Deena Varner

Thanks for this. Happy to meet a kindred AmStudies spirit, despite the circumstances!

I'm not sure 2 leads directly to → 3. Joking aside, I really am on here tonight because I'm at a total loss...

I wish I weren't so averse to social media and being in the public eye, as this definitely sounds appealing

🙏

Of course. Not a dig at all, just making sure the details are correct. Thanks for posting about this.

I've literally had panic attacks. I'm terrified.

He's the new chancellor. Same provost.

I'm not entirely certain our provost *does* want to be our provost, under this regime...

Any similarly specific suggestions for faculty?

It's been radio silence since this memo, excepting a message from the Provost to follow the chain of command (read: don't contact the Provost's office). This is far beyond what we were told to expect in the wake of the previous memo—when we were informed that we had to follow the "law" re: gender.

I am completely bereft. This has been going on for months, with varying degrees of guidance, but this one takes it. I am terrified of what's happening, for myself, my students, my colleagues, the public I serve.
www.texastech.edu/downloads/25...

Our first post is an invitation! Join is to explore creative methods in carceral geography with these amazing people. Register here: events.humanitix.com/cgwg-worksho...

Book Review: Carceral worlds: Legacies, textures and futures Stuit, H, Turner, J, & Weegels, J. (Eds.). (2024). Carceral worlds: Legacies, textures and futures. Bloomsbury. Reviewed by Virve Repo, Tampere University, Finland    Carceral Worlds is an edit…

It was lovely working with @virvere.bsky.social on this wonderful review of Carceral Worlds: Legacies, Textures, and Futures, which foregrounds "how people feel and experience [a multiplicity of] carceralities."

City Time: A Discussion with David Campbell and Jarrod Shanahan David Campbell and Jarrod Shanahan’s new book City Time: On Being Sentenced to Rikers Island (NYU Press, 2025) offers an insightful look into the daily life of one of the most notorious carceral…

This conversation among recent political prisoners captures so many subtleties and contradictions of social life in prison—and a plug for their new book, City Time

Texas Won’t Study How Its Abortion Ban Impacts Women, So We Did Since Texas banned abortion, no one has studied the statewide effects on pregnant women experiencing complications. Here’s how we sifted through data on millions of pregnancy hospitalizations and anal...

How we did it: Texas Won’t Study How Its Abortion Ban Impacts Women, So We Did

YouTube video by Kino Lorber Ahed's Knee – Official U.S. Trailer

Ahed’s Knee seems to be about the nationalist/racist/bureaucratic/authoritarian state, but the film within the film (the critique within the critique)—the *sympathy* and *admiration* for Ahed Tamimi—is a brilliant take on the structural relationship between liberalism and state violence.

For the last time: The illegal / legal immigrant distinction is a manufactured crisis designed to mask deeper anxieties about white supremacy and generate support for nativist policies.

This executive order essentially mandates that universities develop a complex surveillance infrastructure to monitor each and every employee at any and at all times, framing all faculty and staff as threats to national security.

All employees of Texas universities "must be routinely reviewed to determine whether or not things such as criminal history...might prevent [them] from being able to maintain the security or or integrity of the infrastructure."

Personal travel to China requires notifying the state in advance and submitting "a post-travel brief outlining details of the trip, including the dates and purpose of travel."

Employees of Texas universities are no longer permitted to travel to China for teaching, research, or any other professional purposes. Greg Abbott has unilaterally crippled ties between American and Chinese academics. gov.texas.gov/uploads/file...

Toward an Intersectional Analysis of Money: Racial Capitalism, Stagflation, and Unemployment as Economic Policy David Stein American Quarterly Johns Hopkins University Press Volume 76, Number 4, December 2024 pp. 795-820 10.1353/aq.2024.a945171

I love a “drop everything and read” moment in my google scholar alerts for “carceral state.” New @davidstein.bsky.social article in American Quarterly! muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/articl...

How inflation makes your state’s criminal justice system harsher today than it was yesterday The case for increasing the monetary level for felony theft.

This Black Friday, you'll probably notice the effects of inflation on price tags. What might not be so obvious though is its effect on the criminal legal system.

Each year, inflation makes the system more punitive – and that's not a good deal.
www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/06...

🔊 Listen Now: A look at a pilot program in Georgia that uses 'jailbots' to track inmates Morning Edition on NPR One | 3:13

Jailbots are like every recent #AI #surveillance horror movie squared. I wonder if someone watched Megan and said, let's do that in prisons! one.npr.org/i/nx-s1-5178...

I'm pretty sure they also think English is either knowing all the grammar rules or having read all the novels.

Whether time travel is literal (as with Kindred) or metaphorical (through devices like nostalgia or anachronism), how does this literature go beyond “lasting impacts” to help us understand the impossibility of radical social change without revolution?

Time travel and kinship networks make intergenerational trauma an easy lens through which to read Kindred, but the other novels I’m reading—about the prison society, Cold War conservatism, and the Cultural Revolution—also play with time/space as historiography.

I’m prepping a class about “literature of the fantastic” through the lens of political systems and social control. As the semester winds down, I was able to spend an entire Saturday doing little else but rereading Octavia Butler’s Kindred.

System-affected academics are building a movement — and transforming the academy Scholarship is a powerful tool for changing how people think, plan, and govern. By giving voice to bright minds and bold ideas, we seek to foster understanding and drive progressive change.

Since the 1990s, scholar-activists with lived experience in the criminal legal system have built a global movement. Tietjen Grant explores its history, impact, and future promise. www.ucpress.edu/blog-posts/s...

The Technology the Trump Administration Could Use to Hack Your Phone Other Western democracies have been roiled by the use of spyware to target political opponents, activists, journalists, and other vulnerable groups. Could it happen here?

ICE Might Be Reading Your Encrypted Text Messages

Paragon is an Israeli firm whose spyware product “Graphite” focuses on breaching encrypted messaging applications such as Telegram and Signal. ICE, the immigration agency, has already acquired the technology.

www.newyorker.com/news/news-de...