More gems from the family archive of John and Anya Berger, as discovered and compiled by their daughter Katya. Here, on her uncredited contribution to the concept of ways of seeing. www.theparisreview.org/blog/2025/12...

working at a university

What was Lo-Fi? Latest from music writer-critic Adam Harper locates the term “Lo-fi” in the changing historical contexts of the 1950s-2020s. Open access 🔓from ‘Popular Music and Society’ www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

If you feel like teaching photography as an art practice and as a historical matter, here is your position at Boulder:

This is a good argument for withdrawing entirely from using institutional LMS’s.

due to a new federal initiative Carleton is hiring 5 to 10 "Canada Impact+ Research Chairs" at the rank of Associate or Full Professor if you work in any of the strategic priority areas listed, and long for Canada, consider applying (&feel free to reach out) carleton.ca/deputyprovos...

"This promise of an AI future, is really just a collective anxiety that wealthy people have about how well they're gonna be able to control us in the future." - @tressiemcphd.bsky.social with an absolute mic drop moment about AI bullshit. Incredible words. Listen to all of it!

We’re doing a photography conference! Please circulate!

Photography’s ’that has been’ quality is now competing with normative assumptions of the post-edited self on what is and isn’t ethical to show in portraiture … when your frame of reference is fascist aesthetics, the ugliness ( and ridiculousness ) of power deserves to be pictured.

ICYMI!! Our book is out in the world, & we're so proud! If you want to grab a copy, use code SPIN2909 for 50% hard copies from now til the end of Jan! 🏺 #archaeology #deathstudies

New issue of Canadian Journal of Film & Media Studies recently dropped. Issue is devoted to Crawley Films, Canada’s largest sponsored film company in mid-20th century. With essays by Charles R. Acland and Liz Czach (issue editors) + seven other brilliant scholars! utppublishing.com/toc/cjfms/34...

more power to any Dean who makes the case that their discipline-specific standard for AI is refusal, and AI refusal will be what they integrate into the curriculum

It's really something to watch the corporate sector admit that GenAI is an applied failure, while universities double down on massive integration to benefit from the same "productivity gains" as corps - layoffs + decimation of programs + destruction of critical thinking.

This is more than twice the amount of money paid to every writer in Canada in royalties who has had their book taken out of a library in the past year.

It’s arrived!

Harrowing (literally). And one of the knock-on effects from this kind of curricula violence is that legitimately interesting and promising computational work—including, yes, involving AI—is inevitably tainted by association. It’s not good for anyone, except administrators.

In these cases, AI is being used to solder together the libertarian goal of dismantling administrative capacity with the fascist goal of ever present control and enforcement. This mediating function between contrasting desires is at least as important whether it actually works.

2026 photo research fellowships now open. Come to Toronto to work with the amazing collections at TMU’s Image Centre! theimagecentre.ca/fellowship/

Historian of eugenics here. I don't normally like to retweet bad arguments, but this is such a fundamental misunderstanding of eugenics, I think it's important to point out. I don't have time to debunk all of the ways this is inaccurate, but I'll highlight a few things and then recommend some books🧵

„CSU—US’s largest public uni system—went all-in with a $17mill partnership with OpenAI. . .CSU unveiled its grand technological gesture just as it proposed slashing $375mill from its budget. While admin cut ribbons on AI, they were cutting faculty positions, academic programs, student services.“

📢CfP: DIFFICULT COLLECTIONS📢 What can practitioners & researchers do with difficult heritage preserved in galleries, libraries, archives and museums? - Paper Trails (a Book as Online Open Content) Special Issue - Proposal deadline: 31/01/2026 - Details: blogs.ucl.ac.uk/special-coll... 🗃️ #GLAM

Call for Papers for the 2026 Underhill Graduate Student Colloquium “Reimagining Community | Doing History Together” Deadline is midnight December 19th, 2025. csn-rec.ca/student-zone... @cndhistassoc.bsky.social

From R.E.M. to Nirvana, Live from the Underground by Katherine Rye Jewell traces how college radio shaped American music—and politics. A deeply researched history of rebellion, rhythm, and the fight for free expression zurl.co/5ehvB

"OpenAI is not a partner—it’s an empire, cloaked in ethics and bundled with a Terms of Service. The university didn’t resist. It clicked ‘Accept.’"

i’m taking on a new personal project this month. i’ve just collected a large collection of 35mm film negatives of black american life in the 1970s and 1980s and am going to begin digitizing them into an archive of their own. i’ll write about my progress here.

