In their blog, Modern America: Power and Politics of an Empire, spring 2014 students Sujaya Desai ’14, Maansi Vohra ’15, Najma Yakob ’14, and Bartosz Zerebecki ’15 set out to find the colonial in our supposedly post-colonial world. Through discussion, their tumblr and its followers interrogate the concept of imperialism and track its persistence in today’s world. Their project is…
Author: nonufrie
A Herstory of Activism
Itching to learn more about the activism of womyn of color at Brown University since the 1960s? Look no further than A People’s Herstory of Womyn of Color at Brown, an archive created by spring 2014 students Sarah Day Dayon ’15, Kendra Cornejo ’15, Hector Peralta ’16, and Julmar Carcedo ’16. This rich archive includes eight interviews with…
Resource: National Priorities Project
The National Priorities Project seeks to make the federal budget easy to understand in order to encourage people to make informed choices about how they want their taxes spent. The website includes a huge amount of information about the federal budget, how taxes are allocated, and even has a tool for you to see how your…
Resource: Costs of War
At some point over the course of spring 2014, the class explored an informative–and enraging, for some–resource that details the costs of the wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq since 2001. The Costs of War Project was assembled by dozens of lawyers, economists, anthropologists, and many other academics and professionals who came together to analyze the human,…
“Studying History Is Kind of Important”
For their final project, spring 2014 students Lily Novak ’14, Kirah Nelson ’14, Will Fesperman ’15, Sara Winnick ’15, and Yi-Hung Liu (graduate student) created a zine and teaching resource entitled “‘Studying History is Kind of Important’: An Analysis of US History Classes in Providence, RI.” Their project brings together critical readings of theories in education…
Resource: The Refugee Project
The Refugee Project is a great interactive map created with UN data to help visualize refugee movements since 1975. Words can’t do the wealth of information on the website justice, so go check it out for yourself!
Get Gentrified
Breaking with the generally sobering tone of the course, spring 2014 students Brienne Ellis and Eddie Grystar created a promotional website for a fake app to promote the gentrification of Oakland, gentri.fy. From the proclamation on the front page of the site–”A brighter tomorrow starts with you”–to the list of partners (Lean In of course wants in…
From the Archives: Displacement, Genocide, Resistance
Produced by fall 2012 students Eduarda Araujo, Jonathon Tollefson, and Mika Zacks, this zine, “Struggles of Our Time: Memories from Palestine and Guatemala,” is filled at once with exquisite multimedia pieces, a collection of poetry, photography, and other artwork from survivors of displacement, and prose elegant enough to be art itself. In its 44 pages, the zine tells a story…
From the Archives: Nuclear Narratives
Barry Elkington’s website* for Professor Shibusawa’s Stories to Live By course presents the history of nuclear weapons production in the American Southwest. Pairing insightful prose with thought-provoking videos, Elkington draws out subtle–and some unsubtle–themes in the public discourse around nuclear weapons testing and production. The essays on each page shed light on these themes, which range from the American…
From the Archives: El Trujillato
Women and Nationalism: El Trujillato. The title of this teaching resource, a final project from spring 2013 by Saudi Garcia, Madilynn Castillo, and Kate Blessing, understates the depth of the research behind the words on the screen. Though the site focuses on the impact of the 1930-1961 rule of Rafael Trujillo on women, it also explores various aspects of the history…