Electric Agora (archive)

Tag: culture

  • Hybridity and Why It Matters

    by Kevin Currie-Knight ___ Academics sure can take simple everyday things and make them complicated. Or complicated things and make them simple. I’m not sure which it is when we come to what some call “hybridity,” which is what happens when folks create fusions between cultural worlds, taking things from different cultures and smashing them…

  • Race Talk

    by Kevin Currie-Knight ____ Race talk – using racial categories as descriptors in conversation – is inevitably clunky. For the past several years I’ve noticed this, especially as the teacher of an Introduction to Diversity class where we discuss racial diversity, among other things. Race is a hard thing to talk about sensibly, not just…

  • Traveling Light

    by Mark English ___ I am in the process of reorienting my life. Over the years I have been caught up, as everybody is, in various projects, commitments, entanglements and responsibilities (or perceived responsibilities). Some of these commitments limited my opportunities for extensive travel, or at least the sort of travel I desired. In recent…

  • More Thoughts on Individualism and Cultural Embeddedness

    by Mark English ___ This post was prompted by some private discussion of a recent episode of my podcast, Culture and Value. The episode in question, entitled “Individualism and Cultural Embeddedness“, was centered – in fact the podcast in general is centered – around what you could see as the paradox of individualism: we are…

  • Sources of Human Diversity

    by Kevin Currie-Knight ___ People differ in all sorts of ways. Most of our differences generally go unnoticed when we interact. For example, with regard to a store clerk yesterday, I didn’t notice what her eye color or dominant hand is. But other differences, as the saying goes, make a difference. Historically and into the…

  • Course Notes — Themes from the Incomparable Philip K. Dick

    by Daniel A. Kaufman ___ The end of the Fall semester is rapidly approaching, and it will mark the last time I will have taught the current iteration of my Philosophical Ideas in Literature course, devoted to five novels by Philip K. Dick: The Man in the High Castle (1962); The Three Stigmata of Palmer…

  • New Year Musings

    By Daniel A. Kaufman ___ Middle age is widely believed to be challenging, because it is the point at which we become uncomfortably aware of our mortality. I turned 50 this year, and my own experience has been that the hardest thing about middle age is that it is the time when one simultaneously has…

  • Notes on Culture and Language

    by Mark English Having written recently about shared narratives and their role in creating a common culture, I thought it might be worthwhile to try to develop a few of the points I have been making and to clarify the foundation – personal and intellectual – upon which my claims rest. Now, the idea of…

  • Philistinism and Philosophy

    by Daniel A. Kaufman Art is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress towards well-being of individuals and of humanity. If men lacked this capacity of being infected by art, people might be more savage still, and above all, more separated from,…

  • Cosmopolitan

    by Margaret Rowley Multiple news sources have detailed Stephen Miller’s recent accusation hurled at Jim Acosta of “cosmopolitan bias,” an insult that has been recently and repeatedly levied at so-called “left-leaning” news networks. Acosta: This whole notion of they have to learn English before they get to the United States, are we just going to…