On this page you will find a selection of my college academic writing. Please feel free to leave responses or feedback on any of the pages.
“Incorporation into the Corporate: Digital Technology and the Concentration of Corporate Power” (Fall 2012)
Final paper for Digital Media in Society with Professor Fred Turner. The prompt I am responding to was “On balance, digital technologies tend to empower corporations and disempower individuals in contemporary American society.” (Hint: my answer is yes.)
“Empathy vs. Emptiness: An Investigation of Human and Divine Responses to Pain in Homer’s Odyssey” (Fall 2010)
During my first quarter of Structured Liberal Education, I was the recipient of the Boothe Prize for Excellence in First Year Writing for an essay I wrote fall quarter in my Structured Liberal Education (SLE) program. The essay, entitled “Empathy vs. Emptiness: An Investigation of Human and Divine Responses to Pain” explored what I thought was fundamentally at stake in the human relationships in Homer’s Odyssey: the ability to empathize, which was best demonstrated during moments of connubial sleep. Read the essay below or download a copy here.
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“Free at Last? Reconciling the legacies of Karl Marx and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.” (Spring 2011)
For the conclusion of Structured Liberal Education, we were tasked with analyzing any topic of our choice through the lens of Marxism or Karl Marx. I decided to examine the legacies of Karl Marx and MLK, two of history’s biggest social revolutionaries. King studied Marx, and while sympathetic to democratic socialism, ultimately rejected Marxism; and Marx’s late writings ultimately seemed to reject religion as a vehicle for social change. Given that the descendants of both legacies seem to want the same end–an equitable society, I wanted to see whether the two groups could work together. Through an analysis of Marx’s early humanist writings and of King’s personal entries as he thought about Marxism, I ultimately decide they can be, given the philosophical shortcomings of both Marx and King. Take a look at the paper here.
