Rich Nisa

The AI Dragnet - Dissent Magazine The U.S. government is activating a suite of algorithmic surveillance tools, developed in concert with major tech companies, to monitor and criminalize immigrants’ speech.

The Trump administration has unleashed a massive domestic surveillance apparatus, thanks to AI systems supplied by major tech firms

I wrote about its origins and impact on the ground for @dissentmag.bsky.social and the @theintercept.com

www.dissentmagazine.org/online_artic...

Medical Research Funding — Unbreaking How the administration is breaking the government, and what that means for all of us.

Hi! We just released three new pages. First up, we break down the devastating defunding of medical research in the US, including grant terminations and delays representing nearly $5B in funding losses, cuts to future funding, and attacks on training programs: unbreaking.org/issues/medic...

👋 Hi, we’re Unbreaking, a volunteer-run collective working to document our current moment of institutional collapse and its human costs—as well as the pushback and resilience work already underway. We believe this is critical work for building and retaining political agency.

Trying to Reason with Hurricane Season In Florida, risk is a feature of life. In a deepening climate crisis, financial capitalism gives risk new meaning.

My new piece on the death drive in Florida and the need for roots is out in the incredible inaugural issue of @the-breakdown.bsky.social. Grateful to the editors for the opportunity to gather my thoughts on the meanings of risk and to write about home—and in the company of such brilliant people. ✨

Redirecting Energy Transition Minerals from the Pentagon Fleet to the Public Good - Climate and Community Institute The Pentagon is the world’s largest institutional consumer of fossil fuels, but it is also the US federal government’s leader in electrifying some of its transportation—especially …

New from my team: for the same volume of energy transition minerals it would take to make all of the Pentagon's non-combat vehicles into EVs, we could electrify the entire Postal Service, the entire Parks Service, and put battery backup on more than 7600 federal buildings. 🧵

I’m writing a book conclusion that’s also a tiptoe into a new research project, and this review is the first time in a long time that I’ve read something about automated war and realized my head was just nodding up and down the whole time. Thanks @emilymitchelleaton.bsky.social for the rec!

The fall of the house Usher…

Yup. Kinda excited this year.

Please share!
Call for topic editors, POEM

Is there a topic related to AI and algorithms; data and computation; or media and mis- and dis-information that you don't think is getting enough attention, or that you think is crucial for high schoolers and college students to learn about?

Good shouts! Thanks Kevin! Will you be in Detroit in the spring?

I’ll be teaching an ethics course to 4th year UG architecture students in the spring. The students will have had at least one design ethics courses already.

I’m wondering what y’all think are the topics/readings/cases that the field needs a more sustained engagement & deep reckoning with.

A squeaker.

But the Knicks are winning. For now.

To commemorate this article, I humbly provide this "graphical abstract" of the paper featuring El Risitas. Sound on.

youtu.be/NoJ6eNxHgNs

Hoping to meet some of you in person at the Annual Meeting. Be sure to mark your calendars and come to the Urban Geography Plenary with Dallas Rogers and Marina Karides on Friday the 19th at 1:20!!

Student Access Award Winners: Joseph Karanja, Arizona State University Qingren Chen, Durham University Kejin Wang, Louisiana State University Corgan Archuleta, Macalester College Sheng Xuan, Durham University Ang Liu, Rutgers University Xuan He, Chinese University of Hong Kong Weiying Lin, Texas A&M Aneika Perez, San Diego State University, University of California Santa Barbara Katie Brown, Michigan State University Austin Martin, Temple University Mehmet Eroğlu, Michigan State University

Alternative Modes of Scholarship Awards: James Barnes (Principal researcher & design/builder), The University of Virginia with Robin Xu (Architecture, The University of Virginia) and Addie Merlo (Industrial Design, James Madison University) "Tactical Growth: Socio-Ecological Investigations of Biodiversity-based Tactical Urbanism in a K-5 Schoolyard" Bryson Berry, Macalester College "Black Prosperity Through Afrofuturism: An Analysis of the Black/White Wealth Gap"

