Rashid's Blog: A Place for Inquisitive Souls

Benjamin Fraser, Malcolm Alan Compitello and Eva Karene Romero have just authored an editorial titled “A Modest Proposal Regarding Peer-Review” that can be found on Project Muse here.

While this essay has appeared in a Hispanic Studies journal–the Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies–it is pitched/positioned much more generally to speak to shifts in the humanities in particular but perhaps also to interdisciplinary scholarship outside of the humanities as well. Some insights may be particular to Hispanic Studies, while others may be more broadly applicable, take a look and let us know what you think,

[more information in original context here]:

A THEMATIC CONFERENCE SERIES on The NEW IMPACTS OF ECONOMIC, SOCIAL and POLITICAL CHANGE ON URBAN LIFE

The Post-Crash City

CONTEXT

The global financial crisis has provoked re-analysis of the limits and social harms associated with our economic systems and its relationship to urban life. The move to conditions of an economic reverse, a crash of arguably unprecedented scale, has been met with wavering commitments to expand and draw-back from the public financing of both private and state institutions. Proposals in many western and other countries globally for massive public cuts raise the prospect of economic stagnation and indeed social pain generated by the withdrawal of state supports for the most marginal members of society. This context presents important challenges to critical social analysis.

What will this crisis, and its unwinding in different social spheres and spatial contexts, mean for cities globally and…

One might have hoped that CNN’s Sanjay Gupta, who has a kind, gentle manner, and who is an American with an Indian background, might be more in tune with the tradition of ahimsa.  Promoting fish farming in the oceans on his program The Next List, on September 9, 2012, isn’t going to do anything to help the world’s hunger problems.

Alleviating the hunger crisis can be done by humans eating less meat (less of all kinds of meat, including seafood, fish, and chicken) and fewer dairy products – and relying more on plant-based diets.  We’d be healthier too.

Helping the planet (and ourselves, because we live here as well) won’t be accomplished by imprisoning fish or by further extending humanity’s sphere of dominance over the seas as well as the land.  Since we’ve usurped and destroyed much of the earth already – air, water, and land – and killed…