@carrideen@c18.masto.host
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carrideen

@carrideen@c18.masto.host

Lecturer at Yeshiva College in #18thC & #19thC #Literature. #Bentham & #queer #aesthetics (wrote Uncommon Sense, UVaP 2022), national #debt and #slavery, #Bronx #cats #boardgames #film

Treasurer of the #Johnsonians, philosophy #reviews editor of JECS.

#Admin of c18.masto.host, an instance for anyone with an interest or scholarship in any aspect of the global eighteenth century. All disciplines welcome!

http://carrieshanafelt.com
https://www.yu.edu/faculty/pages/shanafelt-carrie

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

carrideen, to random
@carrideen@c18.masto.host avatar

For a long time, I've said that the thing I love about the gothic novel, in its eighteenth-century form, is that it appealed to young women particularly because it suggests that their fears are not stupid or insignificant; there really is a conspiracy against you, and you must act, now. (The conspiracy is patriarchy! They're not wrong!)

Teaching The Turn of the Screw today, it's like the perfect meta-gothic. The real danger is how we act on our certainty of danger!

Cf. Bodies Bodies Bodies.

carrideen, to random
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A piece of advice, for free:

Don't try putting an onion somewhere new. Just put the onions in the same place every time, so that you don't forget about them until they gradually liquify and mysteriously fill your home with a faint, untraceable odor, that, when finally exposed directly to the organs of sense, results in an hour of retching and cleansing and sorrow. Onions go in the onion place, every time!

carrideen, to random
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Maybe it wasn't a good idea to turn the police into the world's most overfunded and ignorant paramilitary organization in the world?

carrideen,
@carrideen@c18.masto.host avatar

I grew up in the 90s when you could talk back to police. I grew up talking back to police. Learning how to refuse to obey police was one of my earliest lessons. (Talk about white privilege!) After 9/11, every single moron with a badge suddenly became a little god who must be obeyed, and now they're carrying machine guns for some reason and wearing camo for some reason, and driving miniature tanks for some reason, and they bark "you're welcome" at you for some reason. They march now.

carrideen,
@carrideen@c18.masto.host avatar

One of the many many lessons of Abu Ghraib that we refuse to learn is that when you give people no training, no oversight, no consequences, no ethical boundaries, and tell them to get 100% compliance, especially from people they hate, they will become sadistic torturers and murderers. Human beings are not compliant. Anyone who knows about human beings understands this, and most of us face consequences for exercising authority with violence. The police are making little Abu Ghraibs, everywhere.

carrideen,
@carrideen@c18.masto.host avatar

The only excuse I've heard for increased police power that makes any sense at all is that our gun laws in the US are so lax and useless that police are genuinely frightened out of their minds at all times. Hey, I have a very cool and ingenious solution for this that does not require every single person in the country to own multiple machine guns to be able to leave the house. In fact, hear me out, what if NO ONE had access to thousands of military-grade weapons?

carrideen,
@carrideen@c18.masto.host avatar

In 2024, the NYPD budget was doubled from last year to $11B. We pay an average of over $1K per person in taxes to have these assholes harass us and hold our city hostage. Our public pool can't open because we can't afford lifeguards, but there are crowds of tooled-up cops in every subway station playing Candy Crush on their phones and forcing unhoused people to do tricks for them. And if anyone says a word about defunding, they get even more useless and violent to retaliate against the city.

carrideen,
@carrideen@c18.masto.host avatar

All I'm saying is, if I were a university president and some unarmed undergrads were disagreeing with me about where their tuition dollars are spent to support a side of an international conflict, the very last people I would call for consultation and support are the NYPD, the world's worst-trained, dumbest, cruelest, richest, most racist militia, who are sitting on a pile of war machines they are sad about never getting to use on soft-bodied civilians.

apodoxus, to random
@apodoxus@mastodon.online avatar

Is it okay to feel the way I do? Please give me permission to feel how I feel. 😆

(This post is ironic. I think a lot of us implicitly think like this sometimes.)

carrideen,
@carrideen@c18.masto.host avatar

@apodoxus No you mussssssn't feel that way! Stop now! Everyone can see you!

carrideen, to random
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Who else grew up leaving May Day baskets on friends' doors? I lived in Omaha, NE from age 6-8, so I only had two years of May Day. The first year, I had no idea what was going on (I have to... kiss people?) and the second year, I got really competitive about it (basket-making and running away). Then we moved to Kansas and I never saw a May Day basket again.
https://www.npr.org/sections/npr-history-dept/2015/04/30/402817821/a-forgotten-tradition-may-basket-day

carrideen, to random
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Does anyone recommend a good academic translator, English to French? (I can pay!) It's a small job, under 1000 words, in philosophy.

