Hikchhiking: Europe \u2768

Hitchhiking was a primary means for the young to travel in Europe in 1968. The hitchhikers were a mix of Europeans, Americans (both North and South) and Japanese. They were part of a cultural pattern that was forming but one that would not last beyond the early 1970s

Another Colonialist Tool?

the student enrolled in an xMOOC, I believe, is in much the same position as both the student before the teaching machine and the colonized individual. She or he is forced to deal with foreign assumptions having little to do with the reality of the learner or the colonized

How Much Does Chaos Scare You?: Politics, Religion, and Philosophy in the Fiction of Philip K. Dick

Certain themes appear with surprising consistency in Dick’s fiction. They crop up in the early short stories, called by some critics, including Kim Stanley Robinson, Dick’s “apprentice” fiction. They appear in the novels of Dick’s most productive period, the 1960s. And they are a part of the last novels, the VALIS trilogy and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer—written when Dick was, according to Eric Rabkin and others, insane. These themes fall into three inter-related categories: metaphysics, religion, and politics. The first concerns perception and the world, and the individual’s interaction with both. The second, the moralities of creator/creation relationships. The third, relationships between individuals; by extension, between individuals and political systems. From these, and from their interactions, come all other political points presented in Dick’s fiction

Corporate Responsibility: The Case of Big Tobacco

Barlow recounts his experience on a jury on a major case relating to the tobacco industry

Dust and Smoke: Desertification, Fire and Elephants in Togo, West Africa

Dust and smoke: from desert and fire. Everyone south of the Sahara in Africa, and not just those in the region where I lived, knows them intimately. From Abidjan to Mombassa, Africans understands what these twinned hazes mean to their lives, their futures. Dual signs of the destruction of the savanna—born of the over-use of farmland and of wood burned as fuel—they’ve become omens, precursors of the desert sands certain to follow. Signals, they are, that life in the villages will only get harder as time passes. This is a story of dust and smoke--and elephants--in one small area in northern Togo

Hard As Kerosene

This novel is set in West Africa during the 1980s and concerns one man\u27s trip through Peace Corps, war and alcoholism

Fighting Fire with Fire: Reinvigorating the Language of American Universities

Might academia co-opt the concepts and language of the corporate world, repurposing them to meet the actual (and traditional) ends of our higher education institutions

Casualization: A Primer

The problem of casualization (the increasing reliance on adjunct and contingent faculty) grows in American higher education each year. Yet, for all of the attention now being paid to the plight of the adjuncts, few understand exactly what is happening and why, or what the impact is on colleges and univerrsitties