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(Originally posted elsewhere on 9 January 2021.) Scientists and naturalists in Britain and the US, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, sometimes seemed to wake up, roll out of bed, and think: “Okay, time to describe women, non-white people, and colonial subjects as carnivorous plants and pestilent insects in
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(Originally compiled and posted elsewhere 2021, then revised and re-posted on 7 May 2024.) Just four excerpts from different Avery Gordon pieces that I prepared for May Day/Labor Day. — Excerpt 1: [C]oncentration of global wealth and the “extension of hopeless poverties”; [...] the intensification of state repression and
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(Originally posted elsewhere in May 2020.) Woah.
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(Originally posted elsewhere in April 2020.) Am I told old to be communicating like this? Just a moodboards—as they’re known in the blogosphere—about Alberta’s simultaneous reckoning with its fossil fuel industry, the Keystone XL pipeline, and pandemic quarantine closures.
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(Originally posted elsewhere on 23 December 2025.) Just a Christmas-themed post that recalls the significance of calendar holidays to practices of escape among slaves in the Caribbean and antebellum US. Subscribe Screenshots to set the mood and make the case (I added URL source to each screenshot; following excerpts
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(Originally post elsewhere on 11 November 2025.) Just a compilation of scholarship on the use of convict transportation and spatial confinement as both means and ends, sometimes prioritizing punishment over and beyond efficiency, prison profitability, and book-balancing… at least in the words of the very administrators who managed those
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(Originally posted elsewhere on 18 March 2022.) About the South Pacific giant land-roaming spike-tailed horned turtle beast: Subscribe Some time around 5,000 years ago, Sumerian storytellers formulating tales of Gilgamesh could have (completely theoretically; of course they weren’t making trips up to the Arctic Ocean) maybe,
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(First draft/installment originally posted elsewhere on 7 May 2019.) On 2 May 2019, Governor Kristi Noem was formally banned from Pine Ridge Reservation “until she rescinds her support for new state laws that target disruptive demonstrations.” Subscribe (Originally posted elsewhere on 19 November 2019.) Extreme flooding had already been
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(Originally posted elsewhere in February 2024.) Just some excerpts from a couple of authors in the same special issue of Slavery & Abolition, which I liked contemplating together. Subscribe Aside from Combrink’s discussion of so-far-understudied Dutch role in promoting a commodity chain as an intermediary between Caribbean
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(Originally posted elsewhere on 3 October 2021.) First, a list of sources. Subscribe Then, an excerpt of an interview with David Feldman, author Seeds of Control: Japan’s Empire of Forestry in Colonial Korea (University of Washington Press, 2020). Feldman describes utilitarian concerns and the Japanese institutional/state adoption of
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(Originally posted elsewhere on 18 May 2020.) Stage 1: A poisoning. Subscribe Stage 2: A poisoning. Stage 3: A poisoning. People get hurt at every stage of the process: during the original extraction; during the use of the extracted material; and then during the eventual waste disposal. 1. Navajo, Pueblo,
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(Originally posted elsewhere on 16 May 2022.) “… very vgly and fearefull beasts to behold … strawnge kindes of beastes … There weare Crocadiles which did Incounter & fighte with vs …” Subscribe Those are words sometimes attributed to Sir Francis Drake, drawn from his journal of 20 April 1586. Otherwise, the words have