We hate the pace of social media. And we think most algorithmic recommendations are a trap. So we tread our own path. A path of serendipity and erudition. And our one-time guest curators are happy to help.

Click on any of our Cyberflâneurs below to see their selections. 

About the Cyberflâneur

Asad Haider is a writer and intellectual historian, and an Assistant Professor at York University’s Department of Politics. His first book is Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump. Asad is also a founding editor of Viewpoint Magazine.

The Syllabus was born to contest the all-too-predictable culture of social media. Hence, we regularly invite intellectuals, academics, artists, and politicians to share the pieces they found insightful - all of them found using our indexing infrastructure - with our subscribers. Think of this as a slow-paced Twitter that thrives on serendipity and erudition.

Cyberflaneur

We hate the pace of social media. And we think most algorithmic recommendations are a trap. So we tread our own path. A path of serendipity and erudition. And our one-time guest curators are happy to help. 

Click on any of our Cyberflâneurs below to see their selections.

Brian Eno – a thinker, an artist, an activist – is our firstcyberflâneur. Famous for pioneering ambient music and “unique conceptual approaches and recording techniques to contemporary music”, Brian has been described as one of the world’s most influential artists.

Brian has collaborated with the likes of David Bowie, David Byrne, U2, Coldplay - to name but a few - and was recently inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Among his many interests and activities beyond the world of music, he is a founding member of the Long Now Foundation and has been President of the Stop the War Coalition.

He has chosen some terrific pieces from our stacks - across audio, video, and text - including on how architects have finally embraced communities in their work, the effects of pollution on crime, why we should trust intuition, and the power of the commons.

Brian's bio and Twitter.

Brian Eno – a thinker, an artist, an activist – is our firstcyberflâneur. Famous for pioneering ambient music and “unique conceptual approaches and recording techniques to contemporary music”, Brian has been described as one of the world’s most influential artists.

Brian Eno

Interesting argument about attempts to define and protect cultural innovations – whether it’s possible and/or desirable, and how to deal with the income thus generated.

Ghana’s Copyright Law for Folklore Hampers Cultural Growth

An argument for community – in the form of family.

Why Large Families Are So Happy

Cellular Automata are totally magical and completely logical at the same time! Here they are discussed by Stephen Wolfram, probably the leading thinker on their implications.

Announcing the Rule 30 Prizes (on cellular automata)

Jane Jacobs’ message finally makes an impact among architects.

Streets Make Communities. Have Architects Realised at Last?

Long term solitary confinement is a form of torture increasingly used in American prisons. This artist has developed a strategy for helping to make it less solitary. I really wish I’d thought of this!!!

The Solitary Garden

People dealing with climate change from the bottom up. An inspiring story showing a new form of political and social relationships arising out of the climate crisis.

Meet the Pioneering Women Farmers Saving the Catalan Pyrenees From Climate Change

Self-redefinition by smell. Beyond ‘unisex’, perfume is becoming a forum for olfactory gender discussion, a way of locating yourself on the gender spectrum.

Gender Fluidity as Luxury in Perfume Packaging [$]

Surprising research showing that air pollution has direct social effects in terms of mental as well as physical effects. People thinking about ‘smart cities’ might want to start with cleaner air.

The Effect of Pollution on Crime: Evidence From Data on Particulate Matter and Ozone

The asset managers at the root of the climate change problem. Please send their names and addresses to Extinction Rebellion…

World’s Top Three Asset Managers Oversee $300bn Fossil Fuel Investments

The concentration of land ownership into fewer hands – and the use of land as an investment vehicle – creates fundamental imbalances in society…

Land for the Many

Very important discussion of where wealth comes from and how else it could be distributed, and why distribution is a socially productive idea…

On Wealth and Democratic Socialism

Why the UK is in such a deep hole, why the attempted national suicide of Brexit happened, and why we need new politics. Also applies to the US, by the way…

Land and Territory

A brief and provocative survey of intuition – what it is, and under what circumstances it develops…

Intuition: Why Should We Trust It?

