Tressie McMillan Cottom is a professor with the Center for Information, Technology and Public Life at UNC-Chapel Hill, a New York Times columnist, and 2020 MacArthur Fellow. Her sharp insights do not let anyone off the hook – she argues that bad federal policy, state disinvestment, amoral narratives about meritocracy, and prestige-driven cultures of traditional higher education all share responsibility for LowerEd. Influential change-makers like Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and activists like The Debt Strike Collective cite her book as important for changing the conversation about higher education. Professor Tressie McMillan Cottom’s first book, Lower Ed, captures the zeitgeist on how profit, and debt, moved from the margins of higher education to bankrupt the very heart of American meritocracy. In eight highly praised treatises on beauty, media, money, and more, Tressie McMillan Cottomaward-winning professor and acclaimed author of Lower Edis unapologetically thick: deemed thick where I should have been thin, more where I should have been less, McMillan Cottom refuses to shy away from blending the. Her breadth is phenomenal – it moves from the racial hierarchy of beauty standards and the class codes of dressing for work to the predation of for-profit colleges and the stain of racial capitalism on our plural democracy – all while reimagining the essay form for the 21st century as she goes. Thick occupies a wonderful, liminal space between academic text and.

A trenchant cultural critic, celebrated sociologist, and award-winning writer, Tressie McMillan Cottom is known for rearranging your brain in the span of a carefully-turned phrase. McMillan Cottom pushes against this to make room for the women who yearn to grow but are encouraged to shrink: thick is not just about bodies, but about capaciousness, about being a black woman who ‘thinks for a living’who is paid, and well, published, and often.

Thick tressie mcmillan cottom