Clips Archives - Page 20 of 26

Without Meaning To

Published at Killing the Buddha on February 26, 2016. Truth appears and recedes, but meaning feels just out of my grasp. I’m searching for something, but I’m never sure what. At moments, I feel I’m on the cusp of discovery. But then, the search tugs and pulls me in a different direction. Discovery becomes a dead end. […]

Work the Power Pose

Published at Women in Higher Education in April 2016. I can manage my body to improve how I feel, but I still live in a patriarchy. What frustrated me the most about Presence is the emphasis on changing the self but ignoring the culture that creates our senses of self. Feeling better doesn’t eliminate persistent gender bias, […]

Silence Won’t Protect You

Published at Marginalia Review of Books on March 1, 2016. Graduate students, contingent workers, and tenure track faculty, then, are vulnerable to the whims of the leaders of our institutions. The corporate university curtails academic freedom to prevent dissent. Yet, we only seem to care about academic freedom when the tenured or the tenure track are denied […]

How You End Up Leaving a Contingency Task Force

Published at Chronicle Vitae on April 14, 2016. You leave not with a grand exit — a clear resolution to the problem of contingent labor in religious studies — but with repeated sighs of frustration (and private rants to your beleaguered partner). Your exit from the task force you were asked to lead in your disciplinary society […]

Academic Waste

Published at Chronicle Vitae on February 23, 2016. The doctorate becomes not the beginning of an academic career, but the end of one. Ph.D. holders, Bousquet explains, are “the actual shit of the system — being churned inexorably outside: not merely disposable labor but labor that must be disposed of for the system to work.” Let that […]

Teaching as Liberation

Published at Chronicle Vitae on January 19, 2016. Academia, hooks shows us, is not an inherently safe space for students or faculty. The classroom only seemed safe for those who fit its mold. Diversity appears threatening because it made the preferred norms visible. Some of us never had the illusion of fitting in, so education […]