Temple University Press Journals
Not a member yet
549 research outputs found
Sort by
Rules and Consequences
No full text“Every teacher should have a clear set of rules and consequences in their classroom.” “Teachers need to maintain control of their classrooms at all times.” “Students may not show it, but deep down, they all crave structure and order.” In the abstract, it seemed pretty doable. After all, rules and consequences made me feel safe. Why wouldn’t they make my students feel the same way? I soon learned that lots of people really don’t feel the same way about rules and consequences as I had learned to feel when I was young. And, as I have discovered, their resentments are often very well justified.Today, I live in a predominantly Black neighborhood of a predominantly Black city and I teach in a predominantly—and historically—Black school. I belong to a predominantly Black labor union. The culture of New Orleans is rooted in Blackness. I’ve done a lot of work in recent years to understand what my whiteness means in this context. Peers, elders, and students have helped me learn not only what it means to be Black in a racist society but also what it means to be white in a culture built to oppress people of color. As a result, I am increasingly aware of the delicate danger of giving a white teacher authority over Black students. My affinity for rules and consequences weaponizes me in this context. If I am not careful, I have the power to do some real, lasting damage
Facing Up to Neanderthals
No full textI open by thanking Terence Keel both for inviting me to participate in this dialogue and for so effectively framing two distinct stances on how to understand the role of race in human genetics research today. This discussion is important to critical assessments of racial thinking—its depth and breadth in contemporary societies—but also to encouraging a correct understanding of genes and risk factors related to disease more broadly. For the sake of debate, I first elaborate on the position I have taken in critiquing social constructivist claims about race, then offer my thoughts on how an attention to Neanderthals provides a broader understanding of racial thinking as it pertains to the question of variation within a species
This Sacred Moment: Listening, Responsibility, and Making Room for Justice
No full textWhen Ingrid Waldron asked me to create and share a summary of the excellent and juicy presentations and discussion at the symposium titled “Over the Line: A Conversation on Race, Place, and the Environment,” held in Halifax on October 27, 2017, I agreed right away. I’d planned to be at the symposium listening carefully and taking notes anyway. Little did I know that I had agreed to share my “hot take” verbally, in front of everyone, immediately after the final presentation! I’m much more comfortable sharing my thoughts on something after I have mulled it over for a day, a week, or—even better—a few months. The short series of small thoughts in this article are the closest I could come to synthesizing my impressions of the day, in that moment. The result is not comprehensive, but I hope it expresses the vulnerable and hopeful mood I was sensing, along with the appetite for deep resistance and change in the room at the end of a whole day of badass idea-sharing
Physician Responses to the Opioid Epidemic in the Context of Population-Based Pain and Opioid Care
Get PDFThe opioid epidemic is a multifaceted phenomenon in which the prescription of opioids for pain still plays a significant role. However, a plethora of efforts in the physician community following many years of epidemiological research regarding patterns and characteristics of prescription opioid misuse, abuse, and addiction have led to best practice guidelines agreed upon widely. Adoption of these guidelines and specific changes across health care systems and in individual provider practices have resulted in improved opioid prescribing patterns, which are safer and no less effective in addressing pain. The experience at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center is highlighted as an example of progressive change to address the simultaneous epidemics of poorly controlled chronic pain affecting 100 million adults in this country and prescription opioid use disorders affecting 2.2 million adults
What Can the Slim Initiative in Genomic Medicine for the Americas (SIGMA) Contribute to Preventing, Treating, or Decreasing the Impact of Diabetes among Mexicans and Latin Americans?