Graduate Student Paper Award: Amani Ponnaganti, University of Wisconsin-Madison “Submerged empire: Racial grammars of environmental governance in Houston, 1900-1939," and Dissertation Completion: Yudi Liu, Department of Urban Engineering, Graduate School of Engineering, The University of Tokyo, "National Railway Reform as a Critical Juncture: Institutional Establishment of Entrepreneurial Transit Metropolis Tokyo"

Grad Fellowship: Michael McCanless, University of Kentucky “Corporate Investors, Property Technologies, and Changing Dynamics in Property Tax," Aila Bandagi Kandlakunta, University of Nevada, Reno "Women on the Move: Gendered Mobility and the Right to the City in Hyderabad, India."

Really happy to announce this year’s winners of the
@geographers.bsky.social Urban Geography Specialty Group Awards! The board read so many excellent submissions and it was a joy to learn from all the exciting work being done by such a wide range of early career scholars.

Congratulations all!

Really happy to have this out: on occupations as reparative urban infrastructures, written with brilliant friend and collaborator Suraya Scheba: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Turbulence and Pulse, by Asher Gamedze 13 track album

This record has been spinning in my apartment all week. It’s really helped carry me through such an intense range of emotions—a gift in such awful awful times.

intlanthem.bandcamp.com/album/turbul...

And check out this related symposium in @antipodeonline edited by Charmaine Chua & @kaibosworth.bsky.social on blockades, circulation & struggle antipodeonline.org/2023/09/21/v...

Can you tell I’m just really really really thrilled that this is finally out in the world?

Oh! If you’re going to be at the American Studies Assn meeting, come to our panel and meet some of these amazing contributors!

Lastly, an academic journal is the manifestation ofso much supporting labor. Thanks to the people doing copyediting/layout @dukepress.bsky.social; Tom Harbison, Conor McGrady & the editorial collective @ Radical History Review; & especially thanks to Monica Kim for the firm/fair editorial brilliance

Considering the ongoing criminalization of mutual aid by reactionaries in the US, this conversation (& much of issue 147) conveys the radical nature of building abolitionist infrastructures of survival & “making do” in the face of ongoing expressions of police power.

This roundtable also touches on mutual aid & bridge building & considers what it means—and what it might look like in practice—to build infrastructures premised on the belief that everyone deserves care and no one is disposable.

The issue ends w/ another roundtable—a conversation w/ Dean Spade and Rachel Herzing convened and enriched by Bench Ansfield—about abolition infrastructures, transformative justice, and how activists build infrastructures in relation to the state. read.dukeupress.edu/radical-hist...

The paper details the politics of both route making (which called on the compulsory work of incarcerated laborers of Japanese descent and demanded a remapping of indigenous lands) and the ongoing politics of route marking (by way of highway historical markers)

Desiree Valadares reads the visual cultural history of the construction and promotion of the Hope-Princeton Highway in western Canada to highway the “subtle linkages between an imagined scenic landscape and an imagined multicultural Canada.” read.dukeupress.edu/radical-hist...

Returning again and again to airports in Hawai‘i and Guåhan, the essay highlights what Vũ calls settler carcerality, a term that sees “settler colonialism and carcerality as mutually reinforcing systems that work together to subjugate Native and racialized populations.”

Suturing contemporary deportation geographies to their past iterations as sites of racialized imperial expansion, Jason Tuấn Vũ’s article traces the history of waves of violent infrastructural power deployed by the US state in the transpacific. read.dukeupress.edu/radical-hist...

Radio networks, he shows, “not only permitted the rural populace to contribute to the production and dissemination of information but also brought them together as members and, to an unprecedented extent, active builders of the new society.”

Yingchuan Yang’s article challenges a simplistic top-down framing of centralizing modernist infrastructure by focusing on rural labor in/through mid-century Chinese radio, which worked in “many more ways in addition to indoctrination and regulation.” read.dukeupress.edu/radical-hist...