Scott Ross, animate candy corn

@skort.bsky.social

338 Followers 623 Following

lecturer, wustl | africanist anthro | humanitarianism, infrastructure, war, media, sound | gwu phd | hella left | he/him | arizonan in exile | wants to be your friend

photo of a burning building
Map of US airbases, destroyers, aircraft carriers, and combat ships in the region.
You can’t walk for ten minutes in my neighborhood without seeing them: boxy SUVs, mostly domestic-made, with tinted windows and out-of-state plates. Two men riding in front, dressed in tactical gear. Following behind is a train of three or four cars, honking. Sometimes there are bikers, too, blowing on neon-colored plastic whistles that local businesses give out for free. Every street corner has patrollers on foot, yelling and filming when a convoy rolls by. If the ICE vehicles pull over, people flood the street. Crowds materialize seemingly out of nowhere. The honking and whistling amps up, becoming an unignorable wail, and more people stream out of their houses and businesses. When agents leave their cars they’re met with jeers, mostly variations on “Fuck you.” Usually someone starts throwing snowballs. Agents pull out pepper spray guns, threatening protesters who get too close. If there’s enough of a crowd, they use tear gas.
"From Intimacies of Trauma to Intimacies of Struggle: Gaza Solidarity Encampments as Sites of Black Feminist Praxis" by Savannah Shange and Island Gutierrez How does it feel to learn through a genocide? How does one teach on the same campus where student protest is forcibly quelled? In this experimental dialogue between an undergraduate student and a faculty member, we answer these questions in a Black feminist call and response rooted in an ethics of mutuality and care. Drawing on Gutierrez's lived experience in a Gaza solidarity encampment collective, we conceive of encampments as antibodies—an adaptive response to the settler sickness of war and genocide. Thinking alongside Dána-Ain Davis, Christina Sharpe, and Tiffany Lethabo King, we argue that intimate pedagogical and political engagement across diasporas produces a necessary pathway to praxis that can disrupt the normativity of both anti-Blackness and Zionism.
Jewish Currents article, "Portrait of a Campus in Crisis" UCLA capitulated to its own hardline pro-Israel activists long before Trump came calling. As a result, it's students hand repeatedly become targets of vigilante and police violence
ArtSci dissolves task force considering departmental reorganization after resignation of task force members
The Faculty Senate Council (FSC) met with Provost West yesterday and shared with great passion the deep concerns and strong opposition the Faculty Senate has to the Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education. FSC received hundreds of emails, text messages, phone calls and office visits from Faculty Senate members, articulating the serious threats the Compact poses to academic freedom, educational integrity and scientific inquiry. No university should strive for or be given preferential treatment by our federal government in exchange for compliance with one political ideology. No institution can maintain its integrity and stay true to its values, including freedom of speech and respect for the human dignity of all, by capitulating to the untenable demands embedded in the Compact. Consequently, following the meeting with Provost West, the FSC unanimously decided to express our strong opposition to WashU signing the Compact.
Trump's Compact for higher education. What it is and why you should resist it
The compact characterizes efforts to improve diversity as discriminatory, a continuation of other efforts to undermine the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It makes other demands about admission, like requiring the use of standardized tests and limiting the admission of international students, that directly flout the shared governance rights of faculty. It redefines sex and gender according to rigid binary divisions incompatible with science and our value of human respect; forcing members of the University to accept these definitions in their work and medical practice would violate our academic freedom as well as standards of care. Finally, it instructs universities to ensure a “vibrant marketplace of ideas on campus.” Given recent government actions to suppress the expression of ideas with which it disagrees, such as arresting, detaining, and deporting noncitizen students and faculty members for Constitutionally protected speech, we can only interpret this as a thinly-veiled attempt to restrict academic freedom to those who agree with the current government, defeating the very purpose of academic freedom and of higher education as a whole.
White House Meets With New Colleges About ‘Compact’ After Rejections Washington University in St. Louis, the University of Kansas and Arizona State are invited to weigh in after MIT, others turn down proposal
We should say what is going on here in clear and unsentimental terms: The president instructed federal agents to use extralegal violence against both immigrants and citizens in Chicago. When the citizenry of Chicago objected to these violent acts, the president used their First Amendment demonstrations of protest as pretext to deploy the Texas National Guard into the city, so that armed soldiers from Texas could impose the president’s will on the people of Illinois.
September 12: ICE agents shoot and kill Chicago resident Silverio Villegas González in Franklin Park. ICE claimed that González was shot after he “seriously injured” an ICE agent. But bodycam footage shows the same agent immediately after the encounter describing his injuries as “nothing major.” September 30: Some 300 federal agents raid an apartment building in the dead of night. Some rappel from a Black Hawk helicopter positioned over the building. They ransack apartments and detain not only children but several U.S. citizens
WashU Med labeled ‘DEI Indoctrination Training Camp,’ DOJ investigation requested | On Sept. 15, 2025, America First Legal (AFL) filed a complaint against WashU School of Medicine for its Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) practices, asking the Department of Justice to issue an investigation into the medical school’s alleged “illegal DEI practices.”
