Section
Higher Education
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Shoptalk: Overheard at ASA 2025 or MLA 2026?
This edition of Shoptalk asks: Can you guess which of the following was overheard at ASA 2025 and which was overheard at MLA 2026?
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In Defense of Imagination
West Virginia University’s unprecedented cuts to its liberal arts programs sells the public a university tethered to market demands at the expense of imaginative expansion and intellectual curiosity.
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Shoptalk: Overheard at ASA 2023 or MLA 2024?
This edition of Shoptalk asks: Can you guess which of the following was overheard at ASA 2023 and which was overheard at MLA 2024?
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How to Lose a Library
On October 31, 2023, the British Library suffered a massive cyberattack. Since then, what has been lost?
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Did the College Admissions Essay Remake Literature?
Is the college admissions essay (CAE) a useful tool for understanding ongoing transformations in literature, academia, and publishing?
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Publishers and Scholars, Unite!
Universities have disinvested from their presses just as much as their humanities departments and libraries. Will working together stop it?
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Let Them Eat Pedagogy
Changing myself and my classroom might help me renew my one-year contract, but it cannot prepare me to demand an alternative.
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Queer Leadership, Stronger Universities
It is powerful and affirming to consider the unique qualities that queerness brings to leadership.
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Don’t Save Yourself, Save the World: A Dialogue with Vincent Lloyd
“I’m very skeptical about the ability of people in positions of power and privilege—including intellectuals—to name truths about the world.”
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As Society Evolves, So Too Does the University
Faculty and students can—and must—govern their own institutions, so that universities maintain their vital power.
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Neoliberal Keywords: Creative, Passionate, Confident
When did we all become so empowered, passionate, and self-enterprising?
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“Let Us Gather Together”
Capital violently forces dispossessed people into markets, workplaces, and prisons. But such forced meetings could end capitalism itself.
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“There’s No Normal to Get Back To”: The State of Higher Ed
“Maybe that’s one thing the pandemic has allowed—for us to be a bit more honest about our struggles.”
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Now the Humanities Can Disrupt “AI”
The world’s humanists might just be the new MVPs in the struggle for the future of critical thinking.
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Shoptalk: Overheard at ASA and ASTR 2022
In this special mega edition of Shoptalk, guess which performative utterance was said at which conference.
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Student-Centered Pedagogy’s Activist Roots
For at least 150 years, Black and feminist educators understood that how one is taught effects how one participates in society.
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Reading after the University
If you want to support readers, the best hope will always be helping do away with economic compulsion and the division of labor.
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Taking Our Time: How Australian Universities Measure Academic Work
“Who gets to decide what is valuable and necessary work for an academic today?”
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America’s “Land Grab” Universities: Robert Lee on Colonial Extraction by “Treaty-Like Agreements”
“It’s not about the land underneath campuses. It’s land at a distance, that can be sold or managed to raise funds for endowments.”
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The Best Classroom Is the Struggle
“As a historian and educator of college students, my experience teaching on US imperialism is one of disappointment.”
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Private Pain, Public Disinvestment: Talking Student Debt with Elizabeth Tandy Shermer
“Individual Americans thought they were the only ones who could not afford to send their kids to college.”
