Malcolm Gladwell’s essay on New Orleans ten years after Hurricane Katrina is but one of the many narratives that center whiteness as the protagonist of the city during and after Katrina. The purchase this essay has by virtue of its publication in The New Yorker, a nationally renowned news, politics and culture magazine, holds lessons…
Structure: the arrangement of and relations between the parts or elements of something complex. When I was finishing up my doctoral studies, third space theories were aflame in literacy research. Studies of how people created spaces that were neither school nor home, neither book nor digital, neither visual nor auditory, but along different nodes, reached…
Many around the nation and globe will be formally grieving, and through their grief, honoring the victims of the recent racism-fueled massacre in South Carolina. Those present in Charleston will include President Obama and myriad other dignitaries, in observance and communion around terror, loss, violence, and perhaps justice and healing. But many will not be…
What a week for the study of race. Rather than she whose name has already had too much airtime, I start with the violence the Dominican Republic is enacting on some of its own citizens. I’ll connect to what’s her name and why neither the confusion and cacophony that’s transpired in her wake nor the DR’s…
The people who work in nail salons are overwhelmingly poor female migrants from East Asian countries. Some have legal documentation status to be in the United States; many do not. As is the case with almost all contemporary poor migrants, they are central to the financial viability of their families here and send remittances to family they left…
Essay also published on Cloakinginequity.com Few would argue that educational inequity is of grave national and international concern. Much less widely understood is how educational inequity is tied to societal inequity, and then, following that, how to alter these structures, particularly in times of widening gaps between the wealthy, and well, everyone else. Teach for…
Originally posted on The Disorder Of Things:
A guest post from Melanie Richter-Montpetit, responding to the disclosure of the Senate Torture Report in December. Melanie is currently lecturer in international security at the University of Sussex, having recently gained her PhD from York University in Toronto. Her work on issues of subjectivity, belonging and political…
How do we recognize state violence in all of its manifestations? This matters deeply in how we organize around it, refuse it, and how we imagine possibilities beyond it. It matters in our ability to hear the problem spoken in our words in some moments and then when we refuse it in other moments. The…
I have been talking with a few of my mamasisterfriends who live in NYC and have school-aged children. We’ve talked aplenty about the ways in which children in this city, and these are middle and upper middle class children, have to learn to navigate an imposing public transit system, stay in constant communication with their…
Thoughts on the 4th of July on the connections between nationalism, settler entitlement, and border crises for unaccompanied minors.
Leigh Patel 
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