Who's that in your AVI, Jasmine?
That's a screenshot from the film Irma Vep (1996, Olivier Assayas) with Maggie Cheung.
Besides being a fantastic and dizzying/disorienting film, I have a soft spot for it bc I first watched it in a class with Prof. Yiman Wang, who would advise my undergraduate thesis! Here's the essay that she wrote on Maggie Cheung and the film Irma Vep: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/492536
currently reading
Liat Ben-Moshe, Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition (U of Minnesota Press, 2020)
The Lecturer's Union at UM has started bargaining
https://www.michigandaily.com/section/campus-life/leo-begins-2021-contract-negotiations-u-m
"LEO includes 1,696 non-tenure track professors from the Ann Arbor, Dearborn and Flint campuses. The union is looking to improve their contract through the upcoming negotiations. Some of the proposals on the bargaining platform include more flexible COVID-19 policies for mode of course instruction, increased pay, pay parity across all three University campuses and greater participation in University governance."
currently reading
Jessie Daniels, “‘My Brain Database Doesn’t See Skin Color’ Color-Blind Racism in the Technology Industry and in Theorizing the Web,” American Behavioral Scientist 59, no. 11 (2015): 1377–93.
snark
Believe it or not there *are* scholars who write and think about the exact issues that rear their ugly heads on the fediverse about every 2-3 months 🙃
here's the libgen link https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=280F367F4AF241CBE76746A0109257DA
If people are having feelings about the shift of users to the fediverse and away from capitalist social media, I might recommend this book:
Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media by Sarah T. Roberts (Yale UP, 2019)
https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300235883/behind-screen
its helpful in understanding why moderation at Twitter, FB, or another social media site is so terrible, and to understand why content moderation is fundamental to the problems of the internet.
Dylan Rodríguez’s statement to American Studies Association: http://utotherescue.blogspot.com/2021/01/traditions-of-communal-self-defense.html
“i encourage a collective embrace of an ethic and practice... [of] collective, communal self-defense. This robust ethic and practice is not only central to abolitionist, liberationist, Black (feminist, queer, trans) radical, and Indigenous self-determination traditions of mutual aid and community building, but is also a necessary aspect of ‘campus life’ for many of us in the ASA.”
I'm really wary of "Left Tube" and I don't really know Owen Jones all that much, but I appreciate Judith Butler's discussions of how they would write Gender Trouble differently now, on the criticisms that people brought against Gender Trouble as a text, in this video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXJb2eLNJZE
Feminist icon Judith Butler on JK Rowling, trans rights, feminism and intersectionality
currently reading
AK Thompson, Black Bloc, White Riot: Antiglobalization and the Geneaology of Dissent (AK Press, 2010).
currently reading
Alexander G. Weheliye, “‘Feenin’: Posthuman Voices in Contemporary Black Popular Music,” Social Text 20, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 21–47.
currently reading
Patrick Jagoda, Network Aesthetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).
featured speakers
Speakers:
Garrett Felber was recently fired by the University of Mississippi despite his incredible work in the study of the racist American carceral state and his activism with the Study and Struggle project that organizes against incarceration and criminalization in Mississippi.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Elizabeth Hinton
Robin D.G. Kelley
Kiese Laymon
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
TONIGHT Join us in solidarity with Garrett Felber for a discussion about defending anti-racist and abolitionist organizing in academia.
Tuesday, December 22, 2020 at 5.00pm – 6.30pm EST
Online Teach-in
Solidarity: Defending Activism Within and Beyond the University
currently reading
Eithne Luibhéid and Lionel Cantú Jr., eds., Queer Migrations: Sexuality, US Citizenship, and Border Crossings (Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press, 2005).
currently reading
Kelly Lytle Hernández, Migra!: A History of the US Border Patrol (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).
Year 3 PhD Student in American Culture and Digital Studies at U-M Ann Arbor
avi is Maggie Cheung in Irma Vep; banner is Valle de la Luna by Remedios Varo