History and Conspiratorial Thinking
I'm not sure whether this is primarily a rant or a warning or a PSA, but one thing I've been seeing a lot of in the summer courses I'm teaching is conspiratorial thinking that flies, bafflingly, in the face of the facts.
My students (presuming this isn't an LLM thing that I haven't figured out yet) will often write, in the style of a YouTube clickbait headline, about how sad it is that so many voices are LOST TO HISTORY because NO ONE THOUGHT THEM WORTHY OF RECORDING.
And, like, on the one hand, yeah, probably 99.9% of humanity throughout history has gone through life without having their voices directly recorded. And the whole "Can the Subaltern Speak?" question is a good one to wrestle with. (I read Spivak in a 2nd-year undergrad history course. I am not making my students do the same thing because I suspect they would riot.) What baffles and confuses me is that they will write this... while reading carefully curated -- thank you very much -- sources about the very people whose experiences are allegedly LOST TO HISTORY FOREVER. We even get some firsthand accounts. And I wish I could figure out why I can assign a whole bunch of sources about the lives of marginalized people (queer, disabled, female, trans, enslaved, etc.) and still get responses about TRAGICALLY, SUCH PEOPLE'S STORIES WERE NOT WRITTEN DOWN. What do they think they're reading? Why doesn't it count if it's assigned rather than passing organically before their eyes in some other way?
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