A brilliant, comprehensive and essential survey of the commons – their historical role and their contemporary demise into privatisation. New understandings of what the idea of ‘the commons’ could include: genes, cultural practices etc…

Power of the Commons

Selections & Comments

Jerome Roos is a Fellow in International Political Economy at the London School of Economics, and the author of Why Not Default? The Political Economy of Sovereign Debt, which won the Immanuel Wallerstein Memorial Book Award in 2020.

Jerome Roos

What has prompted the dramatic rise of anti-establishment politics in recent years? And why has this development taken a progressive form in some countries while taking a nativist form in others? For John Brown, “populism” is a result oftoo littledemocracy. In Europe, he observes, neoliberal de-democratization and austerity have led to an increase in anti-immigration sentiment. In Latin America, by contrast, the presence of powerful popular movements has prevented such scapegoating and tipped the balance in favor of progressive forces. This highlights the importance of social mobilization and credible leftwing alternatives.

Neoliberalization, De-Democratization, and Populist Responses in Western Europe, the US, and Latin America

The rise of the nativist far right in Europe and North America has brought back an old question: what makes liberal societies so vulnerable to far-right extremism? Focusing on the canary in the coalmine (the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party in Greece), a trio of Greek researchers highlight the role of the country's deep socio-economic crisis and the rapid implosion of its centrist establishment parties. We should be warned: with another global recession on the horizon, the familiar pattern of nativist backlash to socio-economic insecurity could easily be repeated.

Crisis and Extremism. How Does an Extreme Far Right Emerge in a Modern Democracy? Evidence from Greece’s Golden Dawn

Greece is not the only European country to have experienced a nativist backlash at the polls. The electoral advances of Marine Le Pen in France can be taken as another important symptom of Europe's democratic crisis. What role has European economic integration played in this development? Julia Lux dispels the claim that Le Pen is simply a result of the EU undermining France's national sovereignty. Instead, she locates the growing popularity of the far right in the marginalization of anti-capitalist discourse by the neoliberal turn towards technocracy.

Understanding the Crisis Symptoms of Representative Democracy: The New European Economic Governance and France's “Political Crisis”

Today's central banks stand as the very emblems of this neoliberal turn towards technocracy. We know that their much-vaunted “independence” is really a code word for their insulation from democratic pressures. But where did this technocratic idea of central bank independence originate? Adriano do Vale demonstrates that the roots of the concept go back much further than commonly recognized: at least to the 1920s. This is an interesting text to read alongside recent histories like Quinn Slobodian's Globalists and Jamie Martin's The Meddlers, which also trace the origins of neoliberal thought and economic governance back to the interwar period.

Central Bank Independence, A Not So New Idea in the History of Economic Thought: A Doctrine in the 1920s

The past decade has seen a huge amount of new literature highlighting neoliberalism's antagonistic relationship with democracy. Yet many recent contributions still fail to recognize the racialized dimension behind this – especially in the context of the Global South. In this article, Lars Cornelissen provides an important corrective. Turning to neoliberal discussions of post-colonial self-determination in the postwar period, he shows that “these discussions were steeped both in racialized tropes and in more explicitly racial theories, which served to enframe post-colonial peoples as 'civilizationally immature' and hence unfit for democratic rule.”

Neoliberalism and the Racialized Critique of Democracy

If neoliberalism is all about insulating economic policy from democratic pressures, we should not be surprised to observe a growing gap between the political preferences of citizens and real-world policy outcomes. In 2014, Gilens and Page published aninfluential studythat revealed a clear representation gap in the US. Zoe Lefkofridi and Nathalie Giger find something similar for the EU: their study shows that the poor are systematically underrepresented in the European Parliament and Council, leading these institutions to take political positions that are always to the right of the preferences of most citizens and closer to the views of the wealthy.

Democracy or Oligarchy? Unequal Representation of Income Groups in European Institutions

If neoliberalism is all about insulating economic policy from democratic pressures, we should not be surprised to observe a growing gap between the political preferences of citizens and real-world policy outcomes. In 2014, Gilens and Page published an influential study that revealed a clear representation gap in the US. Zoe Lefkofridi and Nathalie Giger find something similar for the EU: their study shows that the poor are systematically underrepresented in the European Parliament and Council, leading these institutions to take political positions that are always to the right of the preferences of most citizens and closer to the views of the wealthy.

