Published at Books & Culture in May 2014. Empathy emerges as fraught; it can’t exist solely as a virtue because of the ways in which we unevenly practice it. Jamison models empathy while simultaneously scrutinizing and analyzing cultural expectations of empathy. She distrusts her own impulses and reactions to those she writes about. Who do we […]
Published at Chronicle Vitae on December 9, 2015. Academics trade in pander, too. We pander to professors, advisers, dissertation committees, search committees, department chairs, deans, provosts, university and college presidents, and chancellors. We indulge them and make choices to gratify them. We try to do what they want us to do: to graduate, be recommended, get […]
Published at Scalawag November 3, 2015. A segregated prom is the kind of story that shocks but also titillates white audiences outside of the South. Look, at the backward South, they say, the racism is so blatant and obvious. Southerners still have segregation and Confederate flags, they utter with horror. They whisper, Aren’t we so glad we […]
Published at Chronicle Vitae on November 2, 2015. Sadly, those experiences were not entirely new to me (or to my fellow attendees). I’m a woman scholar in a field that still skews toward men. I’ve encountered comments about my appearance (from benign to hostile to overtly sexual); dismissals of the merit of my work because of […]
Published at Sacred Matters on October 29, 2015. I want to go to a Hell House, the evangelical Christian alternative to the ubiquitous haunted houses that pop up every October. I say this almost every year, but I’ve yet to attend one. I’ve only had near misses. When I was in high school in the 1990s, […]
Published at Killing the Buddha on October 27, 2015. Indeed, high-power and high-caliber weapons for zombie killing employ fantasy to justify guns that might otherwise violate gun laws. Do products made for killing zombies allow fantasy to trump reality? It seems so. I can’t help but wonder about the consequences of marketing real weapons for fantasy targets. […]