The challenge for Klein and his fellow travelers is to specify what sort of ground rules could make life livable and social situations manageable for such a wide array of people whose values, commitments, and interests differ so sharply—that is, on terms other than various sorts of segregation or the most naked forms of domination and subjugation—if not precisely “social shame and cultural pressure,” now contemptuously referred to as “political correctness” or “wokeness.” We might more accurately call it exactly the “civility” that centrists like Klein otherwise pretend to champion, even while they seek to hollow out even this meager social protection of its efficacy. These codes of neighborliness or of common decency are, in other words, the bare minimum for us to exist peacefully as profoundly different people who nevertheless share the same time and place. Common decency, then, stigmatizes people that do not participate in it—removes them from voluntary association, as Russell exemplified. We indeed have to live with one another, but terms and conditions apply.
They believed they were forging a nation—a homeland for themselves and their descendants. They fought, they bled, they struggled, they died for us. They built this country for us. America, in all its glory, is their gift to us, handed down across the generations. It belongs to us. It’s our birthright, our heritage, our destiny. If America is everything and everyone, then it is nothing and no one at all. But we know that’s not true. America is not a “universal nation.” It is something distinctive, unique, and real—unlike any other place or people in the history of mankind.
This does not mean Kirk deserved to die or that political violence is ever justified. What happened to Kirk is horrifying, and we fear deeply for whatever will happen next. But it is undeniable that Kirk was not just a part of the extremely tense, very dangerous national dialogue, he was an accelerationist force whose work to dehumanize LGBTQ+ people and threaten the free speech of professors, teachers, and school board members around the country has directly put the livelihoods and physical safety of many people in danger. We do no one any favors by ignoring this, even in the immediate aftermath of an assassination like this. Kirk claimed that his Turning Point USA sent “80+ buses full of patriots” to the January 6 insurrection. Turning Point USA has also run a “Professor Watchlist,”and a “School Board Watchlist” for nearly a decade.
This course includes writing assignments. The point of these assignments is to assess your understanding of the field, the ideas and concepts covered in the course, and your own individual thinking in response to the prompt. While you may use tools such as spellchecks, you are not permitted to use any AI tools to plan, organize, or write your assignments for this class. In addition to pedagogical reasons, generative AI has been shown to falsify information, draw from invalid sources, violate privacy concerns, exacerbate mental health problems, literally make you dumber, and be harmful to the environment. Maybe don’t use it, generally. Definitely don’t use it for this course. The use of generative AI in this course will be considered an academic integrity violation and may result in grade penalties or conduct referrals. If you are looking to check or improve your writing, consider visiting the Writing Center Links to an external site.. Sharing with a peer and coming to office hours are also encouraged. Don’t use AI.
"I know what you did last summer" written on a piece of paper.
Every misogynist joke poses a question to its female audience: Can you laugh along? Will you be chill or are you going to make a big deal out of this? Are you going to be a bitch about it? Arriving in the form of a dildo, the joke that is also the question becomes a double entendre: Can you take it?
Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers in tuxes standing on stage with a screen that reads "Rule of Culture #1: Culture is when a woman does something seriously, a gay guy does something as a joke, or a straight guy does something good by accident."
One page on equity.washu.edu, called “our progress,” existed until at least April 28, the last time the nonprofit Internet Archive captured a version of it. It included year-to-year data of student, faculty and staff demographics, with graphics showing WashU’s share of female, Asian and Hispanic populations of students and faculty rising — and its share of white students declining — as well as statistics on WashU’s socio-economic diversity improving.
BOOK REVIEW Scott Ross, Washington University in St. Louis Rachel Marie Niehuus, An Archive of Possibilities: Healing and Repair in Democratic Republic of Congo. Durham: Duke University Press, 2024. 201 pp. What is it like to live amid violence? To endure war and attempt to build a life within it? Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo is a place whose very name often evokes associations with violence. As the battleground of multiple international conflicts and civil wars for the last three decades and currently home to over 100 armed groups, these associations might seem obvious and even be taken for granted. In Rachel Marie Niehuus’ new ethnography, An Archive of Possibilities: Healing and Repair in Democratic Republic of Congo, readers find a Congo that is wracked by violence and destruction, yes, but also one that is the site of reconstruction, of healing and repair, of new possibilities. The book offers an insightful and reflective meditation on what it means to live life in a place marked by war, such as eastern Congo.
Trump was elected in part because of his promise to "launch the largest deportation programme of criminals in the history" - a promise Arpineh, her husband and mother say they all still believe in. Yet her family says they have faith that Arpineh will be released, and believe that only hardened, dangerous criminals will actually be deported. "I don't blame Trump, I blame Biden," Arthur says. "It's his doing for open borders, but I believe in the system and all the good people will be released and the ones that are bad will be sent back." While many of those detained do not have criminal records, Aprineh is a convicted felon, which makes her a prime target for removal.
The pedestal to Albert Pike (without statue), covered in graffiti that labels him racist and says things like Fuck White Supremacy, Fuck 12, Black Lives Matter.