The legitimation crisis of the advanced capitalist democracies is closely intertwined with the socio-economic consequences of financialization and the financial crisis of 2008. How did these same developments impact China? In this article, Shenjing He, Mengzhu Zhang and Zongcai Wei show that China is not immune to the legitimation problems of financialized capitalism. The Chinese state, too, has been forced to contend with the threat of growing social discontent triggered by the economic recession of 2008. The result has been a pattern of “over-intervention” by the state, leading to a “crisis of crisis management.”

The State Project of Crisis Management: China’s Shantytown Redevelopment Schemes Under State-Led Financialization

The tensions between technocratic rationality and democratic representation are not limited to economic policy. The failure of many advanced capitalist democracies to address the climate crisis has led some to wonder whether democracy may be holding back the green transition. Should we place environmental policy in the hands of technocratic experts instead? Amanda Machin answers firmly in the negative: what we need is more democracy, not less. Without “the creative power of the demos,” we will not be able to address the looming environmental crisis.

Democracy, Disagreement, Disruption: Agonism and the Environmental State

How will the world respond to the planetary crisis of climate change and ecological destruction? As efforts at decarbonization continue to fall short of stated objectives, there has been a notable increase in proposals for geo- and climate engineering. Here, Columba Peoples critically interrogates such proposals, identifying them as part of a “technopolitics of planetary crisis management” that is narrowly geared towards securing the survival of “market civilization.” If this vision prevails, he warns, it will likely deepen the global crisis of inequality and insecurity.

Global Uncertainties, Geoengineering and the Technopolitics of Planetary Crisis Management

How will the climate crisis impact the future of capitalism? In this case study of Canada, the country with the highest per capita carbon emissions in the G20, William K. Carroll dissects the political economy of fossil capitalism and argues that we can already detect the early stirrings of a “passive revolution” by corporate and political elites that will eventually lead towards a new form of green capitalism. In opposition to this hegemonic ruling class project, Carroll explores the potential for an anti-hegemonic project of energy democracy, opening onto eco-socialism.

Fossil Capitalism, Climate Capitalism, Energy Democracy: The Struggle for Hegemony in an Era of Climate Crisis

How the Weather Shapes History

The Survival of the Paris Commune

Capitalism Causes Disasters, Socialism Can Solve Them

Si hay algo que no funciona, es el sistema financiero

New Deal: The Role and Control of Finance

Marcia Chatelain is Professor of History and African American studies at Georgetown University. Her 2020 book, Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America, which chronicles how fast food restaurants came to saturate Black neighbourhoods, won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for History and the 2022 James Beard Foundation Book Award.

Marcia Chatelain's selections as Cyberflaneur

Marcia Chatelain

A fascinating narrative about the racial boundaries in the wine and spirits industry, which illustrates the logics of segregated marketplaces, as well as the cultural baggage associated with alcohol and alcohol consumption. What happens when Black political power is galvanized to integrate the alcohol sales forces in Harlem? Would boycotting the white dominance of the beverage industry create a window of opportunity for Black professionals across the industry, including brewers and vintners? An excellent piece of history on the limits of consumer activism.

The Untold Story of Harlem's 'Whiskey Rebellion,' the Civil Rights Campaign for Black Liquor Salesmen

In 1968, shortly after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., gospel music star Mahalia Jackson launched a fried chicken franchise aptly named Glori-Fried Chicken. Unlike most fast food brands, this Black-owned business was designed to not only feed communities, but to also uplift them. Dedicated to expanding Black economic opportunity, Glori-Fried was among a number of start-up fast food outfits that promised Black people a pathway to economic independence in an era of contention about the role of capitalism in Black freedom movements.

Mahalia Jackson’s Glori-Fried Chicken

The late 1960s and early 1970s initiated a golden age of Black food – from the advent of soul food, to the publication of Black cookbooks and the popularization of Black eating regimes and diets. The rise of Black culinary and food expertise suggested that Black eating habits were a means of asserting or refining Black identity.

How to Eat to Live: Black Nationalism and the Post-1964 Culinary Turn

Considering the importance of land to the project of Black freedom after Emancipation, the loss of Black farmland is a critical topic of concern for food justice and racial justice activists alike. The federal promises of Reconstruction, ongoing racial discrimination against Black farmers, and the power of Big Agriculture has imperiled the hope that Black agrarianism could yield Black freedom.

How USDA Distorted Data to Conceal Decades of Discrimination Against Black Farmers

Throughout the mid-century Civil Rights Movement, activists targeted restaurants and lunch counters to protest the practices of segregation of and abuse towards Black consumers. This very public strategy was used to highlight the ways that racism shaped the marketplace. Equally important to the movement were struggles against punitive policies that targeted state food aid to poor, Black communities. This paper examines the Greenwood Food Blockade to illustrate the weaponization of food access in response to Black political organizing.

Food and the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement: Re-Reading the 1962-1963 Greenwood Food Blockade

Although the national memory of the era of segregation is infused with images of lunch counter sit-ins and other forms of nonviolent resistance in the South, the culture of Jim Crow in the North still evades recognition. This article about efforts to end restaurant discrimination in New York City emphasizes how the Northern color line was enforced and experienced by Black diners.

Neither Welcomed, Nor Refused: Race and Restaurants in Postwar New York City

When local foods become national trends, there is often a process of erasure that happens, especially when it comes to Black culinary contributions. The rise of the Nashville hot chicken and its appearance on fast food menus and in restaurants in gentrifying neighborhoods provides a case study of what going mainstream means for palates and politics.

Innovation and the Incinerated Tongue: Hot Chicken, Race and Culinary Crossovers

McDonald's and Black America

The Intricate Ties Between Fast Food And Black America

Book Talk on Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America

Fast Food, Urban Crises: A History

Capitalism Can’t Save Us

Joan Subirats is a professor of political science at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and a frequent contributor to the Spanish media. He’s a leading voice on issues of city governance, public management and public policy. Moreover, Joan has turned words into deeds. He’s actively involved in Spanish politics – currently the Deputy Mayor for Culture in Barcelona – and the co-founder of the citizen platform Barcelona en Comú.

Joan’s selections from our stacks make for excellent reading for anyone interested in fresh perspectives and case studies on urban society and governance. The pieces drawing on areas such as “new municipalism metropolitan rebellions” or “urban entrepreneurialism” are especially relevant in the context of our cities under assault from COVID-19.

Joan Subirats is a professor of political science at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and a frequent contributor to the Spanish media. He’s a leading voice on issues of city governance, public management and public policy. Moreover, Joan has turned words into deeds. He’s actively involved in Spanish politics – currently the Deputy Mayor for Culture in Barcelona – and the co-founder of the citizen platform Barcelona en Comú.

Joan Subirats

Are there really innovative elements in the so-called “new municipalism”? What differential characteristics does it present?

What’s so New about New Municipalism?

What significant elements emerge from the experience of “Barcelona en Comú” during its first years of government in the Barcelona city council? Challenges and opportunities.

Urban Governance and Political Change Under a Radical Left Government: the Case of Barcelona [$]

Despite the fact that the municipalities do not have the necessary competencies to address the scale and significance of the problems they face, it is important to understand the political capacities that they can deploy in an enabling logic.

Municipalities as Enablers in Urban Experimentation

The metropolitan areas as a field of intersection of processes of city making, city occupying and rights claiming.

Metropolitan Rebellions and the Politics of Commoning the City

A volume devoted to pose two critical questions with respect to inequality: the eruption of far-right politics and the geographic separation between haves and have-nots.

New Angles on Inequality

The case of Liverpool as an example of de-commodifying land, labour and capital using Polanyi framework.

Re-Grounding the City with Polanyi: from Urban Entrepreneurialism to Entrepreneurial Municipalism

Analysis of the limits and potential of the new municipalism, in part emerged after the movement of the “Indignados”, in Spain after the experience of government between 2015 and 2019, with a special emphasis on the public-community relationship.

La Colaboración Público-Comunitaria para Defender lo Común

This article analyze the role unions have played in the struggles against austerity and increasing inequalities, particularly in the European periphery that suffered the recession’s consequences.

Social Movements in Times of Inequalities: Struggling against Austerity in Europe [$]

This article presents a history of the concept of the right to the city.

