All Tomorrow's Cultures

(from our storymap ) In my capacity as a fellow in our faculty research center, I've been doing a lot of support work for the unexpected shift to learning-at-a-distance.  At my uni, very few of us have experience teaching online.  The faculty (generally) aren't especially enthusiastic, and there hasn't really been a lot of institutional support.  So, I wasn't surprised when most of the questions I was fielding took the form of: "I do X in my class.  How can I do X online?"  Not surprised because that's the ideological frame distance education has relied upon: an exact homology between offline- and online teaching, with the physical classroom replaced by the discussion board, the lectures by videos.  But actual online courses (not our band aid efforts to stitch together something in a few days) are structured very differently than their physical counterparts.  The best classes maximize their digital affordances and don’t try to simply "reprodu...

 Maureen McHugh's 2011 collection of short stories, After the Apocalypse , is a devastating window onto the conditions of bare life--the reduction of self to homo sacer, humans evacuated of any rights until only their bare corporeality remains to be regulated by the State (Agamben 1998).   Each of the stories takes up the question of the apocalyptic, but not from the Hollywood perspective--there are no bombs, tsunami, alien invasions.  Instead, McHugh explores everyday life in the wake of disaster.  And, little by little, we're led from this novum to the realization that we are, in fact, living after the apocalypse: in the wake of successive catastrophes of capitalism, greed and environmental degradation. This is certainly the case with the second story in the collection, "Special Economics".  In a post-bird flu pandemic China, workers are in short supply, and Jieling makes her way from the provinces to Shenzhen to find her fortune in a factory. ...