As soon as I began my fieldwork in Guyana in July of 2014, I started to hear hushed discussions and whispered warnings about something the locals were calling “the sickness.” While I assumed that they were referencing something like malaria or the flu, I soon discovered how wrong I was. “The sickness,” sometimes mentioned explicitly… Read more →
Tag: school
Prison Cells and Pretty Walls: Gender Coding and American Schools
A few months ago, I was scrolling through Twitter and saw a conversation about redesigning classroom spaces and a phrase caught my attention: “redesign is NOT about being pretty for Pinterest.” As someone interested in the dynamics of gender in education, especially in history, it gave me pause. That the users of the phrase were… Read more →
The Gastropolitics of School Lunch
For Americans of a certain age, the term school lunch evokes the worst elements of institutional dining: soggy pizza, mushy vegetables, plastic sporks. Or perhaps it is the nutritional inadequacies that are most salient in our collective imagination: after all, the Reagan administration (according to popular legend) once classified ketchup as a vegetable.1 Passage of… Read more →