Blog & Pod

What can be learned from ethnographic interviews of Amazon’s last mile delivery workers in the greater LA area about the current global economy? How can undergraduate student researchers participate in this kind of labor research? Can academic and student research build opportunities for labor organizing, and resist the precarity that dominates the economy because of … Read More

Is Fred Hampton-style coalition building a useful praxis for contesting anti-Blackness today, or are efforts at building a “Rainbow Coalition” inappropriate or ineffective in the current historical conjuncture? Does emphasis on emancipatory efforts for black persons, and especially men, in social-political theory, sometimes undercut the need to come to terms with deeper, perhaps insurmountable anti-black … Read More

What is distinctive about higher education journalism? What can we learn from people driven narratives in journalism, including telling the stories of “departmental drama” in higher education? What are some of the challenges in covering higher education – especially with respect to the faculty beat? Are there any blind spots in what higher education reporters … Read More

What do the results of the US election mean for the future of US higher education? Even beyond electoral politics, what does it suggest about the current status of “little d” democracy, as well as about our national institutions? In light of this situation, can US higher education survive in its current form? On this … Read More

If and how does understanding our workplaces as “private governments”, especially how many of them are run on deeply undemocratic models of organization and decision making, apply to US colleges and universities in their function as employers? Should higher education in the US function on any market principles, or are other institutions and arrangements more … Read More

How do we best support graduate students in media studies? Do universities and graduate programs have a responsibility to readjust their model of grad education in the field? What is the value of a humanities-based approach to media studies? How can media be a site of convergence for the disciplines? In today’s episode we investigate … Read More

What is the current landscape of higher education in the United States, and in particular Illinois? How pervasive is the corporatization of higher education? How should public universities transform in the coming years? Given the scale of issues that face public higher education, how much change can come from attempts at the state and federal … Read More

What can today’s higher education student and scholar activists learn from the critical theory tradition? What role can higher education and social movements play in constituting or readying people to participate in the public sphere?  How did the critical theory tradition try to balance the need to take a critical distance from the world and … Read More

What’s the status of the labor movement and of labor unions in higher education today? Have academic labor unions been trapped in the two-tier structure of higher education (between tenured and non-tenured faculty), and can they sufficiently transform the arrangements within higher education so as to bring about an end to that system? In today’s … Read More

Why are those with humanities PhDs mostly confined to careers within the academy? In what ways can humanities PhDs thrive and serve others with vocations outside of the academy? What would a more holistic humanities graduate education for broader careers and relationships with the local community look like? Who benefits from the dominant culture of … Read More