Teaching Today

Labor Day gloriously nixed my long teaching day yesterday, today's grad seminar is a companion (illustration, contextualization, elaboration) to the general maps of the conceptual terrain I offered up in my introductory lecture last week: we'll be discussing Jenny Anderson's, "The Great Future Debate and the Struggle for the World" on Cold War futurological think-tankification; Lee Vinsel's amusing polemic, "Design Thinking Is Sort of Like Syphilis: It's Contagious And Rots Your Brain" on a generation of unnovative think-leadership and white upward failure in the Valley of the Silly Con, then Wendy Hui Kyong Chun's wonderful useful and clarifying, "Race And/As Technology," which in turn takes up Martin Heidegger's, "The Question Concerning Technology" (which I'll be connecting to Arendt, natch) and then William Gibson's first published story (and a manifesto of sorts), "The Gernsback Continuum" on retro-futurity and present-as-future sfnal dystopia with a chrome sharkfin. I have an order in mind (I just offered it, as it happens) and a set of pet concerns to emphasize, but who knows what the community of the classroom will fixate on or be provoked by or fall in love with? Should be an interesting seminar.