The Right to the City: Conceptual Transformations and Urban Struggles

As the vulnerability of cities to the effects of climate change and now with the Covid-19 crisis increases, so does the urgency of and interest in urban transformational adaptation. The question is how “everyday” urban politics shape the multi-scalar political constraints that prevent municipalities from implementing transformational adaptation. In this article they analyze the Poblenou superblock project in Barcelona as an effort to enact transformational land use planning linked with climate adaptation and post-Covid efforts.

The Everyday Politics of Urban Transformational Adaptation: Struggles for Authority and the Barcelona Superblock Project [$]

Peter Galison is the Pellegrino University Professor of the History of Science and of Physics at Harvard University. A MacArthur Fellow, and member of the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration, Peter is the author of numerous books that explore the embedding of science and technology in the wider world, including Image and Logic (1997), and Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps (2003). He is also a filmmaker whose documentaries have covered such subjects as nuclear waste and, most recently, the physics and philosophy of black holes.

Peter Galison

There is a standard story about the American and German research universities repeated endlessly—and it is wrong. That account has it that the research university began in Germany, traveling to Johns Hopkins and then Harvard in the last third of the nineteenth century. Levine shows, convincingly, that the two countries had a much more interesting alliance/rivalry, with the Americans taking up the idea of research, and the Germans adapting the intra-American university rivalry and integration of teaching with research.

Allies and Rivals: German-American Exchange and the Rise of the Modern Research University

Peter Mandler accomplishes three important goals. First, he shows that despite the antiquity of the oldest British university, the aim of providing more than elementary education in England is a relatively new phenomenon, hard fought (often from below, not from above) to secure secondary and tertiary education. Second, he casts a rigorous historical eye not only on the famous reports and studies that helped shape British education, but also on the history of the social science and bureaucratic moves that enabled these reports. Third, he tracks the long-running tension between meritocracy and democracy in British society, key to understanding current debates about the fundamental aims of higher education.

The Crisis of the Meritocracy: Britain's Transition to Mass Education Since the Second World War

Zheng presents a feminist analysis of the contingent labor (non-tenure-track, NTT) positions that have proliferated across universities and national borders. For the US, the ratio of tenure track (TT) to NTT has gone from 70% to 30% some fifty years ago to the inverse today, 30% TT versus 70% NTT. She casts a sharp, critical eye on meritocratic arguments, but most importantly addresses the historical and ideological reasons that women are so over-represented in these insecure jobs (in the European Union women are about 1.5 times more likely to be among the “casual” labor force). Astutely, Zheng notes that academic precarity builds on long-standing gender stereotypes that put women in more “reproductive” rather than “productive” roles, and that single them out more than men for caretaking responsibilities—taking care of students’ well-being rather than research engagement.

“Precarity is a Feminist Issue: Gender and Contingent Labor in the Academy”

This is a short overview of conservative academic philanthropy. It very usefully outlines—and gives many references to the study of—some key benefactor families (e.g. Walgreen, Olin, and Koch). Walsh is particularly interested in tracking the ways that these foundations of the right have been successful in institutionalizing academic research along free-enterprise, libertarian, and anti-statist lines—starting with the Chicago School in economics. Of particular interest is the contrast the author proposes, offering this as a topic for further inquiry, between the often efficacious intervention by the donors of the right rather than the less controlling donations of their more liberal peers.

“Conservative Philanthropy in Higher Education”

Using interviews and other discursive methods, Koch and Vora put into question the simple binary that sets American universities on the liberal democratic side and their franchise branches elsewhere (e.g. Arabian peninsula, China, Singapore, Central Asia) as lesser, anti-liberal, even non-modern. The authors want to put pressure on such characterizations, looking to see how faculty in these extensions of the university see questions of authoritarian governments and, by contrast, the American “home’ institutions. Agree or disagree, the article rotates our perspective on this novel, global, and expanding reach of North American universities.

