Muinteoir_Saoirse [she/her]

A jersey that says CCCP on it next to the logo of a Nazi company, capitalism is wild.

What type of thing are you wanting to read? Any topic in particular?

We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics edited by Andrea Abi-Karam and Kay Gabriel is good if you’re in the mood for another trans poetry book.

Transgender Marxism edited by Elle O’Rourke and Jules Joanne Gleeson is a pretty fun collection of essays, as is Susan Stryker and Stephen Wittle’s The Transgender Studies Reader.

If you want something else Palestine-oriented, Ahed Tamimi’s They Called Me a Lioness: A Palestinian Girl’s Fight For Freedom is a pretty good memoir from a young girl’s perspective (she was thrown in jail for slapping an IOF soldier back in 2018 when she was a teenager).

Nada Elia’s Greater Than the Sum of Our Parts: Feminism, Inter/Nationalism, and Palestine is a good overview at feminist movements in Palestine.

I was a big fan of El Jones’ Abolitionist Intimacies and Ardath Whynacht’s Insurgent Love: Abolition and Domestic Homicide.

Currently reading Zheng Wang’s Finding Women in the State: A Socialist Feminist Revolution in the People’s Republic of China, 1949-1964 which has been pretty interesting so far, as well as Learning in Adulthood: A Comprehensive Guide which has been hit or miss, but introduced me to the concept of Learning Cities, an educational concept that China began experimenting with in 61 locations in the early 00s (80% of Beijing’s streets had an educational centre by the end of the decade as part of this; they leveraged their administrative levels to establish Learning Families, which networked to create Learning Streets, which networked to create Learning Neighbourhoods, and then Learning Districts, on to Learning Cities (with the ultimate aim of networking Learning Cities into Learning Provinces, and thusly creating a Learning Nation). This was really interesting to read while reading Finding Women in the State, as the administrative levels here mirror those used by the Women’s Federation in the 50s to engage women throughout the country in the socialist project.

Exactly! And I want to stress the part you said about discussion forums in humanities.

Because get this: the university courses that are teaching educators how to deliver their education uses that format and so educators are learning through that format themselves and so at best that ends up being the format they replicate in their own educational practices. And yeah, it is better than some other online formats, and often-times is the “best” you can get in an asynchronous class (which is often necessary since these are not full time students, they have full time jobs and families). But it’s a far cry from a comprehensive use of the best the Internet could offer if we ever had a chance to truly leverage its potential.

I also want to say that aside from online requiring way different skills and approaches both for the learner and the educator, there is a tendency to use online education as an excuse to pack classes to an overwhelming degree. So you have educators who do not have curricula adapted for online, who do not have the training or skills to adapt it, who are often also unused to the technology, and who have three or four times more learners (at best) than they do in person for the same time period. And no one interested in allocating the resources to do anything about any of this, because it’s just good business to treat educational workers this way and to never care about the learners to begin with.

I don’t have a particular insight to share, but I would like to share my perspective as an educator.

A large portion of my work specifically is curriculum development for new online programming that was hastily cobbled together in the wake of the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak. The immediate need for a complete switch to online learning shifted a lot of priorities. With the return to face-to-face, we’ve made it a commitment at my organization to fine-tune and develop online and hybrid coursework in response to something that was made glaringly obvious: the Internet provided a massive benefit to learners facing a wide variety of barriers.

Childcare, work commitments, dis/ability, adherence to rigid class schedules, transportation, location, addiction, criminalization (and the multitude of access barriers that come with that), spoken language proficiency, social comfort: the list of barriers that can be overcome or reduced by the application of online/hybrid learning is unbelievable.

Sure, there’s a whole host of other barriers that come with online learning–device/web access, proficiency, the digital divide, a need for greater internal motivation, different learning styles/skills–but the benefits are impossible to ignore.

However the implementation of online learning is really all over the place.

Distance education’s origins lie in correspondence schooling, which was introduced largely to target rural areas and played a massive role in early educational efforts for women, as they were able to access education while at home. This evolved with radio, and later, television, educational programming. This was supported by governments/granting bodies so far as it was economically beneficial to raise women and rural workers’ educational level. But no farther. Online education was adopted rather quickly, but it primarily followed the correspondence education model. The field of pedagogy (and the newly burgeoning field of andragogy) was slow to incorporate models of education that could fully make use of the unprecedented interactivity offered by online distance courses.

Development on this front was generally slow (though of course more rapid in locations with large educational deficits and rural populations). You can probably already see why: distance education was revolutionary because of its ability to reach otherwise marginalized learners. Providing access to education for previously unreached communities is exactly how bourgeois education does not want to function. The barriers are a function of the system specifically to ensure that certain parts of the population are funnelled away from pursuing education beyond what’s needed to socially reproduce the workers required for any given area based on the level of industry present. Efforts to improve distance were met with low funding, and derision. The popular conception of distance education as inferior was essential to undervaluing the potential of online education.

Then came 2020 and suddenly the educational access of the people who were meant to be educated to maintain the status quo was threatened. There was now a rapid expansion of online education programming. Distance education needed to be folded into the educational models of the institutions that had been underfunding them, and people had to be convinced that actually distance education was valid. But at the same time, there was always an eye to what would happen next, when people would be back in classrooms. So distance education couldn’t be too good, it had to always serve as a stop-gap.

What we got instead was a haphazard implementation of mass online education programming being slapped together on no notice by overworked, underpaid, and underqualified educational workers. Online education requires an entirely different educational praxis, but the pedagogical models that educators had been working with had largely (and purposefully) excluded any in-depth understanding of that praxis.

Educators who had no knowledge of delivering online curricula were trying to convert in-person education into online education. Types of learning that actually work really well online weren’t being implemented or focused on, and types of learning that are completely abysmal online were being shoehorned in. And just as educators were starting to figure out what changes needed to be made, and what learning they needed to undergo to update their practice, that influx of funding and attention for online education dried up in the “return to normal.”

There is some really amazing work being done in the fields of pedagogy and andragogy to develop online educational models (ones with implications for its ability to function as a radical democratization of learning), however, as you said: education at large is seen as an investment in human capital. There is always a struggle between the desire to build powerful revolutionary educational praxis, and the complete dearth of resources allocated to anything that threatens the status quo.

The book was written a decade before this though.

When you run the installer, uncheck the boxes for updating directx or c++ or whatever. That’s what is failing to download.

I don’t care about DNA stuff, and to be honest there is a lot of weird race science wrapped up in people’s obsession with DNA. Nor can DNA actually tell you how someone looked in real life; it is simply one of the many factors that go into someone’s complexion and skin tone.

I gotta say though, there is something a bit uncomfortable about asserting that Egypt is being “secretive” with their cultural honoured and revered dead, when the history of “Egyptology” is the pillage and plunder of Egyptian history at the hands of white scientists seeking to build their own civilizational narrative.

No one owes western science unfettered access to their history or the right to assert western science as some objective truth-building endeavour.

It’s probably because in real life Ramesses II had red hair, and a lot of white people seem to have a hard time imagining someone with natural red hair having dark skin and eyes, even though that was sort of a big deal for Egyptians at the time.

That being said, fair skin and light coloured eyes are not an entirely uncommon trait for the area (North Africa and West Asia, Egypt’s sphere of influence at the time). Not likely they were traits possessed by Ramesses, though a very questionable race science examination tried to assert he was a fair-skinned man of Amazigh (Berber) descent in the 70s, which is probably where they drew this idea of him from. Though they nailed his big beautiful nose.

Edit: On further inspection it sort of looks like they just made a beefier blue-eyed version of Yul Brynner from the Ten Commandments