Meredith Kooi is an artist and PhD student whose specialties (visual culture, biopolitics and disability, deconstruction) overlap beautifully with the ILA, where she enrolled before the cuts were announced. She shares her thoughts on Emory’s loss at Burnaway, a newish blog covering the Atlanta art scene:
“Many students in the ILA…feel that this move has been an attack on our work and who we are…. Since the graduate students in the ILA work with ‘unconventional’ methodologies and produce ‘unconventional’ dissertations—the first dissertations with visual chapters were just accepted by the graduate school—it is hard for traditional disciplines to recognize the work we do.”
Meanwhile, the Crunk Feminist Collective blog has been garnering attention and passion on a national scale since it was established by a group of African American women grad students at Emory. At a recent Collective soiree, the topic of the cuts was an emotional one for presenters and audience members alike. The department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, which sponsored the event, continues to be a beacon for that courageous inquiry thing, and its high rankings ensure the administration will not be trampling on it anytime soon.
