The webseries is an often snubbed medium. It is written-off as sub-par and too easy: any kid can grab a camcorder and some friends right? Webseries has often been viewed as television’s disowned cousin. The truth is that webseries is the future of entertainment and the most honest medium in existence today; it is also so often, due to low budgets and time constraints, a labor of love.
Still, it takes something special for just any webseries to rise above the din of the rest, because anybody can grab a camera and some friends. The internet is for most, though not all, free and easily accessible. No one makes a webseries for the money, because there isn’t much to be made. Even the most well known and frequently awarded series are constantly grasping for sponsorship.
Culture
Hyper-Masculinity, Twin Peaks, & Gendered Violence
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The reinforcing messages sent from “breastaurants” like Twin Peaks and Hooters are quite clear”: inscribed gender roles and promotion of socially constructed norms of female beauty, which are exclusionary hegemonic ideologies in terms of body size and shape and standards for skin and hair type. These establishments endorse a consumeristic colonization of women’s bodies for the edification of the objectifying male gaze.
Christianity
Turning Again: Been Down in the South
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The Christian response to nonviolent direct action in 1963 sounded similar to many critiques of Baltimore’s uprising today: yes, injustice is wrong. But we must be patient. Don’t stir up trouble. But when you come to a dead end, nonviolence teaches you to look for a resurrection.
Gender and Sexuality
Social Contexts of Youth Bullying
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What kinds of messages are we sending our youth? Do we truly understand our own complicity in the bullying we see in our schools? Unless and until we grapple with the ways in which our society promotes and gives justification to such bullying, we will never truly solve these problems.
art
Field Office Annals, Part Two: Engagement, Vision, and Play
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One of the Department of Art’s foundational ideas is that the local and national feed and support each other. That is essential, connections to a larger movement, to other practitioners, to other ideas.
Culture
UK Muslim Climate Action Campaign Gains Big Support
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The “Islam is Green” climate action campaign is centered around the Muslim understanding that humans have been given the role of caretaker of the Earth. We must protect it and maintain it, just as we would our own garden with blossoming fruit trees and vegetable plants. Members of the Islamic Education Research Academy and Islam is Green climate action campaign encourage all of us to be caretakers of our extended garden.
Culture
Cartoons of Free Speech or Hate? Redux
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Though the AFDI’s Islamophobic and racist actions is doing have been classified as “free speech,” that does not mean that we have to tolerate it by not speaking up. We have the right, as well, to take this case to the court of public opinion and call it out for what it is: a hateful reaction to an already minoritized and misunderstood group of people.
Culture
Pay to Play: The Creeping Privatization of Public Education
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Anyone with a child in a California public school knows how thoroughly riddled with private-school fundraising many schools have become. But without such stopgaps, public schools have no art, theatre, debate, music, robotics, sports, or field trips—and some public schools lack all of these! Generous and public-spirited parents try to fill the enormous gap left by Proposition 13, but inevitably, when a small group coalesces around a favored activity, the precious cornerstone and sign of democracy—universal access— is eroded.
Culture
Acceptance Weighs More Than Denouncement
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Contrary to the expectation of the American Freedom Defense Initiative, Muslim leaders have condemned violence and supported the right to free speech. Most openly exhibit tolerance and follow the Qur’an when it states “And the servants of the Gracious God are those who walk on the earth in a dignified manner, and when the ignorant address them, they say, ‘Peace!’
Healing Israel/Palestine
The New Israeli Government is Worse than You Might Have Expected
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The new Israeli government is a total victory for the most extreme elements in the extreme Right in Israel. The overtly racist party HaBayit HaYehudi, the party of the West Bank settlers, will control the Justice Department, the Education Department, and almost all important government offices concerned with the Occupation of the West Bank.
Christianity
Cartoons of Free Speech or Hate?
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Violence in the face of hate only brings about more hate, thus creating an unending cycle. How could Pam Geller and the AFDI justify their perverse event as free speech?