Opinion

Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about intersections. Specifically, the places where people, objects and ideas converge to produce some sort of result. The interesting thing about intersections is that some are visible while others aren’t. For instance, how we express ourselves physically might differ from the way we communicate emotionally, and […]

It’s almost electric, that shiver down my spine when I’m out walking on a dark night. Traversing a starlit marsh or wood, the eerie stillness is breached only faintly by the occasional owl or whip-poor-will. Although some, like my dad, are astronomers and lovers of the quiet night, the dark was always my biggest fear […]

What is it about medical categories that makes them so powerful? Why are people, particularly from the U.S., so confident in their accuracies? Why is it that simply getting the name right makes all the difference in the experience of illness? And why does it give people the right to hierarchize the way things are […]

Continuing on with the theme of oppressive ideologies that are related to LGBTQIA+ identities, in this column I’m going to be talking about transphobia, an oppressive and marginalising form of hatred and misunderstanding that is often aimed at those whose gender presentation does not match our expectations – specifically trans, genderqueer and gender non-conforming folk. […]

I have always had a profound love for children. Throughout high school and college, I worked with highly resilient and extraordinary children in multiple capacities – as a program coordinator in an orphanage, as a volunteer in an HIV-positive mercy center and as a research assistant for a national study on foster youth support. At […]

In the introduction to a Technocultural Studies class I took last fall, my professor conducted a quick survey by asking us two  questions: “How many cellphones have you owned? How many laptops?” Our collective response yielded a jarring result. Most of us had owned at least three to four phones and two to three PCs […]

This past weekend, our campus hosted the 26th Annual Undergraduate Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activities Conference where many of your fellows Aggies were participants. The conference attracted 550 students, more than 1,000 attendees and showcased the great interdisciplinary work that our faculty and students are doing. Undergraduate research is one of the core principles of […]

Let’s play a game. I’m going to give you two scenarios. I want you to guess which one is the more likely response to being sexually assaulted. Ready? Option A: Amy was raped by a stranger a few weeks ago. During the assault, Amy was completely terrified, but reacted quickly and cleverly. She escaped the […]

There are numerous misconceptions about what autism is, what the causes are and how it is experienced. Autism, like any other disorder, is complex and variable. Unfortunately, it gets simplified by many of the misunderstandings surrounding it. I want to highlight five of the many myths people have about autism, in the hope that readers […]

Just the right amount of sunlight, just the right amount of rain. With these balances and a little fertile ground, the seed becomes the tree. The branches will find a shape of their own design, but by what providence have they grown under? It is the nurturing of the Earth that brings the tree up […]

In a speech yesterday at Lehman College in New York, President Obama addressed one of the most widely discussed topics of the ongoing Baltimore riots: news outlets’ tendency to turn a blind eye to the city’s many peaceful protests. He said that TV cameras have come to solely focus on protesters lighting fires and turning […]

Since the City of Davis recently hosted its first Pride celebration on Saturday, and the LGBTQIARC is hosting Pride Month, I thought it would be important to talk about an issue that I think is at the root of many homophobic and transmisogynistic occurrences  that we often see in our everyday lives– femmephobia. As usual, let’s […]