By Lorena German/The Hechinger Report

If we want to fight white supremacy, a good place to start is by interrogating how it seeps into canonical texts like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Whiteness, meaning the institution that upholds white culture and affirms white ways of being as superior over other ways, seeks to sustain and protect itself. That’s how it survives.
Identifying its tactics is a necessary skill for understanding it. Understanding it is necessary if you seek to destroy it, as I, a Dominican woman and educator, do. I do not seek to destroy white people. I do seek to destroy white supremacy as the ideology and structure that has oppressed, killed and destroyed the rest of us since its inception.

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Posted on March 31, 2021

By SIU Press

“Twice a year, spring and fall, numerous species of reptiles and amphibians migrate between the LaRue-Pine Hills‘ towering limestone bluffs and the Big Muddy River’s swampy floodplain in southern Illinois. Snakes, especially great numbers of Cottonmouths, give the road that separates these distinct environments its name.
“Although it is one of the best places in the world to observe snakes throughout the year, spring and fall are the optimal times to see a greater number and variety. Among the many activities that snakes can be observed doing are sunning themselves on rocks, lying in grasses, sheltering under or near fallen tree limbs, or crossing the road. In this engaging guide, author Joshua J. Vossler details what to expect and how to make the most of a visit to what is known around the world as Snake Road.

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Posted on March 16, 2021

By UIC

Following recent years of turbulent developments in politics, economics and social media around the world, one might assume these events inspire University of Illinois Chicago researcher Zizi Papacharissi to have an ominous view about what the future holds.
That would be an incorrect assumption.
It was during the Obama administration when she began to consider whether democracy is not the idealized final stop on the world’s civic journey, but rather a springboard to superior government practices.
“What if there is something better out there, and technology can help us uncover a long-hidden path to it? We change and so does our technology, but we cling to past iterations of democracy like a dream we desperately try to remember after we wake up. Life is not static. Neither is democracy,” said Papacharissi, UIC professor and head of communication and professor of political science.

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Posted on March 11, 2021

By Jacob L. Nelson/The Conversation

News organizations are trying to do a better job connecting with their audiences, in hopes of overcoming the profession’s credibility problems and ensuring its long-term survival.
To do this, a growing number of newsrooms have for years embraced what’s called “audience engagement,” a loosely defined term that typically refers to efforts to increase the communication between journalists and the people they hope to reach.
These efforts take many forms, and vary from online – for example, the use of social media to interact with readers about a story after it’s been published – to offline, for example, meetings between journalists and community members to discuss a story currently being produced.
At its best, engagement shows audiences that journalists are real people, with the training and skills necessary to provide accurate information that is trustworthy. It also offers people an opportunity to contribute their ideas about how their communities should be covered, allowing news consumers a larger role in shaping their own stories.
This outcome is especially important for communities of color, who have long been been ignored or misrepresented by newsrooms that have historically comprised mostly white, middle-class editors and reporters.
But not all efforts have produced the intended results.

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Posted on March 4, 2021