Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 611

Talking Music: Blitz the Ambassador

'Ghanaian-born, Brooklyn-based rapper Blitz the Ambassador came to Duke University for a one-week artist residency thanks to Duke Performances. He spoke about his career and hip-hop culture today, covering topics such as Afropolitanism, urban hip-hop, and Blitz’s own unique trajectory born in Ghana, raised in Brooklyn.  Blitz also completed his film project 'diaporadical trilogy' and discusses the themes in the films.' +Scholars and Publics 

Elaine Richardson: PHD to Ph.D--How Education Saved My Life |

'The Ohio State University Professor  Elaine Richardson re-enacts her journey of being ensnared into human trafficking as a young teen, to a cycle of abuse, addiction and prostitution, to recovery through earning her Ph.D. supported by the undying love of her mother and caring professionals.' -- +TEDx 

#CodeSwitch: Can We Talk About Whiteness?

 'On the inaugural episode of the Code Switch Podcast, the host dig into how we talk about whiteness — or, really, how we don't talk about it — and hear from some folks who say it's really important that we figure out how.'

What One District's Data Mining Did For Chronic Absence

Brittney Lohmiller for NPR 'Three years ago, Grand Rapids' public schools took a hard look at the numbers on absenteeism. They've been able to get nearly half of the students missing school to show up.' -- +NPR 

Liberal vs. Conservative: A Neuroscientific Analysis with Gail Saltz

'What the difference in brain structure between liberals and conservatives? And where do our political convictions come from: rational deliberation, or biological determinism? Psychiatrist Gail Saltz explains.'  

Visuals + Sonics: "Lake by the Ocean" -- Maxwell

Official visuals and sonics for Maxwell's "Lake by the Ocean" from his black SUMMERS' night (2016) 

“With a Dangerous Love” Visual Mixtape--a Project by Shamell Bell

'Shamell Bell presents a 'Visual Mixtape'--"With A Dangerous Love": working with the Black body, performance and dangerous love as praxis, resilience, magic against state sanctioned violence/white supremacy. This visual exploration embodies the continuity of struggle and resistance, and transhistorical and interdisciplinary merging. Again, the dancing Black body presents itself in this visual as two young children are dancing, pushing back at the afropessimism conceptions of Blackness and the everpresence death, but imagining Blackness as living as resisting and defying death. This visual mixtape displays the deep connection between arts as praxis of activism and Black love. I end with the “Pleasure/Liberation” mixtape which motivates the pulse of “With a Dangerous Love".' 
"With a Dangerous Love" Visual Mixtape, a project by Shamell Bell from Shamell Bell on Vimeo. 

Hidden Heart Disease Is The Top Health Threat For U.S. Women

'Many women and even doctors underestimate a woman's heart attack risk, research shows, as they focus on weight and breast health instead. Tiny damaged arteries in the heart may not show up in scans.' -- NPR

Choice is Not Liberation: On the Buying and Selling of Feminism.

'Writer and Bitch Media co-founder Andi Zeisler explores 50 years of tension between feminism and capitalism in popular culture, and explains how mass media has adapted and amplified the language of empowerment, but in a depoliticized form in service of selling products, and why she's hopeful that a young generation of connected girls and women can reclaim feminism's radical, libratory potential. Zeisler is author of We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrrl to CoverGirl, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement .' -- This Is Hell Radio

The Blueprints for Mass Incarceration were Drawn During the Civil Rights Era

'Harvard University historian Elizabeth Hinton traces origins of the modern mass incarceration system to the failings of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs of the mid-1960s, when liberalism's failure to confront structural inequality in America met with a set of racist assumptions on Black Americans, and created the blueprint for the surveillance and exploitation of Black lives that future presidents would escalate and expand for decades to come. Hinton is author of the new book From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America  (Harvard University Press)' -- This is Hell!