The Spartan Mirage; A Study into Spartan Women

A myth has been perpetuated about the Greek city-state of Sparta which has shrouded it in a mirage. This mirage can make it difficult to determine what Sparta was truly like, which includes the reality of its women. Scholars tend to present Spartan women within extremes that either showcase them as no different from other women or as the ones holding all the power. Spartan women were key in passing on important values to their children such as to die bravely in battle or not come home at all. By looking into Spartan women, we can find strong evidence that they were different from women at that time, but we must look closer to see what “different” truly implies. For this paper, I plan to closely examine sources to draw the strongest conclusions about what it meant to be a Spartan woman and peel back the Spartan mirage

A Grotesque Beacon of God’s Grace in “A Temple of the Holy Ghost”

The faith of Flannery O’Connor, a Catholic writer, creates a unique tension within her short stories, between the grotesque aspects of the natural world and the sanctity of the divine. Her work “A Temple of the Holy Ghost” exemplifies this tension as a young female narrator encounters an unexpected transformative experience after her two cousins see a “hermaphrodite”[1] at a local “freak show.” In “A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” Flannery O’Connor employs the hermaphrodite character as a vessel for the narrator to explore the mysterious virtue of purity as she matures both literally and spiritually. In doing so, O’Connor calls readers to adopt a perception of sacramentality upon the physical world

Repairing Activist-Academic Relationships: Defining Methods to Improve Reciprocity and Movement Building in Degrowth

The degrowth movement, advocating for an eco-socialist restructuring of world economies, has failed to find a political foothold in American politics. This is despite growing support in Europe and positive, yet limited, reception in Canada. Previous literature diagnoses the American degrowth movement with confused and ineffective rhetoric, inhospitable intramovement politics, and too little scholarly support. In this article, I argue differently. I focus on the relationships between academics and activists within American degrowth, understanding academic-activist relationships to be historically extractive but also generative and didactic. Using semistructured interviews with academics and activists, and discourse analysis of the press coverage of degrowth, I define the state of academic-activist relationships as severely underdeveloped and uncooperative. Finally, I find that significant reforms to higher education’s opacity, exclusivity, and extractive productivity, and that encouraging activists to proactively center their narratives in the movement, may improve the lax reciprocity and slow movement building of American degrowth