Vinzenz Hediger

@vinzenzhediger.bsky.social

Film scholar, director of the Cinémathèque Suisse. Research @goethe_uni Frankfurt: http://konfigurationen-des-films.de http://ceditraa.net https://age-c.eu/

As I board the ferry from Tallinn to Helsinki, I’m reminded yet again of three things about the EU: 1) You don’t sacrifice any of your national identity or culture by being part of the EU. Estonia remains Estonia. Finland remains Finland 2) Schengen is great. 3) Brexit was and is shit.

I think it's key to understanding their worldview that they imagine a world not *without* immigrants, but one in which immigrants' inferiority is permanently asserted and they become a subservient caste. All these people worship the Gulf States.

Jo Wolff@jowolff.bsky.social · 2w ago

What is the right-wing vision for a world where immigrants have been deported and public services cut? Care and other services would dry up. The return of living in squalor for those beyond working age? The workhouse? The pauper’s grave?

3. Why is DEI perceived by its "beneficiaries" within the academy as window dressing that failed to meaningfully address numerical disparities in hiring let alone their structural causes, and by others outside the academy as having transformed higher ed into a monolithic bastion of "DEI faculty"?

2. How do hiring practices in the DEI era compare to the postwar era, when a small caste of elite young white men were often installed in prominent positions on the basis of patronage by established mentors but little career achievement? Why is one so corrosive to meritocracy but not the other?

Some questions/thoughts on DEI in the academy as an informed but once-removed observer. 1. How do the infractions Jason Arday was guilty of compare to the longstanding pre-DEI tradition of high-value professors not crediting the work/co-authorship of their research assts, particularly women?

From this review- “Think of all the diligent, decent black academics who have been lumbered with the embarrassment of having Arday as a figurehead” - no, think of *why* black academics are held collectively responsible in ways that white academics are not

Stephen Bush@stephenkb.bsky.social · 2w ago

I think functionally all of the post-resignation coverage that was about him rather than Cambridge was excessive (e.g. this poisonous review of a book nobody is going to buy - why)

our entire global financial system is currently leveraged to the hilt on the premise that it was good and right for a small cadre of US companies to steal all of the intellectual work ever produced by humanity and sell its back to us without credit or remuneration to the authors (plagiarism)

I realize these are all things that sex workers have told us and could tell us better. Consumer-facing AI is basically a sex worker so of course it’s personalizing various iterations of financial domination for men because that’s what they want.

Creating hybrid institutions that are strategically crucial to state capacity without any of the oversight structures of a civil service yet are expected to be run as businesses with sub-standard management frameworks that are 30 years out of date is a bad idea, actually.

BeijingPalmer@beijingpalmer.bsky.social · 3w ago

I have several friends who moved from academia (mostly scientists) into corporate life in the US or UK and every single one of them found corporate life superior in management, benefits, treatment of staff, and attitudes toward work.

Anti-immigration movements in Europe and the US either don't realize it or don't care, but the day that South-to-North immigration ends is the day Europe and the US have locked in the decline those movements are obsessed with. And not just due to the demographic impact that pro-natalists fixate on.

Wir gedenken heute der hl. Edith Stein/Teresia Benedicta vom Kreuz OCD (1891–1942), die als jüdisch-katholische Philosophin und Ordensfrau in Auschwitz-Birkenau ermordet wurde: „Ist nicht der Vernichtungskampf gegen das jüdische Blut eine Schmähung […] unseres Erlösers […]?“

In schwarz-weiß gehaltenes Porträt der hl. Edith Stein/Teresia Benedicta vom Kreuz OCD.

I think if I'd written just this paragraph, let alone at the end of a masterful book that does this very thing on such a weighty subject, I'd retire to a beach somewhere and drink piña coladas all day long.

The point is neither to set aside dualisms that mark social theory nor to exchange one set for another more adequate to describing the contemporary situation. Rather it is to problematize both sides of every dualism by historicizing it, thereby underlining the institutional and political condition for its reproduction and for its transformation. Although theory cannot by itself transform reality, without a theoretical illumination reality must appear a closed riddle.

– Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject

Just found myself writing this into a revised chapter this morning, and I think it's really what the anti-immigrant movements most fail to grasp: Above all else, migration is the manifestation of modernity at work.