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I teach in a predominantly white and affluent public university in a state that is quite diverse. The Republican domination on tax-revenue limits for higher education spending has caused a disproportionate amount of CU-Boulder’s operating budget to be driven by out-of-state tuition, thus filling the campus with students drawn predominantly from affluent European American, or white, populations. Many of these students come from white-dominated suburbs or gated communities, where people of color are mostly the gardeners or maids who live in neighborhoods that they have learned to fear; when they admire hip-hop culture, they do so only from afar. As a faculty member in the Department of Ethnic Studies, I seek to use materials that question racial/ethnic, gender, and class privilege and that empower the voices of subaltern communities of color, especially women, in the United States, in the Western Hemisphere , and around the globe. In this regard I teach a seminar called “Screening Race, Class, and Gender in the Global Borderlands.” I like to end the class with Alfonso Cuarón’s adaptation of P. D. James’s Children of Men (1992), which has been enthusiastically received by critics, many of whom put it on their top-ten lists for 2006. More recently Michael J. Rowin made the following observations in Cineaste: “Children of Men employs stunning verisimilitude within its mise-ensc ène” (60) and “tethers its esthetic designs to an eschatological realism rarely seen before from films of its box office clout” (61). I agree with Rowin’s apt descriptors, even though I think Cuarón’s political canvas is decidedly more complex, nuanced, and expansive than the violence of 9/11 that arguably drives Rowin’s own anxieties throughout his essay . In fact, I use Children of Men’s visual language as a way for students to think about the normalization of fascism in contemporary political CHAPTER 10 Fear and Action: A Cognitive Approach to Teaching Children of Men arturo j. aldama 152 Arturo J. Aldama culture and discourse; violations of the rule of law; the possible role of global warming and genetically modified foods in the systematic sterilization of women; anti-Mexican immigrant social hostility in American public discourse; Western European anti-immigrant hostility toward former colonies; the social and environmental factors behind refugees’ flights from violence and impending death; and the erosion of rights for people in general and women and children (especially those who are neither white, European, nor Christian) in particular. I ask students to write a theoretically nuanced interdisciplinary essay discussing how eventually it would be possible to challenge white and male supremacy in the United States and globally and how social and environmental justice should work in a healthy planet. I do this in part because I am genuinely interested to know how our students see their futures—or whether they are so caught up in the neural stimulation of short-term pleasure that ideas of the future fail to interest them. But I have other, more latent (maybe) or strategic reasons: to cause a cognitive jolt or a shift in their limbic and prefrontal systems,1 and thus in their senses of subjectivity, and to help them develop a worldview sustained by an ethics of social responsibility—or at least an emotional investment in their futures and, if they decide to have children, their children’s futures. In doing so, I am competing with a slew of ideological, institutional, cultural, and cognitive factors. The first macro- and immediate factor (over which I do have some control, at least within the confines of the classroom) is what I term a “digitized solipsism” combined with an “institutionalized attention deficit disorder (ADD),” where students stay immersed in various devices, listening to their iPods, checking e-mail or Facebook comments, and compulsively text messaging. What would an fMRI or PET scan show us about their brains’ cognitive processes when kids are both zoning out to music and multitasking? What would we see with respect to the activation of pleasure-seeking and reward centers; the stimulation of neurotransmitters and related hormones, with delicate interplays of dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin (so important for giving birth; having orgasms; bonding; enhancing social emotions, such as empathy; and inhibiting the amygdala), adrenaline, cortisol, and vasopressin ; and general processing in the limbic system and frontal cortex? Would there be a masking or inhibition of emotional centers, especially those that cause empathy and compassion; of optimistic emotional responses...

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