Jeremy Beaudry
Projects, Research & Texts

Guide to Critical Thinking

Posted on September 8th, 2004 in of interest and

Anne Galloway has posted a relevant and timely Guide to Critical Thinking. As a relatively green college instructor, I find the points iterated in the guide especially useful in reminding me of the kind of classroom environment I wish to create, as well as detailing specific strategies for achieving it.

J. Meredith Warner

Posted on August 2nd, 2004 in of interest and

…now has a virtual home. Artist, student, educator, knitter, community activator and collaborator–take a look at knittingcommunity.org.

An Injury to One

Posted on May 11th, 2004 in of interest and

An Injury to One, directed Travis Wilkerson, centers on a significant episode in American labor history, the murder of Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) organizer Frank Little in Butte, Montana in August 1917. The film provides the historical background to the event, the decades-long exploitation of the region and its workers by the Anaconda Copper Mining Company.

An Injury to One is, frankly, a beautiful film: stark, emphatic, a poetic synthesis of image, sound, historical tale. Its subject reminds us of a seemingly forgotten history of the socialist movement in the US (when that movement had relatively popular support of the industrial working class). The legacy of that era is still with us; the divisions and transgressions of that struggle are still with us. So where have all the socialists gone?

Read more about the film.

Topographies of Populism

Posted on March 3rd, 2004 in of interest and

Organized by the Design Organisation Media Research Laboratory in Austria, this conference entitled “Topographies of Populism: Everyday Life, Media, and the City” looks to be a very interesting event. The topic statement reveals the organizers’ interest in examing “populism” not as “a new political movement within the spectrum of already existing ones,” but as a method by which “various interest groups bring themselves in relation to a wooed public.” Of specific interest are two subsets of this new populism: “strategies of anticipation” and “strategies of mobilization.” Of course, the muscle behind these is the media machine. Seems to be a relevant topic–in my experience in academia (art and architecture schools) the media tends to be forgotten as a powerful force in shaping how a “public” engages (or doesn’t) the work that we designers, architects, artists do.

More info on the conference here.