Hotel Bar Sessions, Episode 24: Specialization

The HBS hosts discuss academic specializations and how to make the humanities more inclusive.

Over the last several decades, there has been a long-overdue push for professors in the humanities to diversify their curricula to include more women, BIPOC, queer, disabled, and other under-represented thinkers and texts. Yet, theh "add diversity and stir" model for syllabus design in many ways fails to address a lot of the problems that motivated this demand in the first place. It isn't just syllabi in the humanities that have a diversity problem. It's the humanities professoriate itself.

First, academics from traditionally dominant demographic groups-- white, make, straight, non-disabled, and middle-to-upper class-- ought not presume that their academic training has necessarily equipped them with the knowledge, skills, or understanding to simply "take up" an unfamiliar field of specialization with the same level of knowledge, skill, and understanding as a specialist in that area possesses. Second, pressuring the current professoriate to "add diversity and stir" tends to de-emphasize the need for universities and individual departments to hire faculty from traditionally under-represented demographics with specialized training in the needed areas. BUT... third, we must also be careful not to assume that every person's scholarly specialization mirrors their personal identity.

How can we think about strategies for diversifying both the curricula and the faculty in humanities fields without reproducing the same prejudices that have made the humanities so non-diverse?

Full episode notes available at this link. You can listen to Episode 24 below:

Hotel Bar Sessions, Episode 23: Superheroes

In American graphic fiction and contemporary film, the superhero stands at the center of many popular narratives. Superhero stories published by DC Comics and Marvel are a multi-million dollar per year industry and, in 2019 alone, superhero movies grossed 3.19 billion dollars in revenue. Although it may seem to the novice as if these publishing houses and film studios just recycle the same stories (and sequels) over and over, connoisseurs of the genre know that the figure of the "superhero' has changed and evolved dramatically over the last half-century. What does the figure of the superhero represent? Who does it serve? How has it adapted to reflect broader culteral, political, and social change?

In this episode, Dr. Charles F. Peterson-- and bona fide connoisseur of comics and superhero films-- schools his novice co-hosts on the nuances of superheroes and their development, as well as the deep and often profound philosophical truths that the figure of the superhero helps to reveal about us ordinary (not super and no heroic) humans. 

Full episode notes available at this link. You can listen to Episode 23 below.

BLACK MIRROR REFLECTIONS, Ep. 18: "Rachel, Jack, and Ashley Too" with Karen Tongson

Dr. Karen Tongson is Professor of English, Gender & Sexuality Studies, and American Studies & Ethnicity, and Chair of the Department of Gender & Sexuality Studies at the University of Southern California. She is the 2019 recipient of the Lambda Literary Jeanne Córdova Award for Lesbian/Queer Nonfiction, and the author of two books: Why Karen Carpenter Matters (2019; nominated for a Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Nonfiction; Best Music Books of 2019, Pitchfork; longlisted for The Believer Book Award, 2020), and Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries (2011). Her writing and cultural commentary have appeared in NPR, Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB), L.A. Weekly, BuzzFeed Reader, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and Public Books, as well as in other scholarly and public forums. She has two books in progress: Empty Orchestra: Karaoke, Queer Performance, Queer Theory (Duke University Press), and NORMPORN: Television and the Spectacle of Normalcy (NYU Press). Postmillennial Pop, the award-winning book series she co-edits with Henry Jenkins at NYU Press, has published over twenty titles. 

BLACK MIRROR REFLECTIONS, Ep 17: "White Bear" with Charles Mills

For Episode 17, I am joined by Dr. Charles Mills to talk about punishment, non-ideal theories of justice, why philosophers love science fiction, and "White Bear" (Season 2, Episode 2 of Black Mirror), which first premiered in 2013.

Dr. Charles W. Mills is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at The Graduate Center, CUNY. He works in the general area of social and political philosophy, particularly in oppositional political theory as centered on class, gender, and race. He is the author of over a hundred journal articles, book chapters, comments and replies, and six books. His first book, The Racial Contract (Cornell UP, 1997), won a Myers Outstanding Book Award for the study of bigotry and human rights in America.  His second book, Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race (Cornell UP, 1998), was a finalist for the award for the most important North American work in social philosophy of that year. Other books are: From Class to Race: Essays in White Marxism and Black Radicalism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), Contract and Domination (co-authored with Carole Pateman) (Polity, 2007), which brings the sexual and racial contracts together, and Radical Theory, Caribbean Reality (University of the West Indies Press, 2010). His most recent book is Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism (Oxford UP, 2017).