Emphasis on lawlessness also invites us to think that any legal institution that reins Trump in is on our side—as if the enemy of our enemy is our friend. This is an especially important mistake relative to the United States’s pervasive pattern of criminalizing poor people, people of color, and the marginalized more generally. A movement that aligns with the forces of law and order is not a liberatory one. The extent to which Trump, and to a lesser but still important extent many Democrats, tends to frame undocumented migrants as having broken the law is salient in this political content. Solidarity with migrants and opposition to the ways they are managed by the state is strategically significant and, more importantly, morally urgent.15 A legalistic political outlook is at best of little use—and is, I suspect, actively antithetical—to that solidarity.
Last week, the leaders of more than 460 colleges and universities—ranging from the president of Yale to the president of the community college in Elgin, Illinois—released an open letter taking the Trump administration to task for what they called “the unprecedented government overreach and political interference now endangering American higher education.” That letter came in response to Trump’s push to cut university funding and even put some programs under “academic receivership.” Not among the letter’s signatories: WashU chancellor Andrew Martin. That absence has spurred another letter, this one addressed to Martin, urging him to sign on to the statement pushing back against Trump. As of last night, almost 300 faculty, staff and alumni had put their names to it. One signatory, law professor Gregory Magarian, says he signed on in protest of, among other things, the Trump administration turning public dollars into leverage. “The only way to resist that is to band together and say, collectively, we are not going to be bullied, we are not going to be bought, we are not going to be intimidated,” he says. “It's incredibly encouraging that those efforts are underway in higher education.” Magarian adds that while he can’t get inside Martin’s head, the chancellor did write an essay for the Chronicle of Higher Education in February arguing that universities ought to be less political. “Based on that essay that he authored, he thinks that we can stand above or outside the fray, and you just can't,” Magarian says. “There is no above or outside the fray. We're living in the fray.” As for Martin, he told SLM earlier this week, “We’re all approaching advocacy in different ways,” and shared additional thoughts about Trump’s threats to higher education.
List of virtual events for the April 17 National Day of Action for Higher Education - full list and registration info available at link in post.
Inside Higher Ed article headlined "International Student Visas Revoked" "As of April 12, over 170 colleges and universities have identified 950-plus international students and recent graduates who have had their legal status changed by the State Department."
Second, innocence will not protect you. I was not in the country from August 2023 to April 2024. While I received a summons on April 30, 2024, the case was dismissed by the courts and I have faced no disciplinary charges. Apart from attending a handful of low-level protests and posting on social media, I have had little contact with events on campus. So there is no explanation why I was targeted. With the rapidly escalating situation, the criminalization of free speech, and eminent travel bans, what has happened to me can happen to you. Therefore, we must exert maximum pressure on Columbia and other universities to protect international students from these arbitrary state actions. And we must fight for complete amnesty and reinstatement for those whom Columbia has sacrificed in the hope of reversing funding cuts. Now is the time to come together and demand universities do the right thing. Ranjani Srinivasan
After speaking with various students, faculty, and staff who did not witness or participate in the protests, the committee found that many supported the administration’s response on April 27. “Many believed an unprecedented number of protestors had no relationship with the University and further believed that the protestors came with ill intent,” reads Page 19 of the report. “[The committee] also pointed out that the unaffiliated protestors far outnumbered WUPD and prevented WashU students from studying during the critical week before finals.”
Screenshot from Severance of Drummond saying "shorter."
Protesters hold signs like "free Mahmoud" and "Jews reject ICE"
In October 2024, the Heritage Foundation followed up Project 2025 with Project Esther, a playbook for repressing those who oppose the genocide of Palestinians. In the text of their report, the Heritage Foundation depicts all concern for Palestinians as participation in “a global Hamas Support Network” and explicitly accuses Jewish Voice for Peace and many other Jewish people of being “antisemitic” for refusing to support Zionism. At the same time, the report relies heavily on anti-Semitic tropes such as fearmongering about George Soros. This exemplifies the way that the far right has sought to appropriate concerns about antisemitism to promote racism, Islamophobia, and antisemitic conspiracy theories. Heritage Foundation slide titled "Antisemitism's Ecosystem" and includes sections labeled "Masterminds" such as Soros, "Backers" such as Antifa, BLM, Open Society Foundation, "Organizers" such as Jewish Voice for Peace, Students for Justice in Palestine, Within Our Lifetime, "Followers" such as students, faculty, labor unions, and "Behavior" described as protests, marches, riots, violence.
Free Mahmoud Khalil and end all deportations Emergency rally March 12 at Noon ICE Field Office, Federal Building, 1222 Spruce Street
Post from Donald Trump talking about how protests against Tesla are bad, so he's going to buy one to support "Elon's baby"
Tweet from Jeff Bezos: I shared this note with the Washington Post team this morning: I’m writing to let you know about a change coming to our opinion pages. We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others. There was a time when a newspaper, especially one that was a local monopoly, might have seen it as a service to bring to the reader’s doorstep every morning a broad-based opinion section that sought to cover all views. