K Borchard
Biographic Data
| ID | 49369 |
|---|---|
| NAME | K Borchard |
| GIVEN NAMES | K |
| FAMILY NAME | Borchard |
| SIGNATURE | BORCHARD K |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Nebraska at Kearney |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9479-4822 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 31 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1998 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Trump and the De(con)struction of Society
This project is rooted in associative quotations. During Trump's first presidency, his advisor Steve Bannon called for the deconstruction of the administrative state. In his second term, Trump is furiously eliminating federal agencies and their thousands of their workers, weaponizing previously nonpartisan aspects of federal government, and upending post-World-War II alliances. Here I, through fragments of discourse, explore how that means not si…
Global Trains of Thought: Coupling Derailment, Environment, Racism, Movement, Progress
This article is an assemblage of thematically inter-relatable quotations promoting critically oriented, non-linear complexity of thought. The quotes concern: recent derailments and safety protocols; what trains carry; ideas about linearity, sequence, and simultaneity; environmental issues; trains used in genocide, race-based segregation and exploitation, and immigration; trains communicating art, symbols, and meaning; and quotes from literary fig…
The Subjection of the Girl of the Period
Responding to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 reversal of Roe v. Wade, I produced the following conceptual writing. I took alternating lines from works by two well-known 19th-century British authors, one an anti-feminist woman and the other a pro-feminist man, pasting them line-by-line into one document. The resulting mashup text presents a contradictory, destabilizing view of women’s rights and responsibilities. The back-and-forth of each author’s…
Who Sociology Is
C. Wright Mills said developing a sociological imagination meant considering the link between history and biography. Drawing stylistically from David Markson’s This is Not a Novel, this textual experiment presents biographical fragments without a coherent narrative or clear purpose. Questions that might emerge: how is sociology related to its creators and practitioners’ biographies? How do details on individual sickness, mortality, and character …
Experimental Writing On Recent Mass Shootings
In 2017 the author published a poem about a mass shooting in Orlando where forty-nine people died. Two shootings in March 2021 in Atlanta and Boulder, where eighteen people total were killed, have since garnered national news media attention. But mass shootings are more common than nationally reported. A Wikipedia page, titled “List of Mass Shootings in the United States 2021,” states that there were over one-hundred shootings involving four or m…
The Van Gogh Experience
This experimental writing both embodies and interrogates how creative work that is re-mixed and re-presented also creates multivalent “experiences.” A menagerie of quotations performs both a narrative-of-thinking and open-ended discursive potential. The work asks: Can this manuscript both analyze and perform a subversion, problematizing notions of authenticity, authorship, ownership, production, distribution, reception, and meaning? Can immersion…
Affectively Entertaining: Dating/Games During a 'Limited Military Exercise
Here the author presents a collage of inter-relatable quotations. The excerpts include discourses from/regarding reality dating shows, media coverage of Ukraine's invasion, gamification in dating apps, the role of affect in media remixing and sense-making, military and business strategy, computerized games, and literary authors and social theory. Questions emerge: How do various forms of popular/social media 'interpellate' us? How does affect pre…
On the (Often Western, White, Male) Privilege of Self-Defense
Here, the author presents a critical, rhyzomatic collage of previously published writing. Foucault argues dominant discourses have specific bodily effects, that such discourses shape-shift in reaffirming the status quo, and that resistance requires continual critical engagement. This textual assemblage suggests affinities with and comparisons between: conservative political discourses; legal frameworks for claiming self-defense; justifications fo…
Three Poems From a Pandemic
Three poems, written during the height of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States, are presented. The poems convey frustration, fear, and sense-making emerging from an unprecedented normative, health, and information crisis. They also evoke discourses regarding inequalities exacerbated during the pandemic, as well as questions of political legitimacy and the impotence of truth
Four Poems From an Insurrection
I present four poems written in response to the U.S. Capitol insurrection. The poems are constructed through fragments of contemporary phrases, words from national anthems and pledges, and word play through spelling, phonetics, and semantics. They produce discordant, emergent sense-making through free form verse composed during a singular crisis of political legitimacy
Squid Game(s)
Here, the author presents a sequentially yet nonlinearly organized collage of previously published writing, curated under the title “Squid Game(s).” The collage is composed entirely of decontextualized quotations. The excerpts include reviews and analysis of the Netflix series Squid Game; excerpts from accounts and analysis of the Holocaust, Nazism, and their representation; discussions of homeless men paid to attack each other in a video series;…
Replication Crisis: Framing Science for Untold Crimes
Here the author presents a sequentially yet nonlinearly organized collage of previously published writing, curated under the title “Replication Crisis: Framing Science for Untold Crimes.” The collage is composed entirely of quotations. Here, a thesis-driven expository regime is replaced with open-ended discursive potential. The excerpts include assessments of the replication crisis in science; discussions of p values and their centrality in the c…
