MA & PhD programs

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How about a little respect, please?

Okay, time for more venting and dissertation blues. Haul out the tiny violins, please, and also everyone get ready to sing along with Arethra Franklin singing her wonderful “Respect”… Whew! Always love good, passionate music. So, now that we all feel better for that, let me get into my grumpy pants again. This log is…

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Reading & voting: Williams’ “Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family & Place”

As I write this I’ve just spent the past two or three hours sitting in the tire shop and waiting for a tire change. It was busy there; fortunately I knew it might take a while and planned ahead so I had my drink and one of my textbooks to read. The book’s cover is…

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Thoughts on V. Shiva’s “Staying Alive”

I’m reading Vandana Shiva’s Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, & Development for an on-line class on Ecofeminism which I’m TAing. The following are two comments made on the class forum at different times. While reading both the book and the forum comments, I was reminded of a study I read about many years ago (which means…

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The unexamined dissertation: not worth writing?

As some who read my blog may know already, I’m currently struggling with the process of writing my dissertation proposal. Despite writing being one of the things I do best and most easily, and for various reasons that aren’t important right now, I’ve had some nervous procrastination issues with writing this proposal. Thus my adviser…

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A Paean to the Librarian

My dissertation proposal research continues apace – sometimes stutteringly slowly, other times with a swiftness and surety which reassures me that I’m on the right path and doing the right thing. I need those moments, believe me! This is one of those moments. I’ve just gotten off the phone with the CIIS librarian who’s also…

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Refusing Standard Masculinities

The following was part of a subsection in my comps essay which was titled “Theorizing Patriarchy Past & Present,” which performed said theorizing via a variety of epistemologies. I reviewed the hypothesized roots of patriarchy, surveyed the broad cultural expression of its impact on women of antiquity as well as more recent history, researched its…

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A History for Women and a Feminism for Everyone

…and now back to my comps essay book reviews! :) A more sweeping view of women throughout history, including both their loss of power and their struggle to both resist and reclaim it within the kyriarchy, is brilliantly demonstrated by English journalist, broadcaster, and social critic Rosalind Miles’ book Who Cooked the Last Supper? The…

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Way too much sexual analysis ;)

As was noted yesterday, Biaggi’s essayists examine the emergence of patriarchy in order to persuasively analyze and explain our current global issues — such as environmental devastation, a near-perpetual social injustice which particularly oppresses women and the poor, the increasing corporatization of the massive war and prison industry — then posit a brighter and feasible…