This illustration by Adam Turnbull is featured in Take Back the Economy. By J.K. Gibson-Graham, Jenny Cameron, and Stephen Healy The task of imagining and enacting a new economy is one that is being taken up by a growing number of people around the world, as our new book Take Back the Economy: An Ethical … More Not capitalism 2.0 or 3.0, but a whole new operating system
BY LISA GUENTHERAssociate professor of philosophy at Vanderbilt University On July 8, more than 30,000 prisoners across California launched the largest hunger strike in state history. Now, three weeks later, more than 600 prisoners continue to refuse meals, in spite of direct acts of retaliation by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR). Hunger … More Social Death and the Criminalization of Resistance in the California Prison Hunger Strikes
In a blog post for Inside Higher Ed, college librarian Barbara Fister considers University of Minnesota Press director Doug Armato’s January blog post on open access and the future of scholarly publishing alongside a recent statement from the American Historical Society in favor of protecting scholars’ dissertations from public view. Her reaction: What’s especially worth … More The way scholarship works today
Victor Gruen’s Southdale Center in Edina, Minnesota, was the first fully indoor shopping mall in the world. Photo credit: Bobak Ha’Eri via Creative Commons. BY DAVID SMILEYGraduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University In 1958, the Architectural League of New York held a photographic exhibit of new street furniture. Today, such an … More How the suburban U.S. shopping mall reimagined the city and undergirded architectural modernization
U.S. Department of Energy radiation hot spot detection equipment utilized at Rocky Flats, Colorado. Courtesy of the U.S. Department of Energy. BY SHILOH R. KRUPARAssistant professor of culture and politics at Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University Growing up near two major plutonium processing facilities (Hanford, WA, and Rocky Flats, CO) … More Hot Spotter’s Report: Imagining alternate possibilities in a world in which toxicity and exposure are not the exception but the rule.
In the 1930s, the dragnet came to refer to the use of radio as the key technology to combat criminal mobility.This image from 1935 is of a radio program being recorded at KTAR (AM), Phoenix, Arizona. Source: Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum. BY KATHLEEN BATTLESAssociate professor of communication and journalism at Oakland University … More The history of government surveillance in the U.S.: From the dragnet to Prism
Penny A. Petersen is author of Minneapolis Madams, the surprising and riveting account of the Minneapolis red-light district in the late nineteenth century and the powerful madams who ran it. In their heyday Minneapolis brothels constituted a substantial economic and political force in the city. Penny digs deep into city archives, newspapers, and other sources … More Vignettes: 19th-century brothels and the lost history of prostitution on the Minneapolis riverfront.
BY ULISES A. MEJIASAssistant professor of communication studies at the State University of New York, College at Oswego If leaked information about the surveillance program Prism is correct, the U.S. government is treating every citizen of the world as a potential terrorist. If the sign of a true democracy is that even the rights of … More Prism leak reminds us to be critical of the seemingly essential—but risky—tools we use every day.
So-called trash species—including pigeons, gulls, coyotes, carp, and cockroaches, among others—cause wonder as to why some species are admired while others are reviled. BY KELSI NAGYM.A. in philosophy from Colorado State University and a graduate student of anthrozoology at Canisius College in New York What is a ‘trash animal’? I am often asked this question … More Pigeons. Cockroaches. Grasshoppers. Just what is a ‘trash animal’?
One (likely snowy) evening this past April in Minneapolis, a group of local literati gathered at the Turf Club’s Clown Lounge to celebrate the launch of Sarah Stonich’s latest novel, Vacationland. Writers Carol Connolly (St. Paul’s Poet Laureate), Peter Geye, Marty Kihn, Danny Klecko, Pamela Klinger-Horn, Kathryn Kysar, and Andy Sturdevant joined in the good … More Talk to the (all-star!) hand: A Vacationland supplementary.
