Amanda Lanzillo

What I've been noticing lately in convos with students is that they *despise* the AI-slopification of everything as much or even more than I do. And yet our universities & their admin seem to believe that students for some reason want it integrated into everything. THEY DON'T.

Feds Used Chemical Weapons On Chicagoans At Least 49 Times — Even After Judge Said To Stop Contrary to federal claims about attacks on agents, most of these incidents appear to involve nonviolent protesters or bystanders.

Several Chicago newsrooms have been quietly collaborating to bring big ICE stories to the forefront.

In this story today, we found that feds used chemical weapons on Chicagoans at least 49 times during immigration raids — even after a judge said to stop.

(Incidentally, my Bluesky profile picture is from the research I did for this article in Meerut.)

SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES Scissors from Meerut, Locks from Aligarh: Locality and Production in North India, 1870-1950 Amanda Lanzillo Department South Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA ABSTRACT This article explores how the emergence of a national Indian economy conditioned the economic and social lives of artisans in highly localised trades. It asks whether artisan workers in localised trades were able to exert influence on the development of 'national' cultures of craft and consumption between 1870 and 1950. I approach these two questions through a study of two metalworking trades in North India that boasted a strong association with a regional city-scissors, which are often associated with the city of Meerut, and locks, usually associated with the city of Aligarh. In the early twentieth century, these goods were sold in part through an advertising culture that presented the city of production as a 'brand: The article examines how local goods became Swadeshi goods, highlighting the impact of the nationalist project to cultivate an 'indigenous' economy on producers who had cultivated a reputation for quality based on locality. KEYWORDS Advertising; artisanship; industry; locality; metalwork; North India; Swadeshi

Excited to see my latest article out, exploring cultures of production in highly localized trades in north India. Part of a forthcoming special section of “South Asia” on artisan lives and forms of production that I co-edited with Arun Kumar and Adhitya Dhanapal.

www.tandfonline.com/eprint/VYR6S...

The opposition to so-called “Operation Midway Blitz” is not the first time Chicagoans have stood up against our neighbors being snatched off the street by outsiders. Jeff Nichols takes a look back at how Chicago residents resisted abductions of Black Chicagoans after the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act.

i, for one, embrace the moral clarity of not raping children, embracing fascism, and using state violence to terrorize both citizens and non-citizens

The Shutdown of U.S.A.I.D. Has Already Killed Hundreds of Thousands The short documentary “Rovina’s Choice” tells the story of what goes when aid goes.

“As of November 5th, it estimated that U.S.A.I.D.’s dismantling has already caused the deaths of six hundred thousand people, two-thirds of them children.” www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

Threats to the humanities as institutions like my own tend to get a lot of attention, but the decimation of our disciplines is happening rapidly at regional public schools across the US, which serve far more students.

Students at every university & college deserves access to humanities education.

A médium-sized tan and white dog with big ears in a yellow harness looks at the camera. She stands on a field covered with snow. In the background is a building and clouds.

The dog in the first snow of the year.

CBP & ICE terrorized Little Village this weekend, used chemical weapons against families and children and kidnapped ordinary people from its streets. Absolutely vile to shout its name during a photo op.

Did actual f*cking Jeff Bezos write this absolute trash?!

(The irony is that this article is just the WaPo dropping the mask of not being the mouthpiece of billionaires and fascists).

Congratulations, Melissa!

The views of the average pro-Palestinian student broadly match what the academic literature says, what international courts say, what the relavant UN officials & orgs say and what the relevant NGOs say. It is views of Clinton and her peers in Western capitals which are largely divorced from reality.

Zohran Mamdani drags the Democratic party into the future This was a local race with national implications, whether the party's leaders liked it or not.

put a stake in it www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

Today in absolutely and always Fuck ICE.

Large Language Muddle | The Editors The AI upheaval is unique in its ability to metabolize any number of dread-inducing transformations. The university is becoming more corporate, more politically oppressive, and all but hostile to the ...

“And for what? A cankerous glut of racist memes and cardboard essays. Not only is the ratio of AI’s resource rapacity to its productive utility indefensibly and irremediably skewed, AI-made material is itself a waste product: flimsy, shoddy, disposable, a single-use plastic of the mind.”

The Languages of Muslim 'Pious Labor' - Amanda Lanzillo 11/5/2025 Speaker: Amanda Lanzillo, Assistant Professor, Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, The University of Chicago Artisans in colonial India were not passive subjects of…

Looking forward to traveling *all the way up to Evanston❗* next Wednesday to speak on my book, Pious Labor, at the new Languages of Islam workshop through the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities. Details here!

On Fox Business, Cuomo continued to paint an ominous picture of New York City under Zohran Mamdani if he is elected mayor and questioned his allegiance to America and the city. "Dual-citizenship, he was a citizen of Uganda, his parents own a mansion in Uganda, he's spent a lot of time there," Cuomo said. He went on to again invoke 9/11 in conjunction with the candidacy of Mamdani, who was a 9-year-old boy living in New York when the attacks took place. "He just doesn't understand the New York culture, the New York values, what 9/11 meant."

Apparently the gap btw “centrist liberal” and “full blown klan” is closed by the radical demand that Palestinians be seen as people and buses should be free

Yup. And riding a bicycle teaches you to vibe with the city, but also that the car people are 100% very actively trying to kill you.

What I Need You To Understand, Notes from Chicago in Late October | dansinker.com

"What I need you to know is we are organized.
What I need you to know is that you need to get organized.
What I need you to know is they are coming.
What I need you to know is you can stop them...
This is how it works: We protect each other, period. These are our neighbors, our friends, our family"

A white and tan medium sized dog licking her nose stands in front of a white woman in a blue jacket, holding the dog’s leash. They both stand in front of a statue of the mascot of the university of Wisconsin, on a concrete pier overlooking a blue lake.

Highly recommend bringing your dog to your academic conference.

They were already living in one of Chicago’s worst apartment buildings. Then came the ICE raid. In what appears to have been a warrantless operation, the federal government will not say how many people were detained, who remains in custody and what happened to the children.

“No public criminal charges have been filed against anyone in connection with the raid … The Tribune has been able to confirm the identity of only one immigrant taken into custody by federal agents that night: a 41-year-old pizza delivery man… who has no apparent criminal history.”

Wtf is a TEST of a ceasefire?!?!??!?

ICE continues their terror campaign today as people protest in mass. Border Patrol was seen in Blue Island, and at the O'Hare rideshare lot again. Sightings in southeast side. A truck with a smashed window in Villa Park. Right now, they're hunting people on the southwest side.

If you're at the Madison South Asia conference on Wednesday afternoon (10/22) from 4:30-5:30pm, the SAMSA symposium will include the book award & authors-meets-critics session with me and honorable mention Arsalan Khan.

Delighted that Pious Labor (@ucpress.bsky.social and Three Essays Collective) has been awarded the South Asian Muslim Studies Association biennial book prize!
faculty.thecollege.asu.edu/samsa/announ...

“On the question of intent, much fudged and fettered by those legal minds who wish to keep the high standards for genocide untainted by Palestinian blood…”

💯.

The only way to deny genocide in Palestine is to believe that Palestinians aren’t equally human.

h/t @fiona-webster22.bsky.social

This really makes it sound like a Border Patrol agent tried to kill an anti-ICE activist in Chicago and DHS lied to cover for him