Cougar Diaries

By Amanda Holmes

The philosophy department usually hosts a couple colloquiums every semester. At the colloquium, a professor reads a paper he or she has been working on and then other professors and students have a discussion about it. It’s usually pretty fun and always interesting. The first colloquium will be held from 5:30 p.m. to 7 p.m. Mon., Nov. 2 in the Fourth Floor Board Room. Prof. Forrest Perry will be reading his paper on “The Class Dimension of Hip Rebellion.” He’ll be talking about hipsters:

“In his presentation Dr. Perry will try to make sense of tastes hipsters have for objects constitutive of the hipster aesthetic: Pabst beer, trucker hats, and second-hand work shirts. He will discuss two ways of interpreting the meaning of these objects: as markers of "cool" within status games played by hipsters and as an unacknowledged acknowledgement of a kind of solidarity between hipsters and the working class. His aim in the paper is to highlight the class dimension of hip practices and show that doing so might put us in a better position to transform such practices into the cross-class cooperation required to bring about non-capitalist societies.”

I encourage anyone to come. It’s going to be deck ("deck" is hipster speak for "cool").

Amanda Holmes is a senior philosophy major from Atlanta, GA. She is vice president of the Philosophy Club. Consideration for the student bloggers is provided by Saint Xavier University.