You're A Bodhisattva All The Time: An Exploration of Buddho-Catholic Syncretism in the Works of Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac had a very tumultuous reign as “King of the Beats,” in terms of his personal religious views, and their relationship to McCarthy era society. This work analyzes the role that religious belief and syncretism – that is, the mixing of two distinctly different belief systems – play in three works by Jack Kerouac: The Dharma Bums, Some of the Dharma, and Visions of Gerard. Each text shows some of the ways that Kerouac conceptualizes and mediates the two major religions in his life (Buddhism and Catholicism). All three works contain some sense of what the sum of the two religions (Buddho-Catholicism) means for Kerouac philosophically, and what it means for 1950’s American society as a whole, in terms of economics and politics.No embarg

Troubled Worlds: A Course Syllabus about Information Work and the Anthropocene

The goal of this syllabus is to interrogate the material, and socioeconomic processes which underpin our everyday information work. In particular, we examine the relationships developing between contemporary information practices and what problematically gets configured as “nature”—that messy world of non-human entanglements that often exists beyond the purview of innovation work, whether digital software development or industrial engineering. Much recent work on the environmental conditions of computing has sought to break down technology-nature dualisms in order to expose the implication of information technology in broader social and material ecologies. Library and information professionals and researchers are well poised to deepen this inquiry by presenting alternative nature-technology epistemologies grounded in longstanding analyses of information resources and their consumption. The “Troubled Worlds” syllabus starts with a discussion of concerns most obviously germane to the work of most library and information science professionals: practices at the intersection of structuring information and computing. Building on this attention, we turn to humanistic approaches to thinking through the era of dominant human activities widely known as the “Anthropocene” by introducing poetic, artistic, and activist lenses. We explore how artistic objects representing an increasingly troubled natural world raise awareness of the challenges facing it, as well as how they may incorporate and reshape information for aesthetic ends. We then look to questions of disability justice and how it works in blended built and natural spaces as well as the many different ways in which bodies respond to the toxic environments produced by information technologies. We next consider the newer design approaches to library and information research, specifically asking how design perspectives on digital information objects get inscribed in the Anthropocene. Lastly, we consider paradigms of repair and making and analyze the different valences through which information researchers and professionals categorize and contextualize what is possible with them. This compilation does not provide a comprehensive review of the literature on the environment within the information fields. Instead, it extends this literature to promote experimental research and practice. The modules construct an interdisciplinary and provisional path through the related literature in a form that we hope may be continually adjusted, rearranged, and augmented. Pre-print first published online 03/15/202