"When I hear us dream our futures, believe we will make it to one, We will make one. The future lives in our bodies. Touch it." from "Femme Futures" by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha I’m going to start right at my point: In the automated future, we’ll all be disabled. But I’ll get back to that in a second. First, let’s talk about robots and labor: Robots (or automatons or replicants or synths or droids or “skin jobs”) have long been stand-ins for discussions about labor eth

“Music is and has been a powerful apparatus of capture for values of all kinds, but it’s also a powerful tool in subverting the present and/or carving out a livable future” (72). As I read Jeffrey T Nealon’s I’m Not Like Everybody Else: Biopolitics, Neoliberalism, and American Popular Music, I rotate through a number of Pandora stations. There’s my classic R&B station based on bands like Sam & Dave and the Temptations with a distinct 60s-70s Motown sound. Another has been lov

I’ve been troubled by the remarks made about “diversity” by other straight white men in public spheres I occupy lately: namely being a Nebraska resident and an avid reader of comics. First, as a Nebraskan, I find myself troubled by the comments about Diversity made recently by Senator Steve Erdman (covered here by the Washington Post). Erdman writes: "Recent Left-wing movements, such as Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, have undoubtedly put tremendous pressure upon the administr

Photo Credit: dreamstime.com As I read and reread the collection of posts our Watershed team has contributed this semester (15 truly stellar pieces of writing in all), I was struck by their shared commitment to expanding theory’s reach beyond the computer screen and into the world. These texts are saturated with calls to action, reorienting readers toward the pursuit of praxis. Although I teach writing and consider myself mathematically challenged, there is one equation I con

My partner pointed out recently that she has witnessed me inflict all of the following on acquaintances in the past month: An elaborate explanation of why I’m certain Han shot first, made to an indifferent bar-goer who had referred to it as “that scene in that movie” The chronology of all the games in The Legend of Zelda series with special attention rendered to the intricacies of the split timelines originating in Ocarina of Time A much-too-winded take on why Samwise Gamgee

Let’s scroll through your social media timelines for a minute (I mean that figuratively; please don’t leave my blog post just yet). In these last weeks, you’ve likely seen some write-up appear on your newsfeed(s) about Tina Fey (who, in the spirit of full disclosure, I may be in love with). Eating a sheet cake. As her answer to white supremacy and racism. Think pieces circulated, like this one from Fast Company concluding that the response to white supremacists can’t simply b