“Stories matter. Stories are a reflection of power.” When Alicia Garza, a founder of the Black Lives Matter movement, said this during her keynote address at the close of the 2018 Race & Pedagogy National Conference held on campus last September, it struck me that this was the crux of the conference. Its title,“Radically Re-Imagining the Project of Justice: Narratives of Rupture, Resilience, and Liberation,” was a call for participants to share their stories and to speak into the spaces that have rendered them invisible.
Siddharth Ramakrishnan, associate professor of biology and the Jennie M. Caruthers Chair in Neuroscience, has a weird brain. He is a master of the microscopic details and concepts of neuroscience—while a research scientist at Columbia University, he designed microchips to record from brain cells, and in his lab at Puget Sound, he studies the development and physiology of reproductive neurons in zebrafish—but he is also a creative visionary, capable of a more spatial, fluid way of seeing the world.
His new book, Imperfect Patriot, explores the decisions, philosophy, and legacy of former Secretary of State and retired four-star Gen. Colin Powell. For Jeff, the George F. Jewett Distinguished Professor in Puget Sound’s School of Business and Leadership, the biography represents the culmination of 14 years of research.
One evening last June, philosophy professor Ariela Tubert and Hispanic studies associate professor Brendan Lanctot led their class along the narrow, labyrinthian paths of Recoleta Cemetery on the acropolis of Buenos Aires, where more than 6,400 above-ground burial sites quietly tell the story of this complicated country.
