Yesenia Barragan, she/they
@yeseniabarragan.bsky.social
historian of Latin America & African diaspora @Rutgers. Latinx surrealist & mama. proud poor/working-class first-gen daughter of immigrants. ✍🏽 IN LATIN AMERICA YOU COULD BE FREE: AN AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY (Basic Books, 2026); FREEDOM’S CAPTIVES (2021)
Former Post-Gazette strikers wanted to return to their newsroom. Instead, they built one they control. @maximillianalvarez.bsky.social speaks with the worker-owners of the @pittsburghprogress.bsky.social about determining their own future.
Former Strikers Start Cooperative News Organization
Following firings from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, workers and community members came together to create the Pittsburgh Progress.
inthesetimes.com
I never would have predicted that cutting 20% of the staff at the federal agency that makes sure our food is safe would result in a bunch of our food being declared unsafe.
White South Africans who come to the United States as refugees could get up to $4,500 per person in initial federal support beginning Oct. 1, nearly double the current amount, four people familiar with the change in policy said www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/...
White South Africans could get $4,500 in aid if they come to U.S. as refugees
The assistance, which helps pay for basic needs such as housing and food, would nearly double under a new policy.
washingtonpost.com
Amazing to live in a country where the secret police are handling inter-chud beefs. It's like the Night of Long Knives playing out in the parking lot of a Dollar General.
Justin Baragona@justinbaragona.bsky.social · 2w agoLaura Loomer is taking credit for Milo getting detained by ICE.
This review I published when I was EIC by Dexter Thomas, was the article that made it clear that Kusama anti-Blackness permeated her work, and even more disturbing, the art market was trying to cover it up in all sorts of ways.
What the Art World Doesn't Want You to Know About Yayoi Kusama
A new publication tries hard to reinvent Kusama as a champion of racial equity despite her troubling record of anti-Black statements.
hyperallergic.com
I appreciate that Dolly Parton refused to participate in "dress respectability" and, by her own account, modeled her aesthetic after a town "tramp," who she thought was beautiful. She separated aesthetics from character and understood "classiness" to be about how you treat people, not how you dress.
Bea Lumpkin was a mother, a union organizer, a mathematician and an educator who began teaching at 47. She was also a lifelong communist and antifascist who kept organizing into her 100s. @stacydavisgates.bsky.social remembers her life.
Bea Lumpkin and How an Antifascist Rests in Power
Bea Lumpkin, a daughter of Russian revolutionaries, passed away June 14 at 107 years old. A lifelong communist herself, she began making solidarity trips in support of striking workers when she was…
inthesetimes.com
Maybe we will finally wake up to the fact that “free speech“ and “viewpoint diversity” are actually bad in academia. What you want is peer-reviewed knowledge, not a debate-me-bro culture in which empirically discredited views get resources & funding & platforms just because.
professor tools for commensality (red scare edition)@inquiline.myatproto.social · 3w ago"compared to the situation of critical disability theorists, eugenic philosophers enjoy far more publicity, institutional support, and financial security. Now we have a better understanding of *why* these hateful bigots have been so successful..." biopoliticalphilosophy.com/2026/08/20/h...
I got tired of waiting for the journalists at @theharvardcrimson.bsky.social to cover this (it IS summer), but this is to say that ALL the staff members in Women & Gender Studies here were laid off last week, on the top of the cutting of 5 lecturer positions in the program last year.+
Absolutely vile framing from the @nytimes.com. Why doesn’t this leave behind hard questions for the media that hounded him? Or the global right-wing that gleefully turned a local matter into an international incident?
there are so many grifters and violent men in positions of power in the academy who are committing serious crimes, sexually harassing students, producing false research for fascists, and aiding and funding genocide. they feel no shame, they face no consequence, and no one is hounding them to death.
Hysterical whiteness has been in murderous full effect.
Book cover just dropped for Anarchafeminist Horizons at the End of Gender and it's rad AF. Coming January 2027 with a chapter by yours truly: "'To Repulse the State from our Uteri': Anarcha-Feminism, Reproductive Freedom, and Dual Power."
School meals should be free for everybody. Charging children to eat somewhere they are legally required to be for the entire day is crazy!