Pulsing
I first learned about the mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, through the television. Popular news anchors provided "on the scene" reporting. I saw interviews with officials, with those present at the shooting, and with families and friends of victims. The media narrative unfolded against a visual backdrop of the club, almost always a great distance off, blocked by police cars and tape. I thought hard about that distance. I felt…
Multimedia Review: Colleges and Universities Losing Their Way
Super Columbine Massacre RPG! and Grand Theft Autoethnography
Here, I use autoethnography, media accounts, and work in sociology to consider the popular video game series Grand Theft Auto (GTA), its abstraction of violence and social relations, and the formation of my Self. I also consider the video game Super Columbine Massacre RPG! (or Role Playing Game) as a deconstruction of cause and effect arguments concerning links between video game violence and real-world violence. I consider such games as sites fo…
Film Review: Media Review Essay: Contemporary Sociological Theory and New Films on Contemporary Social Change Surviving Progress
Between Poverty and a Lifestyle: The Leisure Activities of Homeless People in Las Vegas
Housed people judge homeless people, and in particular their leisure activities, as indicators of whether that person has chosen a "homeless lifestyle" and therefore deserves homelessness. To achieve a more complex understanding of contemporary homelessness, the author conducted ethnographic fieldwork over ten months in Las Vegas, Nevada, interviewing and participant observing dozens of homeless men and women, including observations of their leis…
Overlook: Exploring the Internal Fringes of America with the Center for Land Use Interpretation - Edited by Matthew Coolidge and Sarah Simons and Manufactured Landscapes - Directed by Jennifer Baichwa…
Mystification of the Labor Process in Contemporary Consumer Culture
An addition to an already diverse body of empirical work within cultural studies research is offered by analyzing the mystification of the labor process for children attending Build-A-Bear Workshops. First it is briefly described how customers 'build' their own commodities at these Workshops and how the production of stuffed animals at the stores is constructed as an experience that hides the true nature of capitalist manufacturing and service wo…
Into the Tunnel: The Brief Life of Marion Samuel, 1931-1943 - by Götz Aly
Product Review: Crossing the Line: Vagrancy, Homelessness and Social Displacement in Russia
Las Vegas Mon Amour
Here, the author uses the film/screenplay Hiroshima Mon Amourto discuss contemporary trends in Las Vegas. A new elitism/renaissance in the city can be contrasted against an absence of history/memory. New gambling technologies promote a smoother capitalism while simultaneously encouraging nostalgia and distracting players from considering the house's edge. Television has also gained greater importance in defining Las Vegas, both nationally and loc…
Intersubjective Implosions
In the past 8 years, five major structures on the Las Vegas Strip (The Dunes, Landmark, Hacienda, Sands, and Aladdin hotels) have been imploded. In this intersubjective ethnography, the author utilizes personal reflection to discuss the problematic intersection of biography, changes in the Las Vegas skyline, economic trends, and their connection to history. This intersubjective ethnography captures contradictions and paradoxes through interpretiv…
Fear of and Sympathy toward Homeless Men in Las Vegas
Between a Hard Rock and Postmodernism: Opening the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino
Various researchers have promoted the use of ethnographic accounts in subjective descriptions of postmodern spaces. The Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas represents such a space, embodying several key features of postmodern culture. These features include the commodification of image signs and popular culture, the commercial neutralization of signifying practices subversive to capitalism, ephemeral architecture informing ephemeral social re…
Between Poverty and a Lifestyle: The Leisure Activities of Homeless People in Las Vegas
Housed people judge homeless people, and in particular their leisure activities, as indicators of whether that person has chosen a "homeless lifestyle" and therefore deserves homelessness. To achieve a more complex understanding of contemporary homelessness, the author conducted ethnographic fieldwork over ten months in Las Vegas, Nevada, interviewing and participant observing dozens of homeless men and women, including observations of their leis…
Super Columbine Massacre RPG! and Grand Theft Autoethnography
Here, I use autoethnography, media accounts, and work in sociology to consider the popular video game series Grand Theft Auto (GTA), its abstraction of violence and social relations, and the formation of my Self. I also consider the video game Super Columbine Massacre RPG! (or Role Playing Game) as a deconstruction of cause and effect arguments concerning links between video game violence and real-world violence. I consider such games as sites fo…
Between a Hard Rock and Postmodernism: Opening the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino
Various researchers have promoted the use of ethnographic accounts in subjective descriptions of postmodern spaces. The Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas represents such a space, embodying several key features of postmodern culture. These features include the commodification of image signs and popular culture, the commercial neutralization of signifying practices subversive to capitalism, ephemeral architecture informing ephemeral social re…
Las Vegas Mon Amour
