Category Archives: Archives
April 30, 2013, 8:53 am
By Claire Potter
There are papers to grade, classes to prepare, a search to finish, a conference to pack for, and yet….that last post gets colder and colder as the days roll by. So without further delay, here are some shorts to brighten your day:
Fat Armpits Are The Worst. Before returning to Brooklyn Sunday, I was in the newly-ronovated Acme Market in Bryn Mawr, PA loading up on my favorite diet foods — Tastykakes, scrapple — and reading gossip mags in the checkout line. The misogynist gem to the right caught my attention. Kim Kardashian, who was on the rampage last year because everyone could have a baby but her, has learned to her horror that a growing fetus can make a girl look dumpy.
It must be terrible to be so fragile. According to celeb mag In Touch, Kardashian is on the brink of a breakdown, having discovered that aging leads to age and pregnancy leads to weight gain. In her seventh…
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April 21, 2013, 3:56 pm
By Claire Potter
The mother of us all: Pauline Friedman Phillips, aka Abigail “Dear Abby” van Buren
Ten years ago, in the midst of a conversation, a colleague temporarily lost her temper at me. “Please stop giving me advice!” she snapped. “I don’t want any advice. I just want to talk about this!”
Needless to say, I was shocked and a little hurt. But upon further reflection, I had to admit that a flaw in my socialization had been usefully uncovered. My friend had not asked for any advice, and yet I had offered it anyway. Why?
The giving and taking of advice is so ubiquitous in university life that it defines whole categories of activity that blur the line between personal and professional. In graduate school, members of my cohort gave each other advice, and it was often at least as good as the advice we got from faculty. …
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February 22, 2013, 10:59 am
By Claire Potter
February 14, 2013, 1:36 pm
By Claire Potter
It appeared that my ability to join the collective hinged on my agreement with all the criticisms of my past political thinking and work, and not just a willingness to consider them….The criticism indicated that I was inferior to other members of the collective, and I wanted the opportunity to prove that I had a substantial history of work and ideas, and that I should be considered an equal. So I agreed with the criticisms in general, and said I would rethink things in light of the criticism. I thought to myself, I could always change my mind.
Cathy Wilkerson, Flying Too Close to the Sun: My Life and Times as a Weatherman (2010)
A central theme in several autobiographies of former radical antiwar activists is the role that criticism sessions played in persuading people to adopt a new world view, one that ran counter to attitudes they might previously have valued as members of …
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February 10, 2013, 1:36 pm
By Claire Potter
Shortly after yesterday’s post went up I heard from an old friend and colleague, Dr. David Shorter, who disagreed with my views about Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, and wanted an opportunity to respond to them in this forum. I immediately agreed. Shorter is a professor of World Arts and Cultures/Dance at the University of California Los Angeles. His first book, We Will Dance Our Truth: Yaqui History in Yoeme Performances (University of Nebraska Press, 2010), unpacks the biases associated with writing in educational and legal considerations of Indigenous rights. Shorter’s digital projects, his work with indigenous language revitalization, and his other research areas are described on his website.
Recently, my friend and previous colleague, the Tenured Radical herself, penned a blog posting about the matter of BDS and Brooklyn College’s defense of academic freedom. As usual, her …
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February 7, 2013, 9:15 am
By Claire Potter
The first illustration of Pinocchio, by Enrico Mazzanti. Photo credit.
Today’s guest blogger is Michael Pettit, associate professor of Psychology and Science and Technology Studies at York University in Toronto. He recently published The Science of Deception: Psychology and Commerce in America. He is currently completing the research on another project tentatively entitled The Sex Lives of Animals in the Age of Kinsey.
Lies loom large over the historian’s craft. Historians devote considerable time to parsing the tensions among words, intentions, and behaviours. Reconstructing the inner lives of those who lived in the past is a notoriously difficult task. It is doubly so when you know your informants are deliberately leading you astray. And yet deception hasn’t really figured as a category of historical…
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February 2, 2013, 11:53 am
By Claire Potter
Our guest blogger Mary Louise Roberts is a Professor in the History Department at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her most recent book, What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American G.I. in World War Two France, will be published with the University of Chicago Press in May. This essay was originally written for ”The Public Practice of History In and For a Digital Age,” a plenary session at the 2013 American Historical Association Annual Meeting. Roberts appeared with historians Edward Ayers andWilliam Cronon; editor Niko Pfund; journalist Michael Pollan and your very own Tenured Radical.
I begin with a confession. I resist change. Unlike the other people on this panel, I am a change resister. Unlike them, I have not pioneered digital or digitized approaches to historical inquiry. In fact I have consciously refused them. And when I have embraced new technologies,…
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January 24, 2013, 12:31 pm
By Claire Potter
My inbox at 10:17 a.m. today.
A common faculty complaint at my last job was what we might call “failure to consult.” Whether it was a project occurring at the upper echelons of the administration, a department chair’s carrying out an initiative or, most commonly, the work of a faculty committee, rule of thumb was to imagine anyone who might be a stakeholder and then keep that person informed. In the days before email, this usually meant having frequent and informative meetings, dropping into offices as you meandered down the hall, or copying a memo multiple time and putting it in separate interoffice envelopes. My favorite form of consultation? – and I bet no one under the age of fifty has ever done this – using one interoffice envelope and instructing recipients to check their name off the memo, put it back …
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January 15, 2013, 2:47 pm
By Claire Potter
This week, in the aftermath of another Christ on a cracker we already knew banal celebrity coming out speech the action was hot on Tenured Radical‘s Facebook page. I had responded to the irritating status prompt “How are you feeling, Claire?” by writing that I was “feeling”:
…a little puzzled as to why Jodie Foster needed to do the drama queen thing about coming out at the Golden Globes. Since we all knew she was a lesbian, a press release would have been fine.
I have received many likes (I like to be liked) and many comments, only one of which has accused me of unfairly silencing the little lamb. How many ways can I describe my annoyance that Foster chose her acceptance speech for the Cecil B. DeMille Lifetime Achievement Award (for excellence…
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January 7, 2013, 11:48 am
By Claire Potter
Oysters, please. And then deep fried oysters for the main course.
I can think of a number of good reasons to have a conference in New Orleans. At the top of the list is the excellent, moderately priced food, served at relatively uncrowded restaurants a stone’s throw from the hotel. For the three full days I was at the American Historical Association Annual Meeting I did not have one bad meal (although I was with someone who did.) Furthermore, there are a couple of landmark places that seem to draw the tourist trade (such as the famous Acme Oyster House), leaving equally great places like Desire and Felix’s open to the rest of us. At Felix’s (where I had gone for a little alone time Saturday night because I felt conferenced out) they open the oysters and smack ‘em right down on the bar in front of you. And they…
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