Marco Rubio’s stolen hip-hop valor. He might claim that Tupac is his favorite rapper, but Tupac would’ve hated everything Rubio stands for.
Some undiplomatic thoughts about Tyler Austin Harper’s viral essay in The Atlantic about leaving academia out of frustration at being a “Token Black Professor.” I don’t exactly agree with his critiques of the “woke” university system, but it’s an opportunity to reflect on what’s even at stake in the culture wars.
A new story exposes the plight of students at my university skipping meals and classes because they can’t afford life. The problem is growing, I see it up close everyday, and it’s only going to get worse in a k-shaped economy.
In the back half of the episode, I speak with Robbie Shilliam—one of the most prominent postcolonial scholars today—about international relations’ racial reckoning since the BLM uprisings of 2020. We also discuss:
What made Hans Morgenthau a theorist of race relations, not just international relations;
Why the field of IR has a racial blind spot in the first place;
Why IR’s leading journals, editors, and scholars re-engaged racial questions after 2020 but without drawing on what the discipline’s own canonical thinkers had to say about race (much of which was bad and warrants critical engagement);
Why the Gen Z and Millennial generation of scholars are possibly built differently when it comes to racial issues and historical IR; and
How the concept of “frontier” unites Republicanism and imperialism in some of the early thinkers of IR like Frederick Jackson Turner, William Allen, and Merze Tate.
Catch the episode wherever you get podcasts, or watch on YouTube.
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About the student housing/rent crisis. The days of boutique mini-projects and technocratic voodoo are over. The market won't solve this (duh), neither will NGOs, I doubt democracy will, but even if it did, it wouldn't help the current cohort or the next few. It's back to basics for all of us. The radical approach would be mass, organized squatting. It's been done before, and maybe it's something your students need to hear about from a sympathetic teacher.
Hope you are feeling better!
Aura farming