“We believe that education is the solution to help combat misinformation, and educators are on the front line of that fight.” ~ Ebonee Rice
With so much coming at us, how are we to tell fact from fiction, truth from fabrication? The News Literacy Project has tips, tools and techniques to help. Ebonee Rice, VP for NLP’s Educator Network, joins me to share the wealth and engage our curiosity in cultivating good information hygiene.
Listen to my fascinating conversation with Arlington educator Patricia Hunt on how she uses news literacy to teach government and civics.
A new Pew Research Center analysis finds that those who rely most on social media for political news are less engaged and less knowledgable about the news.
I don’t remember the first time I mowed our yard, but it must have been sometime in the spring of 1988.
Today was maybe the last.
That’s hundreds of mows in the interim, all — with a few minor exceptions when I was very pregnant or otherwise indisposed — executed by yours truly and an assortment of clunky machines. I was glad to be rid of the gasoline-powered rig, pleased to finesse the power cord.
I can’t say it’s been a chore I’ve cherished, but there has always been something satisfying about the indisputably finished product. The sudden clean-shaven order that emerges from our slightly shabby fifth of an acre, coming right up next to respectable. I could point to the effort with satisfaction, knowing I wasn’t the only one who knew work had been done.
Not much else in my life has ever been like that, so I’ve always appreciated that aspect of mowing. Kind of like painting: immediate visible results, however time-limited.
But today might have been the last pass. We go to settlement in less than a week and while we’ll still be clearing out the house for a while yet, I might dodge the next mow bullet. We’ll see; it will depend on the rain.
So I tried to savor this mow, if such a thing is possible. To feel the engine’s churn, the singular scratch of cut grass on the back of my throat, the sun on my hatted head as I swept the drying blades from the slate.
I put some extra effort into the trimming and raked the curb clean. It felt good to honor the process, a little bit of respect to the place we’ve called home all these many mowing seasons.
“[We] have to be curious about what has to happen in the space between where we are and where we want to be.” ~ Ayanna Spencer
Ayanna Spencer joins guest host Julie Williams-Reyes to explore protest as a radical form of curiosity and how that has unfolded in Ms. Spencer’s journey to, and work with, Black feminist theory. (Recommended reading list, below.)
I’m so pleased to share the second in a collaborative series of interviews hosted by graduate and undergraduate students who were enrolled in the fall 2019 class Topics in Philosophy at American University.
As part of their final papers, students conceived and pitched potential episodes and interviews for Choose to be Curious. It was a privilege to listen to their presentations and hear their ideas.
Guest host Julie Williams-Reyes explains what brought her to this conversation, a journey that embodies my own working definition of curiosity — to act on the idea that there is opportunity in the unknown:
In my endeavors to critically explore the ways in which curiosity motivates and shows up in the world of protest, there was no doubt that Black Feminists, Black women, Black folx, and BIPOC more generally, have a deep seeded history in the practice of radical protest, radical curiosity, radical imagination, and in striving for worlds otherwise.
In a world marked by colonial, capitalist, and patriarchal domination, survival in itself is an act of resistance and an act of curiosity. It is a form of protest that affirms that the lives, histories, and futures of BIPOC peoples cannot merely be erased nor relegated to oblivion. Marginalized lived experiences who survive and protest in the name of dismantling the aforementioned system of domination are radical sites of curious resistance rooted in the belief that not only are other worlds possible, but they are tangible realities meant to be realized in the now. Not soon, not later, not sometime, but imperatively, in the now.
In light of our socio-historical context, our conversation in this episode focuses its lens on Black feminist practice in the US context. With that said, it is imperative to keep in mind that the tradition of Black feminist theory and practice is transnational, it is worldly, and any action taken here in the US is informed by the greater historical situation at play. The US context is one thread of the lineage of Black feminist resistance that necessarily connects with Africana, Afro-Caribbean, Afro-German, Palestinian, and many more legacies of resistance. Being curious about the interconnectedness of these threads exposes the entrenchment and multi-dimensionality of the hyper-capitalist, colonial, patriarchical system of domination at play. The system is structural, institutionalized, economic, political, cultural, and transnational.
In this way, an act of resistance and protest led in the US must, through the embodiment and practice of curiosity, reinforce protest as interconnected with the struggle of BIPOC from the system of domination and oppression everywhere. Carol Boyce Davies confirms that “any contemporary cultural and political work that wants to move out of fixity and specific imperialistic interpellations has to account for its particular location, articulate its own specificity, and move toward the recognition of the existence of other cultures and political realities in some cross-cultural or translocational way (Left of Karl Marx, 2008).” This practice of curiosity is fundamental to imagining and creating worlds otherwise.
Learn more about Black Feminist thought with this recommended reading list provided by Ms. Spencer:
M. Bahati Kuumba’s Gender and Social Movements
Beth Richie’s Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America’s Prison Nation
Charlene A. Carruthers’ Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements
Aishah Shahidah Simmons’ film No! The Rape Documentary and anthology, Love with Accountability: Digging Up the Roots of Child Sexual Abuse
bell hooks’ Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery
Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mothers Gardens
Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters
Barbara’s Smith’s Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology
The Edited Collection- All the Women are White, All the Blacks are Men, But Some of Us are Brave: Black Women’s Studies
What’s a wanderer to do in a pandemic? How can we get away while we stay close to home? Where can we go when so much is closed? Demian Perry’s passion project TownCalendar.org has answers. He makes the case for choosing to be curious about the places right around us… You need this conversation!
Check out TownCalendar.org for events and outings of every sort.
Demian mentioned these cool apps: Merlin and Birdnet for identifying bird calls; MTB Project for mountain biking information; and AllTrails for, well, all kinds of trail information.
Listening to the Universe 