The wire and the world: narrative and metanarrative

Rarely, if ever, has a television drama constructed a narrative with such a strong thrust to metanarrative. Its intricate and interwoven storylines dramatise the dialectical interaction of individual aspirations and institutional dynamics. These build into a story of a city, not only the story of Baltimore in its particularity, but with a metaphoric drive toward the story of Everycity. Every character and storyline pulses with symbolic resonance radiating out to a characterisation of the nature of contemporary capitalism. While the text itself does not name the system, the metatext does so with extraordinary clarity and force. David Simon, the primary voice of this collective creation, has engaged in a powerfully polemical discourse articulating the world view underlying the drama. This paper will explore that world view. It will examine how specific plots open into an analysis of the social-political-economic system shaping it all. It will moreover argue that The Wire has demonstrated the potential of television narrative to dramatise the nature of the social order, a potential that has long been neglected or inadequately pursued in the history of television drama. In probing the parameters of the intricate interactions between individuals and institutions, The Wire excavates underlying structures of power and stimulates engagement with overarching ideas.It bristles, even boils over, with systemic critique. While it offers no expectation of an alternative, it provokes reflection on the need for one and an aspiration towards one. Indeed some commentators have raised the question of whether The Wire is a marxist television drama. While David Simon has explicitly stated that he is not a marxist, the question remains. What would a marxist television drama look like? It would look very much like The Wire, this paper contends

Striving against the eclipse of democracy

This paper focuses on the work of Henry Giroux and attempts to provide a coherent overview and critical analysis of his extremely large output spanning almost thirty years. It traces the evolution of his thought throughout this period and discusses such aspects of his work and themes as his engagement with Freire's work, his treatment of social class and race, his contribution to cultural studies, his trenchant critique of the Bush Jr years as well as of the corporisation of various aspects of the public sphere including schooling and higher education, his notion and analysis of different forms of 'public pedagogy,' his contibution to a politics of Educated Hope and to the development of a substantive democracy, and his treatment of the recurring theme of the war being waged on different fronts against youth and children.peer-reviewe

Changing international health policy and changing international development goals

The World Health Organisation (WHO) was founded in 1948 with a remit to promote public health around the world. The WHO’s constitution sets out its objective as ‘the attainment by all peoples of the highest possible level of health’ (WHO, 1948). The paper raises broad questions over the aspirations and practice of international health policy in its international political and development context. The paper explores how international health policy has been informed by evolving international development strategies, from the earlier modernisation approaches to the sustainable development approaches of recent decades. The final part considers international health policy today in a world of continuing international inequalities

IMPACT: The Journal of the Center for Interdisciplinary Teaching and Learning. Volume 7, Issue 2, Summer 2018

IMPACT: The Journal of the Center for Interdisciplinary Teaching & Learning is a peer-reviewed, biannual online journal that publishes scholarly and creative non-fiction essays about the theory, practice and assessment of interdisciplinary education. Impact is produced by the Center for Interdisciplinary Teaching & Learning at the College of General Studies, Boston University (www.bu.edu/cgs/citl).In the weeks and months following August 12, 2017, members of the Boston University community struggled — like Americans everywhere — to comprehend the series of troubling, and tragic, events which would come, almost immediately, to be denoted in the national imagination by the metonym “Charlottesville.” This special issue of Impact: The Journal of the Center for Interdisciplinary Teaching & Learning comprises a series of responses to these events and their aftermath, as well as the conditions which enabled them, by faculty members from across the BU campus

there, not there: (un)disciplining study off the writing tracks/tracts

For us, “writing off the beaten track” has been propelled by collaborative study of ontoepistemological contributions that break the constraints of western knowledge-making. Black studies and women of color feminisms prompt us to pause long enough to breathe … to interrogate the ellipsis … to sit in the space between words or the dangling punctuation. What’s there (or not there) creatively points to ideas, questions, and methods that subvert the primacy of the western colonial imagination. Our collective writing has often come to us by being worked and reworked, fused and refused in an iterative process, this time with fahima ife’s Maroon Choreography. From homonyms to a wordplay on tracks/tracts, we discuss a writing praxis that has been contoured by radical study and scholarship “actively straying from” disciplined/disciplining conventions. There is always more to knowing and articulating subjects, contexts, and the pursuit of justice

Remember the Fillmore: The Lingering History of Urban Renewal in Black San Francisco

In the summer of 2008, I moved to San Francisco, California. I lived in the city for three months. As a researcher, my objective was to learn more about Mayor Gavin Newsome’s African-American Out-Migration Task Force. The Task Force convened in 2007 and met eight times from August to December. In 2009, the Mayor\u27s office released a final report on the Redevelopment Agency\u27s website that summarized the history of blacks in the city and outlined several recommendations for reversing their flight. The final report found that the political, economic, and social conditions of African-Americans are disproportionately more dire than any other group in San Francisco. During our conversations, some task force members suggested that this dire condition could be due to the lack of a black middle-class, which could act as a “connective tissue” between San Francisco’s poor black community and the city’s decision makers. The Task Force reported that although blacks had been in San Francisco for decades, many African-Americans, especially poor blacks, often felt disconnected from much of the city life. That finding resonated with what I heard during my interviews with the middle- to upper-middle class African-American members of the Task Force and with my observations of how residents and visitors shared public space in the Fillmore neighborhood, one of the city’s historically black neighborhoods. [excerpt

Breakwater: Anti-Blackness in Geoscience Lessons from Long Beach, CA

Breakwaters are more than just physical structures that protect against storm surges and in the context of Long Beach, CA, my hometown, they are actualizations of economic, social, environmental, geologic, and policy challenges. Inspired by Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape by Lauret Savoy, and Teaching to Transgress by bell hooks, I use an extended metaphor and autoethnographic approach to connect a chronology of my educational life to the physical structure of a breakwater. Where the breakwater also acts as a signifier of my personal experiences of seeing it, questioning its purpose, and not always finding an answer. This paper explores my lived and learned experiences as a Black woman in the geosciences as it relates to greater needs for diversity and educational changes to be implemented in the geoscience community broadly. Paralleling the breakwater and the systemic racism and violence ingrained in geology, I explore the intersections of elementary geoscience curriculum, Black theory, place-based narratives, and physical geography to pose questions around the reformation or more so the reinvention of geoscience as a tool for empowerment and change

Creolizing Collective Memory: Refusing the Settler Memory of the Reconstruction Era

The collective memory of the Reconstruction era in US history is a good example of Jane Anna Gordon's notion of 'creolization' at work. I argue that this is an era that could do with even further creolizing by refusing the influence of settler memory. Settler memory refers to the capacity both to know and disavow the history and contemporary implications of genocidal violence toward Indigenous people and the accompanying land dispossession that serve as the fundamental bases for creating settler colonial nations-states. One of the most important works on the Reconstruction Era is W.E.B. Du Bois’ canonical text, Black Reconstruction in America: 1860–1880, published in 1935. I examine both the creolizing elements of DuBois' argument and also suggest how attention to settler memory can further creolize our grasp of this period through a re-reading of his text and putting it into the context of other developments occuring during the years he examines