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Paperwork is the new protest: leveraging bureaucracy for progressive action

In contemporary higher education, power increasingly circulates through documents rather than debate, making paperwork one of the most consequential sites of protest. Yet as universities become more corporatized and subject to authoritarian influence, bureaucratic writing is often treated as passive, procedural, or politically neutral. Paper Pusher shows how paperwork is a central mechanism of governance and therefore a formidable, underused medium for democratic action and protest within bureaucracies.

Kathryn J. Gindlesparger reframes the “paper pusher” from a symbol of compliance into an agent of institutional accountability and resistance. She develops four avenues for protesting through bureaucracy—voice, filing, circulation, and stasis-seeking—showing how everyday documents such as meeting minutes, policy drafts, budgets, and accreditation reports can be used to push back against authoritarian and corporate forces that undermine an institution’s mission. Rather than emphasizing visible confrontation, Paper Pusher demonstrates how activism can operate quietly and credibly from within systems where overt protest may carry professional risk.

Grounded in story and lived experience, this book is a love letter to office workers, staff, and middle managers whose labor sustains institutions and whose expertise is often overlooked. It foregrounds feminist, working-class, queer, disabled, Black, and brown voices, highlighting how marginalized workers have long used bureaucratic knowledge to create access, protection, and change. Practical and people-centered, Paper Pusher calls for bureaucratic literacy to be taught wherever writing is taught, insisting that paperwork is not grunt work but power work.

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Understanding paras as key players in Black and Latino struggles for jobs and freedom, Nick Juravich details how the first generation of paras in New York City transformed work in public schools and the relationships between schools and the communities they served. Paraprofessional programs created hundreds of thousands of jobs in working-class Black and Latino neighborhoods. These programs became an important pipeline for the training of Black and Latino teachers in the1970s and early 1980s while paras’ organizing helped drive the expansion and integration of public sector unions.

An engaging portrait of an invisible profession, Para Power examines the lives and practices of the first generation of paraprofessional educators against the backdrop of struggles for justice, equality, and self-determination.

An illuminating volume of critical essays charting the diverse territory of digital humanities scholarship

The digital humanities have traditionally been considered to be the domain of only a small number of prominent and well-funded institutions. However, through a diverse range of critical essays, this volume serves to challenge and enlarge existing notions of how digital humanities research is being undertaken while also serving as a kind of alternative guide for how it can thrive within a wide variety of institutional spaces. 

Focusing on the complex infrastructure that undergirds the field of digital humanities, People, Practice, Power examines the various economic, social, and political factors that shape such academic endeavors. The multitude of perspectives comprising this collection offers both a much-needed critique of the existing structures for digital scholarship and the means to generate broader representation within the field. 

This collection provides a vital contribution to the realm of digital scholarly research and pedagogy in acknowledging the role that small liberal arts colleges, community colleges, historically black colleges and universities, and other underresourced institutions play in its advancement. Gathering together a range of voices both established and emergent, People, Practice, Power offers practitioners a self-reflexive examination of the current conditions under which the digital humanities are evolving, while helping to open up new sustainable pathways for its future.  

Contributors: Matthew Applegate, Molloy College; Taylor Arnold, U of Richmond; Eduard Arriaga, U of Indianapolis; Lydia Bello, Seattle U; Kathi Inman Berens, Portland State U; Christina Boyles, Michigan State U; Laura R. Braunstein, Dartmouth College; Abby R. Broughton; Maria Sachiko Cecire, Bard College; Brennan Collins, Georgia State U; Kelsey Corlett-Rivera, U of Maryland; Brittany de Gail, U of Maryland; Madelynn Dickerson, UC Irvine Libraries; Nathan H. Dize, Vanderbilt U; Quinn Dombrowski, Stanford U; Ashley Sanders Garcia, UCLA; Laura Gerlitz; Erin Rose Glass; Kaitlyn Grant; Margaret Hogarth, Claremont Colleges; Maryse Ndilu Kiese, U of Alberta; Pamella R. Lach, San Diego State U; James Malazita, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Susan Merriam, Bard College; Chelsea Miya, U of Alberta; Jamila Moore Pewu, California State U, Fullerton; Urszula Pawlicka-Deger, Aalto U, Finland; Jessica Pressman, San Diego State U; Jana Remy, Chapman U; Roopika Risam, Salem State U; Elizabeth Rodrigues, Grinnell College; Dylan Ruediger, American Historical Association; Rachel Schnepper, Wesleyan U; Anelise Hanson Shrout, Bates College; Margaret Simon, North Carolina State U; Mengchi Sun, U of Alberta; Lauren Tilton, U of Richmond; Michelle R. Warren, Dartmouth College. 

Leads scholars and anyone who cares about the humanities into more effectively analyzing the fate of the humanities and digging into the very idea of the humanities as a way to find meaning and coherence in the world.

The humanities, considered by many as irrelevant for modern careers and hopelessly devoid of funding, seem to be in a perpetual state of crisis, at the mercy of modernizing and technological forces that are driving universities towards academic pursuits that pull in grant money and direct students to lucrative careers. But as Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon show, this crisis isn’t new—in fact, it’s as old as the humanities themselves. 

