This summer, Cruz Medina reached out to This Rhetorical Life to share an interview he had done with Ana Castillo. As Medina states in this episode: As a writer, Ana Castillo’s work is the art that identifies subject matter before those of us who are academics and scholars are able to apply lenses or qualify and [...]

“Homonormativity has had two kind of strains of theoretical emphasis, one of which has been the focus on neoliberal prerogatives and priorities into institutions and everyday life, and gay and lesbian formations in particular, and I say gay and lesbian for a reason. And the development of a prescriptive set of social codes that [...]

In any event, first [thing] we have to make contact with is the situation that we are entering and what kind of context we are teaching in, and for. And we have to then educate ourselves into the context. In addition, the other thing is, the political conditions not only change from place to place; [...]

Image of Ira Shor from BBS Radio In part one of our interview, Ira Shor tells us about growing up in the Bronx, his early experiences of education, joining social movements, practicing critical pedagogy, and his first encounters and early collaboration with the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire. I discovered what it was like to sit [...]

I just don’t understand why we have to talk about every mode of belonging as some kind of citizenship. It just doesn’t make any sense to me. I’m interested in people’s practices of resistance. I’m interested in people’s practices of belonging. […] I’m interested in people’s practices of world-making.  — Karma Chavez I’m increasingly persuaded [...]

We tend to assume that captioning is objective. It’s just copying down. We tend to privilege speech sounds, and there’s just something about speech that sort of makes it seem easier to transcribe. It’s straightforward and objective, but it’s so much more complex than that—especially when you add in non-speech sounds, especially when you consider that everybody has a [...]

I started the research really struggling to understand how seemingly good people could say such awful things, and that’s really what I wanted to understand. I think what I found is that people are not all one thing or another. They aren’t as awful as they seem in a particular moment. Our students are struggling [...]

There’s a certain set of conceits around academic freedom that limit its functionality and its practice, and those conceits often have to do with critiques of state power, critiques of colonization, critiques of structural violence. –Steven Salaita I think using academic freedom as a way to open these more political conversations and more potentially more [...]

Scholarship is designed to reach some sort of conclusion, even provisional, whereas the podcast because I think it’s still anchored in a kind of entertainment model [stardust clicking] is actually sort of less interested in conclusions and probably also—even if it was interested—that that’s sort of antithetical to the form that it’s working through. You [...]

Can’t we find more creative ways to report these stories? The story of Michael Brown is so important, but we get trapped, I think, in this narrow narrative that we’ve been telling for a really long time. —Tessa Brown Social media and mobile technology has particularly been important for people of color, for working class [...]