Jay Ruby cautions anthropologists against deploying film and video equipment on terms that are completely determined by an institutionalized media industry with its own assumptions about how stories are supposed to be told and circulated. He argues that anthropologists might need to organize their narratives (and distribute their films) in ways that run counter to industry (and even audience) expectations. There is a danger in approaching film making the way others do, he says, a danger that includes potentially betraying anthropology's intellectual mission.

Philosopher Lewis Gordon has recently penned a powerful piece that asks academics to reconsider current tendencies to perform intellectual authority in ways that traffic in neoliberal logics of financial accumulation and brand-name fetishization, logics that may similarly betray our basic intellectual mission. There is a danger, he ...

The RNC's Michael Steele has recently made national headlines for "playing the race card" by agreeing with the claim that African-Americans like himself, in positions of power, have "a slimmer margin of error" in America, including President Obama in that calculation, which was met by a swift dismissal from the White House press secretary. 

Critics always find it ironic (even pathetic) when proponents of purported color blindness frame their own problems in terms of "racial victimization." The "Left" is assumed to traffic in such sophistries. The "Right," however, is supposed to know better. Clarence Thomas calling his confirmation hearing a "high-tech lynching" stands as the quintessential example of such racial irony. Even the people who claim obliviousness to racial reasoning seem susceptible to its rhetorical seductiveness.

But who really doesn't see race? When is it ever...

Did Congress ever pass health care? Seriously. Lately, I've been trying to cultivate my own ignorance of all things "political." The stories are just getting too bizarre: ongoing sagas in the wake of major earthquakes in Haiti and Chile; racial epithets that serve as soundtracks for Tea Parties; sex scandals that allegedly implicate, quite directly, a sitting pope; Sarah Palin telling protesters to "re-load" in the context of actual violence linked to congressional votes and Tweets calling for Obama's assassination. With that as the backdrop, I've decided to issue my own self-moratorium on watching CNN, FOX and the evening news programs. 

Instead, I'm using my television for more otherworldly fare. And TV has never been better on that front. Although it is the quintessential site for sensationalized news-mongering, it is also the best place to spy complicated fictional tales about human...

Frank Rich wrote a New York Times op-ed this weekend that began by criticizing former White House Press Secretary Dana Perino and former NYC Mayor Rudolph Giuliani for their ideological readings of 9/11. Giuliani was appearing on ABC's Good Morning America in January; Perino, on FOX's Hannity last November. 

"We had no domestic attacks under Bush," Giuliani declared (though he probably meant after 9/11).

"We did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush's term," Perino stated. "I hope they [the Obama administration and the liberal wing of the press] are not looking at this politically. I do think we owe it to the American people to call it [the Ft. Hood shooting] what it is [a terrorist attack]."

The Rich piece is really about the extent to which Karl Rove (in his recent memoir) and Keep America Safe (a new foreign-policy advocacy group founded by Liz Cheney and...

I'm taking part in a faculty discussion today on "teaching controversial issues." In preparation for that meeting, I started to jot down some thoughts on the matter. (I'll be responsible for saying a few words.)

There is a hyperpoliticization of higher education today, a hyperpoliticization that I want to call "reactionary Foucauldianism." If Foucault's nothing-is-innocent poststructuralism gets marshaled to make arguments about knowledge production as a "power play," the same "metaphysics of power" informs reactionary critiques of academic culture. While Foucault gets deployed to challenge "the state" and what he labels "governmentality," reactionary Foucauldianism is a critique of those critics (on similar "knowledge/power" grounds).

To discuss, say, America's history of imperialism is to practice "communist indoctrination." (Of course, some of this is about the logic and language of...

It feels callous, even pathetic, to go on with business-as-usual while Haiti continues to reel from such a singular catastrophe. Not that it is really a viable alternative to stand still, catatonic and mouth ajar, wallowing in all the graphic (sometimes gratuitous) images offered up all day, everyday, by news outlets.

Those same media outlets have toned down their coverage of Haiti considerably these past two weeks, which seems welcomingly merciful, I have to selfishly admit, even as it also shocks me how quickly the 24-hour news cycle can chew up and spit out any story, including one as massive as the Haitian disaster. A nor'easter seems hardly to merit displacing it at the top of anybody's news hour. 

Even after we've sent our checks (contra Rush Limbaugh's suggestions) and commiserated with friends about the tragedy (the injustice of the event itself, the high-profile...

Four theories of the GRE's evaluative significance:

1. The Primacy of Quantitative Scores: This position holds that high quant scores are a good indication of how crisply someone thinks, regardless of whether or not the discipline they are applying to demands any robust use of mathematics at all. Of course, the rebuttal maintains that unless someone is going to be working with numbers, the quantitative score can be completely discounted if the other two scores are high enough. 

2. All or Nothing: Some reviewers of grad applications maintain that unless the GRE scores are quite high in all three domains, the student should be considered a bit of a risk. I've even been privy to a theory that links high-math/low-verbal scores to anti-social behavior. The high-verbal/low-math applicant sometimes gets dismissed by others as someone who talks a good game but doesn't have anything substantive...

What's the best way to spend a snow day?

A nor'easter decided to add an exclamation point to the massive winter storm that pummeled Philadelphia (and the entire mid-Atlantic region) this past weekend, which means that schools famous for almost never closing due to weather concerns have cancelled their classes today. I'll have to pay for this later (trying to re-schedule campus meetings that were difficult to schedule the first time around), but there is one major upside. I can to slash through a chunk of my growing to-do list. 

First things first. I sent out 33 e-mails in an hour, e-mails churned out with a reckless disregard for grammar or even comprehension, which probably means that I'll have to spend more time sending follow-ups for clarification.

I've already had three very useful phone calls  with colleagues (related to my administrative roles on campus), and I am now all set...

I recently had someone tell me that co-teaching was one of the biggest academic scams going. "The biggest, in fact," he corrected. According to him, this was insult to injury in the context of a larger academic universe that was itself, by his estimation, one gigantic institutionalized racket of Mafioso (and "governmental") proportions. (A side note about his "governmental" critique: I should probably add that this person is a libertarian, and something of a conspiracy theorist.) 

And he wasn't just talking in the abstract. He was offering me a bit of a browbeating for the amount of co-teaching that I have done over the course of my professorial career.

To hear him tell it, co-teaching is just a way for faculty members to get full credit for half the work. They conspire with their colleagues to split a semester or quarter in two so that they don't have to prepare for (or attend) all of...

Anna Deavere Smith describes her lifelong project as an attempt to theorize the links between language and identity. She came to this realization about the fundamental nature of her actorly goals while still studying her craft (several decades ago) at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. Last night, Smith presented excerpts from her most recent one-woman show, Let Me Down Easy, at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, and she tried to explain to a packed house just how her creative process works. 

For those who don't know Anna Deavere Smith, she is famous for what has been called "documentary theater," a genre that, for her, entails interviewing people from various walks of life (interviews usually organized around a particular theme or event) and staging those juxtaposed interviews as monologues in critical conversation with one...