carrideen, to random
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I don't know if this is known outside of academic circles, but most universities are desperate for enrollments these days. Over the past 10ish years, unis changed tactics from attracting students with perks (some of them admittedly dumb) to slashing everything in sight--support staff, new faculty, majors, equipment, software, facilities, retirement plans, landscaping, even PR and marketing. Radical top-down decisions like "Who cares about foreign languages?" made whole divisions disappear. 1/

carrideen,
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That is, universities used to be (well or badly) competing for students by offering something unique, promising extra career support or honors courses, competing in rare Div I sports, building a climbing wall, hosting ice cream or puppy therapy on the quad. But when the pivot to evisceration happened, it turned out there's nothing you can identify that is foundational enough to a liberal arts education that it can't be ruined and trashed tomorrow to save tens of thousands of $$. 2/

carrideen,
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Meanwhile, all that axing has required unis to pay out absolutely shocking amounts, millions upon millions of $$, to forcibly retired admins who might have stood in the way of strangling the humanities or the lab sciences in the bathtub. (We all think it's just our discipline until the remaining handful of faculty get together and find out not even math or chemistry has a pot to piss in.) Students are paying more and more in tuition (and debt) for a product that is stunningly substandard. 3/

carrideen,
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But at least the students can hang on to the community and vision of the university, its commitment to diversity and social justice, the boldly framed photos of students from all religions and races, giggling on the quad over books that no one is around to assign anymore? And that's where this protest season is different from the one in 2014 when Michael Brown's murderer was not indicted. Universities no longer promise free discourse, or community, or justice. They don't care if you go there. 4/

carrideen,
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There are a lot of universities that are a few pesky undergrads away from becoming a hedge fund. Students endure hours of classes taught by local community members with no degree who like making $1000 to do improv stand-up at captive young people for four months. They create clubs for people who like to read novels or learn about history or discuss philosophy or learn languages. Students mentor each other in programming, finance, and grad school exams, as well as justice. 5/

carrideen,
@carrideen@c18.masto.host avatar

That also means that they get most of their information and direction from the internet--this crumbling, shitty, corrupted internet full of misinformation, scams, conspiracy theories, and some desperately earnest people--rather than from the mentors they have gone into nightmarish debt to learn from. Remember that they are every single bit as smart and capable as any other young people who have ever existed. They just haven't been taught much, and some have taught themselves well. 6/

carrideen,
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They have paid more and received less than any other college students in history. Faculty have been complaining for 20 years and longer about universities being run "like a business" because universities don't work like businesses. But for the past 10 years, it's admins that haven't run the uni "like a business." They're not interested in providing a service for a consumer, or marketing that service effectively. They are making purely financial decisions regardless of consumer experience. 7/

carrideen,
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(e.g. asking police to come over and blind their students with rubber bullets, etc.) 8/

18+ reginasbread, to random
@reginasbread@homo.promo avatar

are mixed drinks with beer still a thing? I just remembered that once upon a time, beer with banana juice was a summer hit. before the time of radlers, bitter taste haters would add raspberry syrup.

carrideen,
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@reginasbread I think shandies are pretty common.

carrideen,
@carrideen@c18.masto.host avatar

@tkinias
Ooh--and the michelada! Like a beer bloody mary.
@reginasbread

carrideen, to random
@carrideen@c18.masto.host avatar

Trauma is information. Someone who has experienced violence knows more about violence than someone who has always been safe. Someone who has a disability knows more about disability than someone who has always been able. I think about this whenever big criminal trials are in the news, that they weed out jurors who have been assaulted, violated, attacked, discriminated against, because they can't be "objective" about violence. I don't trust anyone who thinks inexperience is objectivity.

carrideen,
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@WhiteCatTamer @DrSuzanne In Ellison v. Brady (1991), the fact that a woman who was stalked and harassed at work kept her cool, wrote everything down, presented records of the harassment to her employer, and asked for her harasser to be removed from the office rather than being relocated herself, was all used as evidence against her because she wasn't acting like a traumatized woman. A traumatized woman, according to the courts, is hysterical and unreliable. Not hysterical? Then she's a liar.

carrideen,
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@WhiteCatTamer @DrSuzanne (redacted to prevent boosting and harassment)

carrideen,
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@WhiteCatTamer @DrSuzanne As retaliation for making a complaint, she then put him in charge of writing an assessment of my work that year, even though I outranked him. She later rolled my eyes when I brought it up and said, "It's called HAZING, Carrie." And people wonder why I resigned a tenured professorship!

StefanThinks, to random
@StefanThinks@beige.party avatar

Inspired by Stephen Hawking, to test if time travel is possible, I threw a party for time travelers but sent out the invitations afterward to see if anyone came.

Nobody came, but I don't know if it’s because time travel doesn't exist or everyone hates me.

carrideen,
@carrideen@c18.masto.host avatar

@Alice When I was living in a small town of 7000 people, two of my coworkers and I invented a fake band we were in, called Heinous Peinous, and we would tell communal lies to anyone in town about what kind of music we played, how hard we rocked. Shame you missed us, we'd say.

Later in the same town, I started a band with two other coworkers called Cxck Wxzards, and we really did play, very loud, in one of our basements, so it would echo really loud, and people would gather around the house.

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