Judging from the quotes in here, university admins are some of the least “ai literate” people in existence. No wonder they think students need to be taught how to use it.

“Those using chatbots all wrote similar essays, and had the lowest level of neural activity through the process. … [E]ngagement in the brain reduced more with each subsequent essay. … [Those] who used no technology at all… [were] more creative, curious, engaged, and satisfied with the end results.”

By McGill Assoc. Provost Indigenous Initiatives, Celeste Pedri-Spade "These heroes were largely created by settler-controlled industries like publishing, media and academia — not by us. Their success was sustained by gatekeepers who valued marketable versions of Indigeneity over authentic voices."

“Based on the available evidence, the skills that future graduates will most need in the AI era—creative thinking, the capacity to learn new things, flexible modes of analysis—are precisely those that are likely to be eroded by inserting AI into the educational process.”

Yes, please feel free to! I collected all related letters here olivia.science/ai#letter

AI Data Centers are the new pollutant factories to put into black neighborhoods that they pretend wont kill us. Gotta love that old school environmental racism.

Important insight from Dagmar Herzog on the New Fascist Body venerated by today's right. publicseminar.org/2025/11/new-...

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia: doi.org/10.5281/zeno... We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity. 1/n

I need everyone, esp anyone working in education or tech (but really everyone) to WATCH THIS CLIP of @drtanksley.bsky.social discussing the technologies infiltrating our schools & psyches and how she is addressing it with our young people. youtu.be/5mtcSL4S3HQ

It took some time, but now my essay «Images from Images: Generative AI and the Reconfiguration of the ‹Photographic›» is finally out in open access, as part of the latest issue of «Photography & Culture» www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

My book has a cover! Inventing Nadar will be out in April 2026 from @dukepress.bsky.social.

To “my students and to anyone who might listen, I say: Don’t surrender to AI your ability to read, write and think when others once risked their lives and died for the freedom to do so.” www.huffpost.com/entry/histor...

"For students, AI teaching appears to be less transformative than it is demoralising". “I do not want to be taught by GPT.” www.theguardian.com/education/20...

“Researching and reflecting on the harms of AI is not itself harm reduction. It may even contribute to rationalizing, normalizing, and enabling harm. Critical reflection without appropriate action is thus quintessentially critical washing." -- @marentierra.bsky.social et al, (2025).

Visiting Professor job Political Economy and Work and Labour Carleton University Closing Date: December 1, 2025, or until a suitable candidate has been selected. csn-rec.ca/job-postings... @cpsa-acsp.bsky.social

"Historical analysis is fundamentally different and more complex than producing a mass of visualizations and statistics that are the lifeblood of many A.I. programmes." Gordon McKelvie @gordonmckelvie.bsky.social on the problematic use of A.I. within historical research.

"We are tearing people down by convincing them that they can't function without these tools. And we are doing this purely because some very rich unhappy oligarchs would like to become even richer if no more happier. There is nothing benevolent about this."

“The problem is that when it is installed in a health sector that prizes efficiency, surveillance and profit extraction, AI becomes not a tool for care and community but simply another instrument for commodifying human life.”

I think lots of you all will be as excited as I am to see Jess Moody’s “Plants, Enslavement and Public History” project website and you can sign up for the mailing list in the little box in bottom right corner plantpublichistory.blogs.bristol.ac.uk 🗃️🌿🪴

Today on @nichecanada.bsky.social, historian Gregory Klages discusses his latest project: publishing the diaries of Mark Robinson, who served as Park Ranger in Ontario's Algonquin Park for thirty years. @rgrmarkrobinson.bsky.social niche-canada.org/2025/11/05/t...

It’s deeply ironic how fields like Africana studies, American studies, postcolonial studies, and frankly popular music studies get discussed as rarefied, elitist fields whereas in fact they center extremely common real world discourses.

“”AI” is a failed technology. … LLMs haven’t met any markers of success we’d apply to, well, literally any other technology.” Great article by Ethan Marcotte @ethanmarcotte.com ethanmarcotte.com/wrote/agains...

This is flying way under the radar. There is an open letter going around but I haven't heard anything about it from any of my colleagues.