it, too many students enrolled, etc.), I just have to let students raise their hands and get called on. Part of it is also that, while I like discussion sections, a lot of my students have told me that they’re used to being lectured at (ie the banking model of instruction). The only time I’ve really been successful with getting students to not raise their hands before talking was in ~12 person discussion sections with everyone sitting in a circle (and it worked super well then!!!), but I think most of the time students don’t realize that I’m trying to run discussions and not just lectures. I’d love to hear ideas about how to create a classroom where students are comfortable talking without being called on when classroom sizes/set-ups don’t accommodate the circle set-up.