It’s strange how you can take note of something once, and then all of a sudden, that obscure thing keeps popping up over and again. When recently teaching James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, published in 1912, I was intrigued by a passage describing the narrator’s employment in Jacksonville, Florida: because of his education, he became un lector, a reader in a cigar factory. Next, the very contemporary A Story of My Teeth by Valeria Luiselli found its

The History Channel’s docu-drama Ice Road Truckersdebuted in 2007 and ran until 2017. The first two seasons of the show followed drivers navigating the frozen waters of Canada, using these waterways as roads to move goods for the mining and oil industries. In subsequent seasons the setting moved to Alaska, where the goals of the truckers were the same but the terrain arguably more treacherous. The first two seasons of IRTfeatured only male drivers, but in season three, someth

When I write about truck driving in the academic world, admittedly, the end results are a little disheartening. I love reading Marx, Foucualt, and Bourdieu, but applying them critically to a profession one loves is... Well, you can imagine. While worthwhile in a context of confronting problems of economy and class, this overlay of Marxist theory can easily take the pleasure out of doing something one simply enjoys. Take, for example, this quote from the Manifesto: “Masses of