Khaleel Grant, Elsa Hardy, Max Mishler, and Elizabeth Ross // Starting in December of 2020, a series of rebellions rocked the St. Louis City Justice Center (CJC) and the St. Louis City Minimum Security Institution (MSI), frequently referred to as “the Workhouse.” People incarcerated at both institutions broke out of their cells, detained correctional officers,…
Homeopathic Balms for Unruly gauchos: Alternative Medicine and Rural Imaginaries in Uruguay at the Turn of the 20th Century
Analía Lavin // What did the nostalgic portrayal of gauchos — nomadic rural workers who wandered through Southern Latin America’s countryside— have to do with alternative medicine? An unusual 1895 Uruguayan publication brought together these different worlds, combining a home remedy manual, a homeopathic catalogue and a collection of short stories featuring gauchos. In this…
Collapsing Work-Life Balance in Covid-19
Amala Poli // The beep of the phone.. thudding heart, fingers clicking away. “Is everything okay?” Yes, you say. “I just had to reply to this one email. All done now!” You set it aside, eyes flickering in the direction of the screen just a little.
The space in-between
Dr Jac Saorsa, Artist-in-Residence// My PhD in creative writing consitutes an exploration, through both conventional and visual language, of the presence and immutability of death. My subjects are the Living: patients in hopsital with terminal cancer, and the Dead: cadavers I carefully dissect in a creative and subjective approach to the mysteries of individual human…
Bordering the Line – A Three-Piece Creative Series (I)
Bordering the Line – A Three-Piece Creative Series tackling BPD.
Is Your Baby Even Human? The Science, and Science Fiction, of Observing Babies
Naomi Michalowicz // Babies are full of potential. Every parent, looking at their infant child, will inevitably ask themselves, who will this baby become? What will he like doing? What will her strengths, abilities, and skills, turn out to be? It’s impossible not to wonder what the future holds for a small baby when their…
Notes on Spinal Catastrophism
Travis Chi Wing Lau // “It is the duty of a spine to destroy the universe; or, a spine is the universe’s method of acknowledging this duty to self-destruct.”[1] To my scoliosis, reads the dedication to Thomas Moynihan’s Spinal Catastrophism: A Secret History (Urbanomic 2019). This line alone was more than enough for me to…
Our Olympian Fables
Steve Server// The Perfectionist. The Eccentric. The Paranoiac. The Loner. The Mercurial Partner. The Serial Dater. The Sociopath. The Narcissist. The Coquette. The Milquetoast. Archetypes of difficult personalities populate our books, our movies, and our TV shows. Where do they come from? How do we understand their social function? It is worth considering the extent to which these archetypes are borne or at least informed…
Turning Forty and a Corner: a Storyteller’s Data Analysis on an Empathic Life Lived So Far
Cover Image: Mujer by Melissa Maldonado-Salcedo 2021. Melissa Maldonado-Salcedo // OUT OF THIS WORLD Learning that I was an empath changed my life. It wasn’t that this label gave me meaning or purpose; it just simply explained “me.” As an artist, being sensitive is celebrated and somewhat necessary to create. In academia, emotions and feelings should…
What does it mean to be a triplet anyway?
Steven Rhue // What is a triplet anyway? Well . . . me. I am one of three. A sibling to a brother and a sister. We were born in the same year, on the same day, at approximately the same time, and as it would imply, we are the same age. A more technical…
Ri k’ak’a tzij: Kaqchikel Maya Neologisms in Response to COVID-19
Tiffany D. Creegan Miller, PhD // Though Guatemala is a relatively small country in northern Central America, it boasts of a robust multilingual and multicultural diversity. In addition to Spanish (the official language), Guatemala is also the home to 22 Maya languages, and two other Indigenous languages: Garífuna and Xinca. Within this ethnolinguistic landscape, Kaqchikel…
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