Archive for June, 2008
sexual politics of meat
In some respects we all acknowledge the sexual politics of meat. When we think that men, especially male athletes, need meat, or when wives report that they could give up meat but they fix it for their husbands, the overt association between meat eating and virile maleness is enacted. It is the covert associations that [...]
compositionists as public intellectuals
A while ago I commented at The Blogora that it seems that the positive press about composition and student writing always comes in the form of newspaper articles written by reporters about the classroom, but negative press always seems to come from teachers themselves in the forms of essays. These seem to carry a lot [...]
a genealogy of american anti-intellectualism
I’m enjoying sitting in on Sara’s Writing 323 class this summer, and I’m looking forward to covering it next week. The students today had an interesting discussion about anti-intellectualism. Sara asked why US Americans have such a distaste for public intellectuals (example: one student noted that some believe Gore lost in 2000 because he was [...]
the secular society vs. the post-secular society
This 2006 video of Barack Obama’s speech (video below) is interested to read in juxtaposition to Jürgen Habermas’s recent essay on sightandsound, Notes on a Post-Secular Society. If you are interested in a response to this video from Focus on the Family, their show Turn Signal has a 3-part interview with Tom Minnery (part 1, [...]
from 13 to 8
I started out this summer with only 13 students in my writing in business course. In the first week, the enrollment has dropped to 8. This is the smallest class I’ve ever taught — well, tied with an 8th grade exploratory creative writing course I taught my second year teaching middle school. I’m excited for [...]
the problem with engineering ethics
My friend Luke is working on his M.A. thesis in applied ethics. It’s on ethics in engineering, and while doing some web research, he came across Texas State University professor Karl Stephen‘s blog, where he argues that same-sex marriage is bad for engineering. Barf: I’m going to go out on a limb here. But I’m [...]
new books
Because I still have some faculty development money left over for the spring term, I get to order books! Lots of them (the category distinction below is a bit arbitrary): Rhetoric and Composition Studies: Textual Orientations: Lesbian and Gay Students and the Making of Discourse Communities by Harriet Malinowitz Literacy, Sexuality, Pedagogy: Theory and Practice [...]
blogging the iowa floods
cross-posted My friend Eric Stoller was covered in the Corvallis Gazette Times for his blogging on the floods in Iowa: Quickly, Stoller’s blog switched from site mainly focused on education and diversity issues to a repository on the latest news about Iowa flooding. Culling from local newspapers, wire stories, television news and even YouTube videos, [...]
compulsory meat eating
Of course you can always count on secular colleges to promote absurdity. One recent workshop at the University of California Santa Cruz was entitled: Compulsory Meat-Eating and the Lesbian Vegetarian Connection. The thrust of the workshop was how eating meat is as horrible as being heterosexual!! (The Christian Observer 1998) This last spring, a few [...]
ways of reading
I’m sitting in on Sara‘s Writing 323: Writing With Style course this summer because she’s heading to the WPA conference in a few weeks, and I’ll be covering the course for her for that week. Sara’s using Bartholomae and Petrosky’s Ways of Reading, a common writing textbook I’ve been wanting to look at more in-depth [...]