“Laboratories of Liberalism: American Higher Education in the Arabian Peninsula and the Discursive Production of Authoritarianism”

Hoffman very usefully aims to shift away from the post-hoc or universal characterization of commercially-inflected, university-based scientific work. Not for him the “triple helix” or “mode-2” or “Pasteur’s Quadrant”—various attempts to capture once and for all interdisciplinary research as a new path toward innovation. Instead, Hoffman wants a more processual account, more focused, in a lively AI lab example, on the moment-to-moment adjustments to commercial opportunity. The payoff of this paper is a promising emphasis on the style of research that emerges as this new breed of scientist tries to stay “nimble,” keeping some remove from the in-depth digging that more academic structures encourage.

“A Story of Nimble Knowledge Production in an Era of Academic Capitalism”

Freud’s Drawings and the Visual Origins of Psychoanalysis

Visualizing Science: From Black Holes to the Future

How Do You Photograph a Black Hole?

“The Great Speakers of the Vienna Circle: Rudolph Carnap, Herbert Feigl, Otto Neurath, Hans Reichenbach”

“21 July 1773: Disputation, Poetry, Slavery”

Olivier Tesquet is an award-winning investigative journalist and author whose work unpacks the consequences of surveillance technologies under capitalism. His latest book,Etat d'urgence technologique, explores how the surveillance economy is profiting from COVID-19.

Olivier Tesquet

Unpopular but necessary opinion when documenting issues at the intersection of police and technology. As this article recalls, “Derek Chauvin wore [one] as he knelt for more than eight minutes on George Floyd’s neck”. Yet, governments regularly accused of excessive use of force see it as a cure-all: France will deploy them nationwide next summer. Who are the two contenders currently battling to win the contract? The manufacturer of the Taser (Axon) and a Chinese company helping Beijing to profile Uyghur people in Xinjiang (Hikvision).

Why Police Body Cameras Haven’t Stopped Police Brutality

As this doctoral thesis points out, “citizens perceive a growing threat of crime to their society, but perceive a low risk that they themselves will fall victim of crime”. I will add that, addressing this “feeling of insecurity” and exploiting its political leverage (in France, it has become a mandatory rhetorical step for anyone aspiring to the presidency), liberal democracies have become obsessed with the growing “feeling of security” provided by technology.

Keeping trouble at a safe distance : Unravelling the significance of ‘the fear of crime’

Palantir is a crystallisation of contemporary anxieties: CIA-funded, shady and almost mythological. I was recently asked by the French Parliament to participate in their audition, and it was far from spectacular: On the contrary, their local president, who used to work for Airbus, acted and spoke like he was selling washing machines. It was all about boring plumbing work. To quote the article, “the whole activity becomes depoliticized precisely to the extent to which it is deemed ordinary and procedural”, and I think that’s exactly the point. I don’t think Palantir is a private NSA, but I do think it’s a big problem when a democracy subcontracts its political decisions to any company who owns the intellectual property of the tools upon which those decisions are made. That’s a convincing definition of kleptocracy.

Seeing with Software: Palantir and the Regulation of Life

Very insightful piece to understand the intellectual backbone of Thiel and Karp.

Palantir Goes to the Frankfurt School

Last but not least: What level of cynicism have you achieved when, as the CEO of a surveillance company, you pose for a photo under a portrait of the late Michel Foucault?

Does Palantir see too much?

Ten years ago, one could have thought that the sole purpose of China was to insulate its Internet from the Western world with the help of their so-called Great Firewall. But it’s now clear that the Chinese model described in this article is designed to be exported as a plug-and-play solution to other countries, particularly nations of the Global South. It’s not just a commercial operation: China, aiming to become an AI superpower, uses African faces to train their facial recognition datasets. To misquote William Gibson, the dystopian future is already here—and it could be becoming more and more distributed.

Digital neo-colonialism: The Chinese model of internet sovereignty in Africa

God bless the “safe city”. After years of innocuous, depoliticized “smart cities”, this new buzzword sheds some light on the perils of a militarized public space. About a year ago, I was strolling through the alleys of Milipol, one of the main international security fairs, and it was striking to see so many defense companies advertising for the public space of the future, filled with sensors, drones, cameras and one-way mirrors. Consequently, I agree with the authors of this article, “the governance of the smart city is intrinsically related to surveillance and social control”. It reminds me of an old and prescient slogan invented by art students during the May 68 riots: “Don’t say urban planning, say preventive police”.