Here, the author uses the film/screenplay Hiroshima Mon Amourto discuss contemporary trends in Las Vegas. A new elitism/renaissance in the city can be contrasted against an absence of history/memory. New gambling technologies promote a smoother capitalism while simultaneously encouraging nostalgia and distracting players from considering the house's edge. Television has also gained greater importance in defining Las Vegas, both nationally and loc…
Fear of and Sympathy toward Homeless Men in Las Vegas
Intersubjective Implosions
In the past 8 years, five major structures on the Las Vegas Strip (The Dunes, Landmark, Hacienda, Sands, and Aladdin hotels) have been imploded. In this intersubjective ethnography, the author utilizes personal reflection to discuss the problematic intersection of biography, changes in the Las Vegas skyline, economic trends, and their connection to history. This intersubjective ethnography captures contradictions and paradoxes through interpretiv…
Pulsing
I first learned about the mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, through the television. Popular news anchors provided "on the scene" reporting. I saw interviews with officials, with those present at the shooting, and with families and friends of victims. The media narrative unfolded against a visual backdrop of the club, almost always a great distance off, blocked by police cars and tape. I thought hard about that distance. I felt…
Mystification of the Labor Process in Contemporary Consumer Culture
An addition to an already diverse body of empirical work within cultural studies research is offered by analyzing the mystification of the labor process for children attending Build-A-Bear Workshops. First it is briefly described how customers 'build' their own commodities at these Workshops and how the production of stuffed animals at the stores is constructed as an experience that hides the true nature of capitalist manufacturing and service wo…
Between a Hard Rock and Postmodernism: Opening the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino
Various researchers have promoted the use of ethnographic accounts in subjective descriptions of postmodern spaces. The Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas represents such a space, embodying several key features of postmodern culture. These features include the commodification of image signs and popular culture, the commercial neutralization of signifying practices subversive to capitalism, ephemeral architecture informing ephemeral social re…
Fear of and Sympathy toward Homeless Men in Las Vegas
Intersubjective Implosions
In the past 8 years, five major structures on the Las Vegas Strip (The Dunes, Landmark, Hacienda, Sands, and Aladdin hotels) have been imploded. In this intersubjective ethnography, the author utilizes personal reflection to discuss the problematic intersection of biography, changes in the Las Vegas skyline, economic trends, and their connection to history. This intersubjective ethnography captures contradictions and paradoxes through interpretiv…
Product Review: Crossing the Line: Vagrancy, Homelessness and Social Displacement in Russia
Las Vegas Mon Amour
Here, the author uses the film/screenplay Hiroshima Mon Amourto discuss contemporary trends in Las Vegas. A new elitism/renaissance in the city can be contrasted against an absence of history/memory. New gambling technologies promote a smoother capitalism while simultaneously encouraging nostalgia and distracting players from considering the house's edge. Television has also gained greater importance in defining Las Vegas, both nationally and loc…
Mystification of the Labor Process in Contemporary Consumer Culture
An addition to an already diverse body of empirical work within cultural studies research is offered by analyzing the mystification of the labor process for children attending Build-A-Bear Workshops. First it is briefly described how customers 'build' their own commodities at these Workshops and how the production of stuffed animals at the stores is constructed as an experience that hides the true nature of capitalist manufacturing and service wo…
Into the Tunnel: The Brief Life of Marion Samuel, 1931-1943 - by Götz Aly
Overlook: Exploring the Internal Fringes of America with the Center for Land Use Interpretation - Edited by Matthew Coolidge and Sarah Simons and Manufactured Landscapes - Directed by Jennifer Baichwa…
Between Poverty and a Lifestyle: The Leisure Activities of Homeless People in Las Vegas
Housed people judge homeless people, and in particular their leisure activities, as indicators of whether that person has chosen a "homeless lifestyle" and therefore deserves homelessness. To achieve a more complex understanding of contemporary homelessness, the author conducted ethnographic fieldwork over ten months in Las Vegas, Nevada, interviewing and participant observing dozens of homeless men and women, including observations of their leis…
Film Review: Media Review Essay: Contemporary Sociological Theory and New Films on Contemporary Social Change Surviving Progress
Multimedia Review: Colleges and Universities Losing Their Way
Super Columbine Massacre RPG! and Grand Theft Autoethnography
Here, I use autoethnography, media accounts, and work in sociology to consider the popular video game series Grand Theft Auto (GTA), its abstraction of violence and social relations, and the formation of my Self. I also consider the video game Super Columbine Massacre RPG! (or Role Playing Game) as a deconstruction of cause and effect arguments concerning links between video game violence and real-world violence. I consider such games as sites fo…
Pulsing
I first learned about the mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, through the television. Popular news anchors provided "on the scene" reporting. I saw interviews with officials, with those present at the shooting, and with families and friends of victims. The media narrative unfolded against a visual backdrop of the club, almost always a great distance off, blocked by police cars and tape. I thought hard about that distance. I felt…
