Covid-19

You Need Devotion: A Syllabus

by Michelle Moyd, 8 September 2020

… the idea of devotion, is not the same as what we have been asked to do as workers. A radical ethic of care compels us to build new things to compensate for the inability of capitalism to care. To seek coalition with colleagues, families, friends, strangers. To be honest with our students, our colleagues, families, friends that we are working while at home under remote emergency conditions. We teach, working to brighten the dark for our students, for our families, for our colleagues. Devotion causes us to ask who we have overlooked because we never had to look before.

A few long weeks ago, I submitted an essay to the Digital Feminist Collective about my position as Career Faculty at a state university. In the midst of a pandemic, the problems of structural inequity associated with such positions become more urgent, whether they concern job security or access to health care. The time seemed ripe to describe an experience about which people are usually silent.

Crip Currencies: Resources on Care Community Networks in the Age of COVID-19

by David Loner and Maggie Rosenau, 27 July 2020

In this post we want to share some thoughts on how and why the disabled community is suddenly receiving greater attention. We would like, in specific, to talk about the value of disabled knowledge, and how the story of disability justice connects to two separate however interrelated events happening now: the COVID-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter uprisings. By sharing sources that amplify disabled voices and collectives doing important social justice work, we hope to encourage involvement as we navigate together through these uncertain times.

On Racism in Panama

by Alina Torrero, 20 July 2020

Spanish version

I begin this short text with a very pertinent commentary at a moment in which the pandemic of Covid-19 is turning our attention towards diverse societies:

“…one of the factors that has exacerbated ethno-racial conflicts in recent years has been the imposition of economic policies based on a globalization that subordinates the national economies of the region and impoverishes their peoples dramatically. In this sense, we can observe that the recognition of cultural pluralism tends to emerge, paradoxically, at times in which economic mechanisms of exclusion of traditionally subordinated racial and ethnic sectors, that is to say, of the Amerindian peoples and African Americans, are strengthening.” (Paris Pombo, 2002: 309)

Covid-19 and the White Spaces of Academia

by Mariela Méndez, July 9th 2020

A memory can be consuming. A memory can occupy space. A casual conversation about a past experience of an elite institution can fill the space, the space becomes elite, for a select few, how a few are selected; a sense of ownership spills out and over, our space, our diversity, our university, ours. – Sara Ahmed, The Uses of Use

Two scholars whose work has become more and more central to my teaching and scholarship use the image of the table, or tables, to speak to the long and pervasive act of silencing the voices of women of color within academic environments and within scholarly output. In Living a Feminist Life, feminist writer and scholar Sara Ahmed makes a point of showing us how universities “accommodate” certain bodies and not others. Lélia Gonzalez, a Brazilian scholar whose work is foundational for the field of Afro-Brazilian studies—and Afro-Latin American studies more broadly thanks to her coinage of the category/concept amefricanidade—opens her essay “Racismo e sexismo na cultura brasileira” (“Racism and Sexism in Brazilian Culture”), originally published in 1983, with an anecdote/epigraph describing a party organized by white people to celebrate the publication of a book about people of color.[1]

The Hollow Privilege of Immobility in the Time of Covid-19

by Jennifer Ruth Hosek, July 2nd 2020

Culturally-speaking, humanness is often equated with the freedom to move. Accepting the dance. Getting out of this place. Following the North Star. Mobility often means privilege. However, in this pandemic, our ability to stay put is suddenly where privilege lies. The value of mobility has altered with the pandemic. Rather than dancing together, we are living lonely and most of us don’t like it. Covid-19 is showing us that the exclusive, hyper-individualism of extreme mobility is not only dangerous and unethical but also unenjoyable.