Weekly Link Roundup: 11/13/2015

Let’s just dive right in.

• By now, you should know about the incendiary and distressing events at Yale and Mizzou. Regarding Yale: understand that this is about more than an email or even offensive Halloween costumes. This is about the daily struggle of minority students and students of color for dignity, a sense of belonging, and a respectful environment free of psychic traumas. Viet N. Trinh, a doctoral student at Yale, answers Erika Christakis’ perhaps well-intentioned but ultimately thoughtless and insensitive letter about racism and “free speech” in a more nuanced way than we, as outsiders to this struggle, perhaps could.
• To that point, this New Yorker article by Jelani Cobb is a thoughtful response to the Atlantic’s finger-wagging piece about student activist ‘intolerance,’ (as if students with material privilege cannot experience racism), centered on the protests and debates at Yale.
• Cosmopolitan, of all places, has a urgent and important take on the case of Daniel Holtzclaw, a former police officer accused of trading on his power as a law enforcement official in order to sexually assault black women. Why isn’t this getting the attention it deserves?
• The Nation has an important take on the resignation of Tim Wolfe, and the ways in which exploited student athletes can fight back against administrations. In the article’s words: “The administrators created a world in which universities revolve socially, politically, and economically around the exploited labor of football. Now let them reap what they sow.”
• On decolonizing the kind of yoga that exploits the exotic for profit: “As an Indian woman living in the U.S. I’ve often felt uncomfortable in many yoga spaces. At times, such as when I take a $25.00 yoga class by a well-known teacher who wants to “expose us to the culture by chanting Om to start class“ and her studio hangs the Om symbol in the wrong direction, my culture is being stripped of its meaning and sold back to me in forms that feel humiliating at best and dehumanizing at worst.”
• And finally, news that’s a little more lighthearted: I love advice columns, and I love Mallory Ortberg. Two great things collide!

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Trigger Warnings: A Discussion

Just in time for back-to-school, three writers at ACRO who are involved in high school or college instruction unpack the rhetoric of the “trigger warning”.

Trigger warnings began as a way to tag texts that may provoke a reader’s PTSD, but they have become widely used in tagging texts that contain content that ranges from offensive to traumatic. What began in social justice forums in the blog-sphere has made its way into discourse about the academy at large, leading to a call for the re-examination of the pedagogical value of certain canonical texts, the role of the professor and student in a shifting higher-education system, and the ethics of certain kinds of representation.