Three Poems From a Pandemic
Three poems, written during the height of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States, are presented. The poems convey frustration, fear, and sense-making emerging from an unprecedented normative, health, and information crisis. They also evoke discourses regarding inequalities exacerbated during the pandemic, as well as questions of political legitimacy and the impotence of truth
Four Poems From an Insurrection
I present four poems written in response to the U.S. Capitol insurrection. The poems are constructed through fragments of contemporary phrases, words from national anthems and pledges, and word play through spelling, phonetics, and semantics. They produce discordant, emergent sense-making through free form verse composed during a singular crisis of political legitimacy
Squid Game(s)
Here, the author presents a sequentially yet nonlinearly organized collage of previously published writing, curated under the title “Squid Game(s).” The collage is composed entirely of decontextualized quotations. The excerpts include reviews and analysis of the Netflix series Squid Game; excerpts from accounts and analysis of the Holocaust, Nazism, and their representation; discussions of homeless men paid to attack each other in a video series;…
Replication Crisis: Framing Science for Untold Crimes
Here the author presents a sequentially yet nonlinearly organized collage of previously published writing, curated under the title “Replication Crisis: Framing Science for Untold Crimes.” The collage is composed entirely of quotations. Here, a thesis-driven expository regime is replaced with open-ended discursive potential. The excerpts include assessments of the replication crisis in science; discussions of p values and their centrality in the c…
Who Sociology Is
C. Wright Mills said developing a sociological imagination meant considering the link between history and biography. Drawing stylistically from David Markson’s This is Not a Novel, this textual experiment presents biographical fragments without a coherent narrative or clear purpose. Questions that might emerge: how is sociology related to its creators and practitioners’ biographies? How do details on individual sickness, mortality, and character …
Experimental Writing On Recent Mass Shootings
In 2017 the author published a poem about a mass shooting in Orlando where forty-nine people died. Two shootings in March 2021 in Atlanta and Boulder, where eighteen people total were killed, have since garnered national news media attention. But mass shootings are more common than nationally reported. A Wikipedia page, titled “List of Mass Shootings in the United States 2021,” states that there were over one-hundred shootings involving four or m…
The Van Gogh Experience
This experimental writing both embodies and interrogates how creative work that is re-mixed and re-presented also creates multivalent “experiences.” A menagerie of quotations performs both a narrative-of-thinking and open-ended discursive potential. The work asks: Can this manuscript both analyze and perform a subversion, problematizing notions of authenticity, authorship, ownership, production, distribution, reception, and meaning? Can immersion…
Affectively Entertaining: Dating/Games During a 'Limited Military Exercise
Here the author presents a collage of inter-relatable quotations. The excerpts include discourses from/regarding reality dating shows, media coverage of Ukraine's invasion, gamification in dating apps, the role of affect in media remixing and sense-making, military and business strategy, computerized games, and literary authors and social theory. Questions emerge: How do various forms of popular/social media 'interpellate' us? How does affect pre…
On the (Often Western, White, Male) Privilege of Self-Defense
Here, the author presents a critical, rhyzomatic collage of previously published writing. Foucault argues dominant discourses have specific bodily effects, that such discourses shape-shift in reaffirming the status quo, and that resistance requires continual critical engagement. This textual assemblage suggests affinities with and comparisons between: conservative political discourses; legal frameworks for claiming self-defense; justifications fo…
Global Trains of Thought: Coupling Derailment, Environment, Racism, Movement, Progress
This article is an assemblage of thematically inter-relatable quotations promoting critically oriented, non-linear complexity of thought. The quotes concern: recent derailments and safety protocols; what trains carry; ideas about linearity, sequence, and simultaneity; environmental issues; trains used in genocide, race-based segregation and exploitation, and immigration; trains communicating art, symbols, and meaning; and quotes from literary fig…
The Subjection of the Girl of the Period
Responding to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 reversal of Roe v. Wade, I produced the following conceptual writing. I took alternating lines from works by two well-known 19th-century British authors, one an anti-feminist woman and the other a pro-feminist man, pasting them line-by-line into one document. The resulting mashup text presents a contradictory, destabilizing view of women’s rights and responsibilities. The back-and-forth of each author’s…
Trump and the De(con)struction of Society
This project is rooted in associative quotations. During Trump's first presidency, his advisor Steve Bannon called for the deconstruction of the administrative state. In his second term, Trump is furiously eliminating federal agencies and their thousands of their workers, weaponizing previously nonpartisan aspects of federal government, and upending post-World-War II alliances. Here I, through fragments of discourse, explore how that means not si…
Sociology (22 works) · Political science (16 works) · Art (14 works) · Aesthetics (13 works) · Computer Science (10 works) · History (9 works) · Literature (9 works) · Psychology (9 works) · Law (8 works) · Law (7 works)