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The Fears of a Tapering Majority: Mere Media or Growing Reality?
With Obama in Oval Office and Hispanic Americans expected to become the United States’ racial majority by 2050, news coverage of so-termed “white anxiety” has been anything but scant. Racial anxiety is hardly a new phenomenon — following the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, some whites took umbrage as their institutionally buttressed status as majority was increasingly threatened.
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Development as Money?
On a recent drive to NYC, I (of course) was listening to NPR’s All Things Considered when a piece called “Ecuador’s Hurting Families Find Hope With JUCONI” came on air. In the city of Guayaquil, Ecuador, there are thousands of street children who sell goods to the many tourists who pass through the city on the way to the Galapagos.
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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What has your technology done lately for change?
At the Nonprofit Technology Network’s (NTEN) annual conference earlier this month, the resounding theme was “change.” What were 2,000 nonprofit professionals going to take from the conference back to
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Common Knowledge and Public Dialogue: When Everybody Knows that Everybody Knows
We have all probably experienced this phenomenon: something is going on and it’s no secret. Everybody knows and everybody knows that everybody knows, but nobody is (necessarily) talking about it, much less doing anything about it.
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Of Improper Grammar-tology
My deepest interaction with rockstar French philosopher Jacques Derrida (who, for the record, looks like a Quentin Tarantino supervillain) came in a class called “Remix Culture” I took during my first term at Georgetown.
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Insider Outsider: Artists Engaging the Exotic
This past Thursday March 17, artist Peter Doig spoke at the Phillips Collection as part of their Duncan Phillips Lecture Series. A practitioner who has worked and studied in many corners of the globe, Doig (who currently resides in Trinidad) has sought to open up paintings outside of the four squares of the canvas; depicting scenes which allow the viewer to bring in their own sense of time, place, memory.
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Tweets, Tsunamis and the Toll on Common Memory
The pictures from Japan are nothing short of incredible. Unprecedented footage made its way through television and Internet news organizations almost as quickly as the wall of water that pushed through to the mainland. Viewers were left wondering whether they were watching captured footage or stock of an upcoming Hollywood summer blockbuster.
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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When Rich Meets Reality – Depicting the Benefaction of the Wealthy
In such a hyper-mediated society, it’s only fitting that watching television is one of America’s favorite and most time-consuming activities. The middle-class American family is a historic character of the small screen, immortalized in such classics as All in the Family and The Simpsons – reassuring the most robust, yet simultaneously fragile social class during bouts of racial strife and economic turmoil. Yet, as wealth disparities grow and the middle class suffers, television offers a new type of reassurance – one that proclaims that rich people are just like us.
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Aesthetics and Artifice
Most of my musings here on gnovis stem from my desire to address our everyday relationship to both the production and consumption of visual ephemera, often leaning on linguistic analysis in order to raise questions regarding the way sociocultural standards enter into our reading of visual materials; defining “what counts” as a legitimate visual move.
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Interdisciplinarity Anyone? Part Deux.
In my last blog post, I discussed President Obama’s State of the Union and America’s current treatment of international students in relation to Jane Jacobs’ book, he Death and Life of Great American Cities. The focus of the post was the idea that, much like the city planners in Jacobs’ book who wanted to clear people from city streets due to an unsubstantiated fear that busy streets meant danger, the powers that be here in America have erroneously instilled a belief that allowing international students to remain in the USA will somehow damage our way of life.
Categories: Globalization Column, The Gnovis Blog