The Future is Another Country
The festive season is a time when we’re confronted with the best and worst of ourselves as a society. But for academics, and particularly for those of us still toiling away in graduate school, the chance to reconnect with friends and family brings with it a formidable challenge—the perennial task of explaining, to the satisfaction of your interlocutor, what exactly it is that you study anyway, huh?
Staying with Prexy in Chicago reenergized me. I felt better about my own scholarship, and wanted to continue it. Moreover, I determined to start drawing more connections to the injustices I saw in the present.
My grandmother was right; my high school students needed me. What my grandmother may not have anticipated though was the extent to which I needed my students.
Under the guise of entertainment, fantasy, and allegory, the Trojan horse of Sci Fi sneaks in big questions about the implications of science and technology that students would do well to ponder.
The advances that helped make universities minimally accessible through needs-blind admissions, federal Pell grants, and Title IX protections were all forged by the political struggles of the generation that came before us. How are we going to expand upon them?
Neoliberalism is an incredibly complex system of political economy and there are many more questions to answer. Still, as the contributors all brought up this month, historians have an important role in deconstructing an abusive market system.
