A Peer Reviewed Blog
I was in Canada over the summer and had forgotten that they’d done away with the penny — until, that is, I was trying to figure out why I got short-changed in a store, which blithely rounded up the cost of my purchase and cheated me out of a few cents.
But then I remembered…
Coz what do you do when it costs more to make a penny than the value that’s ascribed to it? (Phasing them out is estimated to save the Canadian taxpayers $11 million per year!) Continue reading “Creative Accounting”
On Facebook this morning I saw two curiously juxtaposed posts on my newsfeed: the above (click the image to see the video), wisely cautioning us about the dangers of judging value based on appearances, and then the one below (click that image too), which strategically caters to this very tendency to achieve their goals — they give the dog a cute make-over and it is adopted. Continue reading “Your Turn: Identifying a Book by its Cover”
The unrivaled success of the modern identifier that goes by the name of nationalism is that it is reproduced and thereby reinforced at countless, intertwined sites — I recently posted briefly on the World Cup as one such site but it’s hardly the only one. Continue reading “Identifying in Unexpected Places”
The persecution of Ahmadis has hit the news again with the killing of an American Ahmadi doctor in Pakistan last week while he was volunteering in an Ahmadi hospital. Having written on the issues of labels in relation to the Ahmadi before at the Bulletin for the Study of Religion blog, I found the careful phrasing of the Reuters article about the shooting of the doctor impressive. Describing the Ahmadi as “a group that says it is Muslim but whose religion is rejected by the state,” I appreciated the precision with which the author acknowledged who described the Ahmadi as Muslim and who rejected that label. This phrasing is similar to what I have advocated generally. To acknowledge that labels are both contested and consequential by stating with precision who applies and contests particular labels is imperative. Continue reading “Who Supports Persecution?”
“Who Are You?” is an ongoing series that asks members of Culture on the Edge to reflect on one of their own many identities (whether national, gendered, racial, familial, etc.), theorizing at the same time the self-identification that they each chose to discuss.
Well, I prefer the adjectives thrifty or sensible, actually, but not everyone agrees. When people observe my spending habits, such as infrequently eating at restaurants and preferring to shop at thrift stores, some may decide that the negative connotation of the classic images of Ebeneezer Scrooge and labels like tightwad and penny-pincher are appropriate. Even with an agreed-upon characteristic, the tension between self-selected labels and ascribed identities remains, with various normative values embedded within those selections. Continue reading “Who Are You? I’m a Miser”
I saw this image making the rounds on social media the other day — presumably aimed at humbling otherwise self-important racially, politically, economically, etc., dominant groups. I find it rather interesting, since the slogan only makes sense, of course, if “minority” is defined as “not us” — that is, while seeming to make a progressive point it actually nicely reinforces that the world is naturally divided between us and all those whom we judge as being not like us. Continue reading “The Measure of All Things”
I recently wrote a post, scheduled for a week or so from now, in which I used the term “white flight” — which names the process whereby many U.S. inner cities have, since about the 1960s, lost a large portion of their white population by people moving out to the suburbs — and so I was thinking about linking the term in that post to a definition online, for those who were not already familiar with it.
So, wondering what it said, I first tried the Urban Dictionary (see the full entry here). The first definition listed on the page reads as follows: Continue reading “Prescriptive Descriptions”
The Edge’s Twitter account was the lucky recipient of this picture earlier this morning (though it wasn’t morning where it originated, was it; thanks @the_cotter-man) — making implicit reference to the recent workshop on “code switching” that four members of the Edge participated in at Lehigh University. Continue reading “What’s a Language?”
“It is a funny thing about addresses where you live. When you live there you know it so well that it is like an identity, a thing that is so much a thing that it could not ever be any other thing and then you live somewhere else and years later, the address that was so much an address that it was like your name and you said it as if it was not an address but something that was living and then years after you do not know what the address was and when you say it it is not a name anymore but something you cannot remember. That is what makes your identity not a thing that exists but something you do or do not remember.”
– Gertrude Stein in Gertrude Stein, Everybody’s
Autobiography (Random House [1937])
Here comes