by Brian J Peterson
(Indiana University Press, £26.99)
THE revolution led by Thomas Sankara in Burkina Faso from 1983 to 1987 might only have lasted four years, but it achieved unparalleled advances in healthcare, women’s rights, literacy, ecological policy, infrastructure, action on Third World debt and nation-building in post-colonial west Africa.
Sankara himself was charismatic and eloquent. His brief appearance on the world stage cast a vivid light on the racism, the inequalities and exploitation that underlay the post-colonial world order during the cold war and the dawning era of neoliberal economics of Thatcher, Reagan and Mitterrand.
He dazzled and alarmed the status quo not just because he was a soldier with the brain of a revolutionary but because of his steadfast incorruptibility.
Michal Raucher is an assistant professor of Jewish Studies at Rutgers University. In her research she is interested in how Jewish women in the US and Israel push boundaries, reinforce norms, and construct moral worlds. Michal has a background in bioethics, religion, and gender studies. As a Fulbright Fellow, Dr. Raucher conducted research on the reproductive ethics of Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) Jewish women in Israel. Her first book, which is based on this research, was published by Indiana University Press in 2020. It is titled, Conceiving Agency: Reproductive Authority among Haredi Women. Prior to joining the Rutgers faculty she was an assistant professor at the University of Cincinnati and taught at the Jewish Theological Seminary. Michal has degrees from Columbia University, JTS, the University of Pennsylvania, and a doctorate from Northwestern University. She is currently researching the ordination of Orthodox Jewish women in Israel and America.
Online, Zoom • Sundays, May 23–June 27, 2021
For some of us, an unblank page is scarier than a blank one. Many writing workshops encourage us to improve a composition through revision, which only characterizes a draft as a mess of problems to be solved. But what if revision were a playful experiment, not a search for solutions? What if our motivation were curiosity, not fear of failure? In this workshop, perfectionism is banned. Results are secondary: what matters is process. Participants will approach a single text with multiple modes of revision to release the hidden story inside the story, sharpen the story’s friction and energy, discover metaphor, and make the language more singular and alive. Light reading and writing homework. Experiments will be shared aloud in class.
Melissa L. Caldwell is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, the founder of the UCSC Design Anthropology Fab Lab, and past editor of Gastronomica: The Journal of Critical Food Studies. A fieldworking ethnographer, her research examines how and why people help one another and how ordinary acts of compassion turn into forms of social activism that respond to pressing social and political issues. She has been conducting ethnographic research in Russia and postsocialist Europe since the early 1990s, and has recently begun research in Hong Kong and the United States. She has researched and written on such topics as food poverty and charity; the role of faith-based social welfare and humanitarian programs in responding to poverty, racial discrimination and violence, and gender inequalities; the moralities of food cultures and food relief programs; and the social justice dimensions of hacking and disruptive creative technologies, especially among food hacker