Fear and Fantasy in the Smart City

Since the beginning of the pandemic, I’ve been trying to read as much literature as possible about the roots of public health, and Italy has provided some answers. This is a fascinating dive into the Bolognese office of the fango, created in the middle of the 13th century to be the noses, eyes and ears of the city officials to enforce social order. In times of Covid-19, the division between public and private spheres is crucial, and I strongly recommend a medieval perspective when looking at urban marginality.

Finding Matter out of Place: Bologna’s ‘Dirt’ (Fango) Officials in the History of Premodern Public Health

État d'urgence technologique : Comment l’économie de la surveillance tire parti de la pandémie

Olivier Tesquet - État d'urgence technologique

La surveillance banalisée

Surveillance, contrôle, traçage: les salariés n'ont jamais été aussi fliqués qu'au temps du Covid

Polynésie française : dans les coulisses d’une enquête sur un lourd secret d’État

«Le Covid-19 banalise la surveillance à grande échelle»

À la trace : Enquête sur les nouveaux territoires de la surveillance

Heather Berg writes about sex, work, and social struggle. Her first book,Porn Work(UNC Press, 2021), explores workers’ strategies for navigating – and subverting – precarity. Her work appears in Signs, WSQ, Feminist Studies, and Porn Studies, among others. Heather is assistant professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. Today’s syllabus themes focus on some of the preoccupations that animate her second book project, an intellectual history of the sex worker left.

Heather Berg

Vital reading on the politics of community self-defense. Navarro parses the tactics indigenous people take up to keep each other safe when the state fails. I'm especially interested in his discussion of progressives' discomfort with self-defense, even as they perform concern with what happens in its absence.

Self-Defense in Mexico: Indigenous Community Policing and the New Dirty Wars

On how worker resistance persists even as surveillance grows and organized labor's power recedes. I appreciate Woodcock's refusal of left nostalgia here.

The Fight Against Platform Capitalism: An Inquiry into the Global Struggles of the Gig Economy

A stunning inquiry into Black girls' resistance to discipline, including the disciplining power of the research encounter. Shange's effort to ‘write in collusion with [her subjects'] ethnographic refusal’ is a model for resistance studies.

Black Girl Ordinary: Flesh, Carcerality, and the Refusal of Ethnography

On anti-work and the politics of pleasure. Stallings' push to avoid calling ‘work’ forms of art making that refuse work ethics should make labor scholars think twice about how we might be ‘contributing to the production of more machines’.

Funk the Erotic: Transaesthetics and Black Sexual Cultures

Some of my favorite sex worker theorists on the intersection of anti-work politics and disability. The panel does a beautiful job of holding ‘sex work is work’ in tension with the reality that it is so often also a way to resist work's discipline.

Sex Work as Work and Sex Work as Anti-Work

On the Black Panthers and the politics of self-defense. Bin Wahad argues against liberals' ‘psychological pablum of non-violence’. There won't be freedom without struggle.

Toward Rethinking Self-Defense in a Racist Culture

Honig's theory of refusal asks readers to take seriously even those forms of refusal that ultimately ‘fail’. Even when efforts to refuse don't get the goods, they expand the refuser's, and the reader's, capacity to imagine otherwise.

A Feminist Theory of Refusal

On feminist politics, Autonomist theory, and the limits of exit as a strategy for doing politics. Boscagli frames political nostalgia as a masculinist project, and future-oriented dreaming as a feminist one.

Minor Apocalypses: Italian Autonomia, Utopia and Women

A study of digital labor that refuses the tendency to frame surveillance as all encompassing. Jones’ materialist account takes workers at their word when they say that pleasure and constraint both define the cam work day.

Camming: Money, Power, and Pleasure in the Sex Work Industry

A groundbreaking collection of sex worker writers on the politics of survival. I hope this book travels beyond sex work studies. If it does, it will change how the left thinks about consent under capitalism, community resilience, and what to do about the state.

We Too: Essays on Sex Work and Survival

Reading Sex Work

Porn Work, Gig Economy, and the Politics of New Labor

Porn Work: Sex, Labor, and Late Capitalism

Porn Work

Suchitra Vijayan has forged a unique career as a Barrister, writer, political essayist and photographer. She has also worked for the UN war crimes tribunal, co-founded a legal aid for refugees project and founded the Polis Project, a hybrid research and journalism organisation.

