You seem to be browsing on a screen size, browser, or device that this website cannot support. Some things might look and act a little weird.
Number of articles: 7
First Article: May 1, 2020
Latest Article: April 22, 2022
What will seem like illegible rambling will, hopefully, embody some of the turbulent currents hidden underneath language. Like any good free-write session, its prose will upset the preconceptions about language that are ingrained in us since our first experiments with language—when well-intentioned teachers taught us how to use periods and what words go with which other ones.
Social acceleration theory, coined by German sociologist Hartmut Rosa in his essay “Capitalism as a Spiral of Dynamisation,” offers a possible explanation for an inherent flaw in capitalism. “Even if [capitalism] runs smoothly,” she argued, “it leads to a limitless game of escalation that throws even the winners into misery for it commits all their energies to that single telos—the struggle to maintain competitiveness.” The implications of capitalism in its accelerated contemporary state are felt throughout late-modern society in the ‘misery’ felt in all sectors of society as the complications of an unhealthy system.
Frantz Fanon wrote “Concerning Violence,” the opening chapter to his final book, “Wretched of the Earth,” in 1961 against the backdrop of the Algerian War of Independence. What Fanon invoked against the cacophony of overlapping voices—endless unique hermeneutics of the social and historical phenomenon of decolonization—was the existence and centrality of violence in this specific social process.
Free associative writing brings out something in us that we never really found before, but it takes a lot of nonsensical rambling to actually get anywhere. It does so in the same way that talking nonsense with hometown friends can lead to world shattering epiphanies—ones where you realize where you really are.
The immigrant experience offers new windows to peer into the living conditions of the most hegemonic empire to ever exist. Sociology majors should recognize this as the concept of the “outsider-within.” I am, however, very hesitant to call myself an outsider in any sense of the word, especially when those who live outside of the so-called West, with a capital “W,” outnumber those within.
This is my response to both the article titled “Progressives, do not let the perfect be the enemy of the good,” and to the ways that Bowdoin students talk about “progressive voters.” What do you mean by “progressives?” Do you see us as some kind of homogeneous group who share the same challenges, the same social, economic and racial realities and who agree unilaterally on a solution?
On April 30, President Rose sent out an email to the Bowdoin community addressing the financial implications of the COVID-19 pandemic for the College. He assured the Bowdoin community that “a top priority is job preservation”—but which jobs, at what pay and for how long?
