Student Work: Criticism

How to Save the Planet? Tell the Right Stories.
There are a number of different narratives about the climate crisis. Some provoke hope or despair, others instill fear, and others still provoke apathy or outright denial. Perhaps neither of these portrayals are correct. Perhaps both of them are.

Sources
Although the internet has always depended on circulation, particularly since the visual turn, it is when those aesthetics begin to originate online that the source of our reality begins to falter.

Martín Chambi’s Portraits: On Beauty and Legacy
Through photography, Chambi found himself in conversation with the two cultural identities of Peru—Spanish and indigenous Peruvians. His photographic legacy is somehow still potent and representative of communities of people born out of tension.

The Ideological Antihero
"Black Sails" pulls no punches depicting the brutality of the pirate lifestyle, but its very premise asks the audience to sympathize with “monsters” by posing questions about the nature of villainy.

I NEED A FATHER. I NEED A MOTHER.
I have been severed for so long. Born severed.
I can’t name it. I don’t want to say it.

Toxic Masculinity in Kanye West’s Music
An intersectional analysis of misogyny and domination in Kanye West's lyrics

Truth-Seeking in the Digital Age
One of the greatest challenges of political polarization is that all participants are passionately convinced of their own grasp on the truth.

Recognizing Self-Deception in a Loveless Society
On Richard Avedon and James Baldwin’s "Nothing Personal"

Two Poems Inspired by Gwendolyn Brooks
Give me the red / rose. The purple / prose. The blooming / bows.

Make Way for Midge Maisel
Midge Maisel's strong-headed, Jewish-mother persona resembles your bubbe who nags you to nosh on a third helping of kugel and gefilte fish. However, she is to be reckoned with as she emerges as a comic who is not afraid to hold her middle finger up to the patriarchy.

Framing the Other
Read with Butler in mind, Coetzee's "Waiting for the Barbarians" portrays the ways an empire manufactures reality, justifying its attack on a broad, different “other” whose lives are “ungrievable” and exist only to further the narrative that the state has constructed of itself.

A Perspective on TikTok’s Mental Health Epidemic
A case for why the mental health gurus on TikTok may be doing their adolescent viewers more harm than good, as well as why these adolescents are drawn to it anyway

Experimental Composition: Stravinsky and Stein
"Rite of Spring" and "Tender Buttons" both adhere to a strict sense of organization and repetition in order to convey a move away from artistic norms of figurative expression toward more literal representation.

In Defense of the Unusual Education
From the outside looking in, many see Gallatin as a sort of bubble, an idealistic utopia without the consequences of the “real world.” However Gallatin has practical utility, and in fact, traditional education has a lot to learn from it.