Much of her work focuses on violence, war and human nature. Her book, Midnight’s Borders: A People’s History of Modern India, will be published by Penguin Random House in February.

Suchitra’s diverse talents are reflected in her excellent selections from our stacks: you’ll be able to read about the relationship between photography and racial justice, Abu Ghraib and the “Patriarchive” or the “disappearance” of political prisoners in the West after WWII; or you will be able to listen to a podcast about what police cameras are doing with our face print.

Suchitra Vijayan has forged a unique career as a Barrister, writer, political essayist and photographer. She has also worked for the UN war crimes tribunal, co-founded a legal aid for refugees project and founded the Polis Project, a hybrid research and journalism organisation.

Suchitra Vijayan

I am beginning to look at the relationship between micro History, time and photography. How do we visually capture and articulate the persistent terror of white supremacy / or in the case of India Rightwing terror in the United States?

Photographic Returns: Racial Justice and the Time of Photography [$]

Of the 1,800 photographs taken by American soldiers in Abu Ghraib, only a very few have been publicly released. After the initial media circus and outrage, only a handful of images were made public on the State Department website. What was brought into public view, and what remains hidden within the archive? Abu Ghraib images and similar images of state violence that appear in the public domain can be an important place to explore questions about photography, feminism, and state violence. How do we think about women’s relation to nationalism and state violence in response to the rise of authoritarian fascism globally? The text also makes an interesting argument that Virginia Woolf’s 1938 book, Three Guineas, used documentary images to write about the first war covered by the “media” through documentary photography.

Opening the Patriarchive [$]

Between 1945–1957, Ansel Adams and his friend and collaborator, Nancy Newhall, worked on a project they referred to in their letters as “The Negro Book.” The work was never published; the publishers refused to print it. Almost 60 years later, their letters and the concerns raised sadly remain the same — questions about black and brown Americans’ rights, their worry about the political instability, and conversations about how to use photography as a medium to “change minds effectively.” The preoccupation with – “what kind of images of black people and communities should we produce to fight racism” is telling. These arguments continue to date and reduce photography to representational meaning without addressing the larger structures of oppression.

The “Negro Book” of Ansel Adams and Nancy Newhall: Photography, Race, and Civil Rights in Early Cold War-Era America

Unimaginable Criminals: the Disappearance of “Political Prisoners” in Spain and the West after 1945

From the Archive | Political Prisoners and Black Liberation

What Are Police Cameras Doing With Your Face Print?

When Fact Is Fiction: Documentary Art in the Post-Truth Era [$]

Drawing with Light: Photographic Modernism in Our Postmodern Dystopia

Whose Streets? Police Violence and the Recorded Image

Dance in Chains: Imprisonment in the Modern World [$]

Antonia Hirsch is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, editor and lecturer. Exploring the affective charge of everyday commodities, her works have been exhibited in contemporary art galleries around the world and can also be found in the public collections of the Vancouver Art Gallery, the National Gallery of Canada, and the Sackner Archive for Concrete and Visual Poetry, Miami Beach, among others. Antonia is also the editor of the anthology Intangible Economies (Filip, 2012) and a reader on Negative Space (SFU Galleries, 2015).

Antonia Hirsch

What I really liked about this essay is the rich web of associative ideas it spins, which makes it really inspiring to read, even if one is perhaps not that interested in the specifics of fashion or music (areas of inquiry the text explores in relation to plastic)... or plastic for that matter: demonstrated here is the complexity of any material’s cultural meaning. A meaning it derives through its physical properties, the way it is circulated both materially and semantically, how it is used and “performed,” and how it operates in the imagination. On a meta level, there is a valuable summary of some of the main tenets defining the discourse on differentiations between “man made” and “natural” materials. Adding to the richness of the essay, too, is its mobilization of “plastic” in terms of “plasticity,” i.e., changing shape. By doing so, it pulls focus on materials being inherently, materially and culturally, dynamic. The author then extends this material dynamism to apply to contemporary concepts of self—an idea I found not all that convincing, but that does not diminish what the text has to offer overall.

Asad Haider

Asad's

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