Today’s humanities scholars experience and react to basic pressures in ways that are strikingly similar to their nineteenth-century German counterparts. The humanities came into their own as scholars framed their work as a unique resource for resolving crises of meaning and value that threatened other cultural or social goods. The self-understanding of the modern humanities didn’t merely take shape in response to a perceived crisis; it also made crisis a core part of its project. Through this critical, historical perspective, Permanent Crisis can take scholars and anyone who cares about the humanities beyond the usual scolding, exhorting, and hand-wringing into clearer, more effective thinking about the fate of the humanities. Building on ideas from Max Weber and Friedrich Nietzsche to Helen Small and Danielle Allen, Reitter and Wellmon dig into the very idea of the humanities as a way to find meaning and coherence in the world. 

“Does a service to all who would prefer a different path, offering realistic strategies to engage students in undermining scholarly stereotypes.”—Science

Picture a Professor is a collection of evidence-based insights and intersectional teaching strategies crafted by and for college instructors. It aims to inspire transformative student learning while challenging stereotypes about what a professor looks like.

Representing a variety of scholarly disciplines, the volume’s contributing authors offer practical advice for effectively navigating student preconceptions about embodied identity and academic expertise. Each contributor recognizes the pervasiveness of racialized, gendered, and other biases about professors and recommends specific ways to respond to and interrupt such preconceptions—helping students, teachers, and others reenvision what we think of when we picture a professor.

Educators at every stage of their career will find affirming acknowledgment of the ways systemic inequities affect college teaching conditions, as well as actionable advice about facilitating student learning with innovative course design, classroom activities, assessment techniques, and more.

Practicing Classics is a memoir about education in America between the end of WWII and the early 21st century. Not only does it consider memory, its truths, and its deceptions, but it also unravels the complexities of class, race, gender, and social positioning in education. Lee Pearcy’s story begins with the 1957 desegregation crisis at Little Rock Central High School and its aftermath, describing how growing up in this environment shaped his academic and personal life.

As he came to study Latin and then Classics, Pearcy’s education intersected with the student disturbances at Columbia University in 1968 and a feminist revolution that brought significant numbers of women into the classical professoriate. He gives a first-hand account of a scandalous episode in the toxic administrative culture that characterized the classics department at the University of Texas in the 1980s. Against the background of these events, he unfolds his own education as a classicist and his development from apprentice to journeyman to confident teacher of Latin and Greek. Practicing Classics will engage readers who care about American education, classical studies, or the ways that choices, chances, and contingencies shaped one man’s life.

Practicing Transnationalism explores the challenges of teaching American studies in the Middle East during a time of tension and conflict between the United States and the region.

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, American studies programs began to spread in the Middle East. During a time of rising anti-American sentiment, ten major programs were established in the region. What impulses propelled universities in the Middle East to establish these centers and programs? What motivated students to take courses and pursue degrees in American studies? In part, American studies programs developed as a way to “know the enemy,” to better understand America’s ubiquitous influence in foreign relations, technology, and culture; however, some programs grew because residents admired the ideals set forth as American, including democracy and free speech.

Practicing Transnationalism investigates these issues and others, using the experiences and research of the editors and contributors, who worked either directly in these programs or as adjunct to them. These scholars seek to understand what American power means to people in the Middle East. They examine the challenge of developing American studies programs in a transnational paradigm, striving to build programs that are separate from and critical of American imperialism without simply becoming anti-American. In the essays, the contributors provide context for how the field of American studies has grown and developed, and they offer views of cultural interactions and classroom situations, demonstrating the problems instructors faced and how they worked to address them.

Published twenty years ago, the original Preschool in Three Cultures was a landmark in the study of education: a profoundly enlightening exploration of the different ways preschoolers are taught in China, Japan, and the United States. Here, lead author Joseph Tobin—along with new collaborators Yeh Hsueh and Mayumi Karasawa—revisits his original research to discover how two decades of globalization and sweeping social transformation have affected the way these three cultures educate and care for their youngest pupils. Putting their subjects’ responses into historical perspective, Tobin, Hsueh, and Karasawa analyze the pressures put on schools to evolve and to stay the same, discuss how the teachers adapt to these demands, and examine the patterns and processes of continuity and change in each country.

Featuring nearly one hundred stills from the videotapes, Preschool in Three Cultures Revisited artfully and insightfully illustrates the surprising, illuminating, and at times entertaining experiences of four-year-olds—and their teachers—on both sides of the Pacific.

Two months after Hurricane Katrina, Louisiana took control of nearly all the public schools in New Orleans. Today, all of the city’s public schools are charter schools. Although many analyses mark the beginning of education reform in New Orleans with Katrina, in Public Schools, Private Governance, J. Celeste Layargues that the storm merely accelerated the timeline for reforms that had inched along incrementally over the previous decade. Both before and after Katrina, white reformers purposely excluded Black educators, community members, and parents.

Public Schools, Private Governance traces the slow, deliberate dismantling of New Orleans’ public schools, and the processes that have maintained the reforms made in Katrina’s immediate aftermath, showing how Black parents and residents were left without a voice and the officials charged with school governance, most of whom are white, with little accountability. Lay cogently explains how political minorities disrupted systems to create change and keep reforms in place, and the predictable political effects—exclusion, frustration, and resignation—on the part of those most directly affected.