Since the beginning of the second Trump administration, 55 people have died in ICE detention, according to the agency’s own data. The mortality rate of ICE detainees is at the highest level in more than a decade and four times that of the Biden presidency.
The deaths ICE doesn’t count
Prisciliano Trejo Ricano passed away in the hospital days after being released from detention.
motherjones.com
Absolute travesty. Academic freedom simply does not exist at Texas Tech University.
A man from El Salvador has died while in ICE custody at a New Jersey detention facility that has faced protests over living conditions and medical care, federal officials say. www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news...
Man from El Salvador dies in immigration jail in New Jersey, ICE says
Edwin Lopez-Cornejo, 41, had been held at Delaney Hall in Newark after being arrested June 18, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
nbcnews.com
“Harvard paid McKinsey & Company at least $250,000 to consult on the Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ staff restructuring efforts, according to internal documents obtained by The Crimson.” www.thecrimson.com/article/2026...
Harvard Paid McKinsey $250,000 For FAS Consultation, Internal Documents Show | News | The Harvard Crimson
Harvard paid McKinsey & Company at least $250,000 to consult on the Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ staff restructuring efforts, according to internal documents obtained by The Crimson.
thecrimson.com
sakura christmas@prof-christmas.bsky.social · last mo.Unsurprising that all these cuts being made to #Harvard —from the Office of Student Services to the Writing Center to now the Dudley Co-op—are happening with input from McKinsey, a firm made up of The Second Worst People I knew in college there
++BREAKING++ The UK and Spanish governments have issued a joint statement overnight: "[We] agreed that this summer’s wildfires demonstrated that climate change was now a national security emergency facing Europe and threatening our way of life." www.gov.uk/government/n...
Love a good prof slam: “It’s bewildering. It seemed weird and laughable,” Davis said of the indictment. “It felt like the length of the indictment was a cover for how thin it actually was. I’m a professor. I’ve seen people pad out papers when they’ve got nothing to say.”
The professor facing prison in ‘antifa’ case: ‘They want to scare all who oppose ICE’
Erik Davis is accused by the government of a ‘conspiracy’ to obstruct ICE – experts say it’s part of a pattern to criminalize lawful organizing and ruin activists’ lives
theguardian.com
Happy to share I have a chapter on anarchafeminism and reproductive freedom in the forthcoming book "Anarchafeminist Horizons at the End of Gender: Praxis Across Movements, Solidarities Across Borders," edited by Nathan Poirier & Zane McNeill, coming from Bloomsbury in Feb 2027.
so I just want to emphasize something here that non-media people might not pick up on: Marisa is an independent journalist and is taking on the risk of being sued by Moraff here without any institutional backing. That's admirable bravery - and also means being very, very certain of the facts.
Marisa Kabas@marisakabas.bsky.social · last mo.Exclusive from me — Daniel Moraff, one of the political operatives behind Graham Platner's rise and fall, has been accused of sexual assault. Full story here:
✴️Tenure is neither a privilege or a right. It is a time-tested safeguard of academic excellence, awarded only to faculty who undergo a rigorous review of their research, teaching, and service. A fair and transparent practice that respects the opinion of experts is essential to UT Austin’s stature.
Texas Conference of the AAUP@texasaaup.bsky.social · 2mo agoUT Austin doubles down on denial of tenure to leading borderlands tech scholar: “In an emailed statement to Inside Higher Ed, a UT spokesperson said, ‘Tenure is privilege, not a right.’” www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-t...
No escape from the world on fire. Except to stop the fire starters.
Ugh. Just awful. Unclear what happened here but the implication I get from the article is that they’d fallen into deep debt and maybe owed money to some very bad people. And once they’d been deported, paying that money back was probably very very hard.
Adam Sawyer@adamjst.bsky.social · last mo.“If immigration hadn't picked up my brother, my sister-in-law would still be alive, and the children wouldn't be going through this sorrow,” he said. “Unfortunately, immigration — the [U.S.] government — doesn't see that. It makes no difference to them.” www.stlpr.org/law-order/20...
A letter from the mother of Alex Pretti, six months after he was murdered by ICE.