No full textIn this commentary I set aside the potentially fruitful question of whether social scientists should be open to or reject genetic conceptions of race in research that purports to contribute to improving health and reducing health inequalities. I address instead the science underlying one such research endeavor: the Slim Initiative in Genomic Medicine for the Americas (SIGMA), which triggered the current debate. I argue that SIGMA, like similar studies, has nothing to add to current knowledge about how to prevent, treat, or decrease inequalities pertaining to common diseases such as diabetes, and that therefore there is no social value in pursuing them. I also engage conceptual problems with the notions of “genetic predisposition” and “heritability,” both of which I have discussed in detail elsewhere. The basic thrust of my argument is that (1) the nonadditive and developmental nature of complex phenotypes like diabetes precludes the empirical identification of whatever may be meant by “predisposing gene variants” and (2) heritability measures are useful only for selective breeding and therefore of no relevance to research in human health. I conclude that identifying genes presumed to “predispose” individuals or populations to diabetes and other common diseases is a fruitless enterprise, whether “predisposed” populations are organized around race or any other category
The Play’s the Thing: An Interview with Rosten Woo
No full textI think that “creative place-making” as a concept means something very different from when you combine the words “creative” and “place-making”; it is an extremely contested term and contested set of practices. It’s equivalent in some ways to the words “social practice.” It’s bizarre to describe some art as being social practice; this implies that other kinds of art are not social in their construction, which I think lets those other artworks off the hook. Painting is a social practice—but a social practice that is largely organized around producing objects for rich people. That’s social as well. I don’t want to say that everything is everything, but certainly creative place-making is—in the same way we are talking about democratizing the idea of who can be a curator, I’m interested in democratizing who is a creative place-maker. I think the mode in which I am most comfortable working on the idea of place-making is the mode of documentary. I’m interested in working to change the way that people can see a space and, via that specific moment, change the way that the space can grow or what it can become
The Dependent Origination of Whiteness
No full textThe Buddhist teachings on dependent origination describe how the process of rebirth—also known as becoming—is caused by a deluded consciousness feeding on a person’s body and mind, as well as on external objects of craving and aversion. The process of racial formation that turns European American bodies into white people who feed off of the land, labor, and life force of people of color can be seen as an example of dependent origination. This article argues that whiteness is a deeply rooted existential experience in the bodies and minds of European Americans that serves as a firewall against perpetrator guilt and trauma; it also explains why the threat white people perceive in demographic shifts triggers an existential fear of annihilation. The Buddhist teachings in this article correspond with the concepts of racial formation and racial project articulated by Michael Omi and Howard Winant, and the concept of the possessive investment in whiteness articulated by George Lipsitz. The article then uses the Buddhist antiracist lens formed from these connections to analyze past and present white supremacist behavior in the United States, as well as past and present antiracist behavior in the United States, paying particular attention to Martin Luther King’s involvement in the Chicago Freedom Movement. Although not the primary focus of this article, connections are also made between the Buddhist elements of this analysis and clinical trauma therapy in order to ground this discussion in a secular, empirical, trauma-informed context
Stanton Heights: Intersections of Art and Science in an Era of Mass Incarceration
No full textI have the tremendous privilege of working among a collection of artists, activists, incarcerated men, police officers, professors, students, and writers. Some of us straddle multiple categories, but we all come together as fictive kin and chosen family. Without realizing it, we have always been tied together; our connective thread stretches back to American slavery, if not further, and can most easily be observed in the ongoing calamity of mass incarceration. These links and overlaps provide a framework for bearing witness to white supremacy as it plays out through the US justice system.Finding a true starting point for these relationships is unlikely, so I began mapping the network within the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program, or more specifically the local think tank that emerged from that larger program. However, this cartography quickly evolved into a story of people who are bound for powerful interactions with law enforcement, the legal system, corrections, one another, and themselves. Whether creating a strange and terrible saga or a series of smaller projects, our goal is always to share these experiences in a manner that capitalizes on the academic depth and breadth of our ranks while also conveying that this is not simply the work that we do but rather engagement with one of the most severe social problems this nation has produced. As such, it is an experience that makes it difficult for participants to remain complicit with malignant authority.This work continually changes us, and by telling our stories, I hope to push readers to consider the wider totality of lived experiences included within them. Moreover, our group is working to build solutions that address the human suffering we have observed. This article offers a perspective, comprising many different perspectives, that is the foundation for a program designed to address the disconnection between the public, the police, and men in prison