I just finished a draft of the following essay, entitled Operation Get Fired: A Chronicle of the Academic Repression of Radical Environmentalist and Animal Rights Advocate-Scholars, that explores how the US academy is currently involved in making things difficult for scholars with radical interests in contemporary ecopolitics. As it has to do with the thematics of my blog and is connected to Freire's work, I would like to offer it here in advance of publication. Below is the intro and a link to the full piece as .pdf.

Paulo Freire wrote that conflict is the midwife of consciousness. I would like to spend the next few blogs considering the meaning of political violence. In this first entry, I recount the tale of learning something about the ability of the nationally organized right-wing to lock down the terms of discourse in a small rural community in order to serve the larger political machinery.