By Arise Chicago

Maria Escutia, 36, of Park City, Illinois, could not get out of bed to care for her two children after being injured on the job. Two years after her workplace injury, her back pain was so severe she was not able to sleep through the night. The pain pulsed and burned all day long and traveled down her leg, causing tingling and frequent numbness. “Every day I was in pain and more irritable. It made it difficult to do everyday things – like helping my kids with their homework. It was endlessly frustrating. My family suffered the consequences of my workplace injury, but my employer didn’t.”
Escutia was a supervisor at a fast food chain for more than 15 years and never thought she would get hurt on the job. Once she reported the injury to her supervisors, the insurance company tried to deny her claim by alleging the injury did not occur in the workplace.
Sadly, Escutia’s experience is not unique. As James Ellenberger notes in a 2012 report, “Introduced as a no-fault program to provide medical benefits and wage replacement in the place of the uncertainty of tort recovery, workers’ comp has seen massive efforts to shift both the blame and the burden of workplace injuries and illnesses to the backs of workers.”

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Posted on December 21, 2017

By SIU Press

Grassroots historiography has been essential in shaping American sexual identities in the 20th century.
Retroactivism in the Lesbian Archives examines how lesbian collectives have employed “retroactivist” rhetorics to propel change in present identification and politics.
By appropriating and composing versions of the past, these collectives question, challenge, deconstruct, and reinvent historical discourse itself to negotiate and contest lesbian identity.

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Posted on December 19, 2017

By Aeon

Are certain familiar narrative arcs inherently appealing?
Although his master’s thesis on the topic was rejected by the University of Chicago’s anthropology department, it’s hard to discount the acuity of Kurt Vonnegut’s theory of “story shapes.”
This archival video features Vonnegut using a chalkboard and his famous deadpan wit to map out three highly familiar narrative arcs that seem to have lost none of their popularity despite countless iterations:

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Posted on December 18, 2017

Your Kind Of Town

Cosmopolitan yet not elitist!

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Posted on December 15, 2017

By Natasha Warikoo/The Conversation

After weeks of negotiation, Harvard University recently agreed to provide the Department of Justice access to its admissions files. The department is reopening a complaint by 63 Asian-American groups alleging that Harvard discriminates against Asian-American applicants. The complaint was previously dismissed under the Obama administration. Some educators, elected officials and public policy advocates worry that government lawyers plan to use the case to argue that all race-conscious admissions – including affirmative action – are a violation of the Civil Rights Act.
Separately, Harvard undergraduates have recently begun to take advantage of their right to view their own admissions files, often only to become frustrated in their efforts to pinpoint exactly why they got admitted.
The inquiries of the Department of Justice and the curious Harvard students have something in common: Both are unlikely to turn up any evidence of why some applicants make the cut and others don’t. That’s because both inquiries rest on the faulty assumption that admissions decisions are driven by an objective, measurable process that will yield the same results over and over again. As a Harvard professor who has studied and written a book about college admissions and their impact on students, I can tell you that’s just not how it works.

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Posted on December 14, 2017

By SIU Press

Author Noe Montez considers how theatre, as a site of activism, produces memory narratives that change public reception to a government’s transitional justice policies.
Drawing on contemporary research in memory studies and transitional justice, Montez examines the Argentine theatre’s responses to the country’s transitional justice policies – truth and reconciliation hearings, trials, amnesties and pardons, and memorial events and spaces – that have taken place in the last decade of the 20th century and the first two decades of the 21st century.

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Posted on December 13, 2017

By SIU Press

Contributors to this collection – public historians with experience at Civil War battle sites – examine key shifts in the Civil War and the context surrounding them to show that many chains of events caused the course of the war to change: the Federal defeats at First Bull Run and Ball’s Bluff, the wounding of Joseph Johnston at Seven Pines and the Confederate victory at Chancellorsville, the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation, the Federal victory at Vicksburg, Grant’s decision to move on to Richmond rather than retreat from the Wilderness, the naming of John B. Hood as commander of the Army of Tennessee, and the 1864 presidential election.
In their conclusion, the editors suggest that the assassination of Abraham Lincoln might have been the war’s final turning point.

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Posted on December 11, 2017