Tag: UCI

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For Ulysses

This was from the day Ulysses and I drove down to UCI to close up his office, a bittersweet moment that still stays with me. He had just retired after nearly three decades, stepping away, as it happened, at almost the exact moment the art world was finally giving him his due, with a major retrospective making its way in 2022 from Philadelphia to the Hammer. There was something very Ulysses about that timing: unhurried, unbothered by recognition that arrived on its own schedule. I can still hear Alice Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things” playing as we looked over all that history that afternoon.

Those years at UCI were just one chapter in a remarkable career. Born in Los Angeles in 1946, Ulysses had been making video art since 1972, when the medium was brand new, picking up a Portapak when most artists hadn’t yet imagined what moving images could do in the hands of someone determined to tell different stories. Working as what he termed a “video griot,” he drew on oral storytelling traditions, structuring his work around music, poetic recitation, and dynamic performance to interrogate race, representation, and the power embedded in popular culture.

Part of what made him singular was how early he grasped what networked media could become. During the 1980s he worked with the Electronic Café, a grassroots arts group pioneering collaborative telecommunications that connected communities through interactive video, audio, and shared screens, accomplishing this decades before Skype and Zoom. Through his conceptual art band Othervisions, he explored the relationship between spoken word and lyrical content, and as artistic director of Othervisions Studio he brought that same Afrofuturist sensibility to an interdisciplinary practice that kept evolving for fifty years. He joined UCI in 1993 and spent nearly three decades shaping generations of students who went on to cite him as a foundational influence.

In the years that followed we got in the habit of having breakfast at Pann’s near his place every few weeks, as Ulysses became a regular part of my life. The staff adored him and always greeted him by name. I think the idyllic atmosphere of that diner was a kind of antidote to the exhausting ritual of dialysis that took up so much of his last few years. As we were sitting in Pann’s just a couple of days before he passed, he looked across the table and remarked, “This place. All these different kinds of people, together, getting along, in times like these. It’s so wonderful.” Never one to complain very much, Ulysses would often muse this way. He was one of the most relentlessly positive people I knew and at the same time one of the most brilliant. Celebrated in recent years for his visionary understanding of media and politics, Ulysses had that rare gift of intuiting novel ideas. As I was dropping him back at home that day, a different kind of mood hung in the air. Call it a premonition or something else, but I felt I had to tell Ulysses how much his friendship meant to me, both now and across the decades. Looking back now, I realize that he had been extremely frail that day. We even spoke about it briefly and he said he planned more walking. I guess I thought he would bounce back yet one more time.

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Inclusive Teaching 2.0: The Challenge of Equity in Anti-DEI Times

These days American universities find themselves at a peculiar crossroads. With the stroke of a pen, federal actions have swept away diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs at institutions dependent on government funding. Yet in this moment of apparent retreat, one might discern not an ending but a beginning, creating the potential for a more profound transformation in how we understand the art of teaching itself.

The moment demands reinvention, not retreat. For decades now, inclusive teaching has been quietly revolutionizing classrooms, operating not by privileging some students over others, but by ensuring all students can thrive. The principle, though deceptively simple, borders on the radical: every learner deserves access to tools that support their academic growth. This principle can guide institutions toward a universal model of excellence, grounded in research, focused on outcomes, and aligned with the values of higher education.

Never has the need been greater. Today’s college student defies easy categorization. The stereotypical image of young adults attending full-time classes on residential campuses has given way to something far more complex, with  students juggling work commitments, family responsibilities, and extended degree timelines to manage costs.[1] This demographic shift demands nothing less than a pedagogical evolution, one that acknowledges students’ multifaceted lives while maintaining academic rigor.

Enter Universal Design for Learning (UDL), an evidence-based framework offering a compelling vision for the future. UDL is defined as “a framework developed to improve and optimize teaching and learning for all people based on scientific insights into how humans learn.”[2] Grounded in cognitive neuroscience and educational research, UDL principles encourage educators to present information in multiple ways, offer students various methods for demonstrating understanding, and foster engagement through real-world relevance and autonomy. Continue reading “Inclusive Teaching 2.0: The Challenge of Equity in Anti-DEI Times”

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Elsewhere in America: The Crisis of Belonging in Contemporary Culture (Routledge, 2016)

It’s not always easy living up to one’s ideals, either personally or as a nation. Americans like to think of the United States as a welcoming place where everyone has equal chance. But historical baggage and anxious times can make such generosity difficult.0001Behind the America’s mythic open door, newcomers often find that civic belonging comes with strings attached––riddled with conditions, limitations, and in some instances, punitive rites of passage. And for those already here, new rationales emerge to challenge civic belonging on the basis of belief, behavior, or heritage. This book uses the term “elsewhere” in describing conditions that exile so many citizens to “some other place” through prejudice, competition, or discordant belief. Even as “diversity” has become the official norm in American society, the country continues to fragment along new lines that pit citizens against their government, each other, and even themselves.  Yet in another way, “elsewhere” evokes an undefined “not yet” ripe with potential. In the face of daunting challenges, elsewhere can point to optimism, hope, and common purpose.

Elsewhere in America uses the concept of “belonging” to frame a uniquely multidisciplinary exploration of division and marginalization in the U.S.––in a study encompassing material conditions, discursive contexts, and affective states. Through 12 detailed chapters, Elsewhere in America applies critical theory in the humanities and social sciences in examining recurring crises of social inclusion in the U.S.  After two centuries of struggle and incremental “progress” in securing human dignity, today the U.S. finds itself riven apart by new conflicts over reproductive rights, immigration, health care, religious extremism, sexual orientation, mental illness, and fears of terrorists. Why are U.S. ideals of civility and unity so easily hijacked and confused? Is there a way of explaining this recurring tendency of Americans to turn against each other? Elsewhere in America engages these questions in charting the ever-changing faces of difference (manifest in contested landscapes of sex and race to such areas as disability and mental health), their spectral and intersectional character (as seen in the new discourses on performativity, normativity, and queer theory), and the grounds on which categories are manifest in ideation and movement politics (seen in theories of metapolitics, cosmopolitanism, dismodernism).