Inclusion At What Cost?

The current protest movement in Israel—similar to but also different than from the much more urgent, anguished, and even bloody revolutions now sweeping the Arab world—brings into focus for me a dilemma that affects my teaching. For the protesters the question is whether to “depoliticize” the mass movement in order to draw in as many people as possible by focusing on broadly shared civic demands: housing, healthcare, and education. This strategy assumes that once you get people active in one cause they may expand their activism to causes that previously seemed out of bounds, notably Israel’s occupation of Palestine and Read More …

What Next–More Partitions?

A recent edition of India’s left-liberal daily, The Hindu (3.30.2010), included an op-ed piece, concerning yet another demonstration by Hyderabad’s Osmania University students, this time off campus, in front of the home of Kanch Ilaiah, the op-ed writer. The students were Telananga separatists, protesting his non-support for their cause because he came out in support of the region’s “Tribals” who are seeking their own state within the current debate over partitioning the state of Andhra Pradesh into two states. If the tribals have their way, Andhra Pradesh would be divided three-ways, with the proposed “Many Seema” biting into both the Read More …

Joiner Center Writers’ Workshop

An announcement I just got regarding an upcoming Writers’ Workshop to be held in Boston in June 2010 jostled me into sending in this blog entry. I have known about this workshop for many years, but it was only last June (2009) that I was able to take it for the first time, and the experience blew me away. This turned out to be an invaluable experience for me as teacher, writer, and editor as well as personally and politically. Though I knew that another Radical Teacher editor, UMass—Boston teacher, friend, colleague, and a poet, has been attending it enthusiastically Read More …