Anna Lännström

Like so many of us, I’ve spent the past two years in a paralyzed panic over artificial intelligence’s effects on my classroom. I teach undergraduates, mainly gen ed philosophy courses, and writing has been a key component of all my courses. When ChatGPT hit the mainstream, it became ...

Funie Hsu’s “How Mainstream Mindfulness Erases Its Buddhist Roots” hit my classroom like a bombshell. We had studied Hindu and Buddhist teachings in my sophomore-level philosophy class, and we were ending the semester by discussing the mindfulness movement. I had introduced Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and we had ...

Creating new courses just keeps getting harder. Today I finished drafting the reading list for my new course on Ethics and the Good Life for first year students. It was supposed to be easy because my research and writing is about ethics. And it was supposed to be fun because ...

Lurking on social media the other day, I listened to colleagues discussing how to respond to a student paper in a philosophy class. The assignment was about our responsibilities towards (nonhuman) animals. The student argued that we can do whatever we want with animals because God has given us dominion ...

I’ve been neglecting my scholarship since March 2020. That, in case you don’t remember, is when the pandemic hit, sending faculty off into a mad scramble of Zoom, hybrid teaching, mental health emergencies, and social distancing. Once vaccines allowed us to stick our heads back out, we began working ...