Jennifer Browdy de Hernandez
Jennifer Browdy de Hernandez teaches comparative literature and gender studies with an activist bent at Bard College at Simon's Rock in Great Barrington, MA and blogs at Transition Times.
Articles by this author
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Views Saturday, June 09, 2012 Bill McKibben: Stand up to the Fossil Fuel Industry, or Start Growing Some Gills Last summer Bill McKibben and 350.org , the organization he and a group of Middlebury College seniors founded in 2006 to fight global heating, brought thousands of protesters to Washington DC to protest the Keystone XL Pipeline. As you’ll recall, they circled the White House in a ring five people deep; thousands were arrested over the course of two weeks; and the construction of the Keystone was at least delayed, if not entirely crushed. Read more |
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Views Thursday, June 07, 2012 Rio+20: Fiddling While Earth Burns I am having trouble summoning any enthusiasm over the upcoming Rio+20 UN Conference , which will begin on June 20. Read more |
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Views Monday, May 28, 2012 Let’s De-Militarize Memorial Day Let’s take Memorial Day back from the military. True, war has been the means of reducing millions of human beings to distant memories, but why should we reduce our national day of mourning to just those who have died in the line of duty as soldiers? Read more |
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Views Saturday, May 12, 2012 From Superheroes to Ordinary Heroes: Time for a New Story The image that stays with me most from the blockbuster superhero action film The Avengers is not the thrilling climax when the hero uses all his power to wrest a nuclear missile away from its collision course with Manhattan and up into space, where it explodes a waiting battleship of nasty intergalactic invaders—although that was pretty thrilling I have to admit, especially in 3-D! Man, that movie packs some powerful special effects! Read more |
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Views Thursday, May 10, 2012 Help Wanted: Strong Leadership on Climate Change, Starting Immediately Now if only President Obama could show the same leadership on climate change as he has just demonstrated on the divisive same- sex-marriage issue. The same narrow-minded interests that made same-sex marriage such a boogeyman for the President are also controlling the GOP-dominated boardrooms of Big Oil, from Mr. Cheney on down. Read more |
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Views Wednesday, May 09, 2012 Welcome to the Knowledge Factory The lead article in this week’s Chronicle of Higher Education Review is titled “ The Ph.D. Now Comes With Food Stamps .” More than 350,000 Americans with advanced degrees applied for food stamps in 2010, part of “an often overlooked, and growing, subgroup of Ph.D. recipients, adjunct professors, and other Americans with advanced degrees who have had to apply for food stamps or some other form of government aid since late 2007. Read more |
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Views Saturday, May 05, 2012 To Avert Climate Change Disaster, Connecting the Dots Must Go Viral As of 8:30 a.m. EST this morning, 10,000 Facebook folks had already “liked” the new 350.org “Connect the Dots” campaign , which encourages people around the world to connect the dots between climate change and extreme weather. Read more |
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Views Sunday, April 29, 2012 Stop the Holocaust of Migrating Birds Lately I have been sitting with the brooding knowledge that at least 7 million migrating songbirds were killed this spring running the gauntlet of 84,000 American communication towers that rise as high as 2,000 feet into the sky, braced by invisible guy wires that garotte the birds right out of the air. This is actually just a fraction of the number of birds killed each year by running a collision course with human activity. Read more |
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Views Saturday, April 21, 2012 Distance Learning and Academic Labor: Promise & Peril It used to be that a smart, motivated young person could work hard, earn a doctorate, do a good job as a junior professor, and live happily ever after as a tenured professor. It also used to be that a smart young person could work hard, get into a good college, and expect to be taught with passion and enthusiasm by a corps of dedicated professors. Read more |
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Views Friday, April 13, 2012 Time to Give Mothers the Respect—and Financial Compensation—They Deserve It truly is disheartening to hear a supposedly progressive woman proclaim that a fulltime mother “never worked a day in her life.” Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen deserves all the flack she’s been getting since she made that statement yesterday on national media. Read more |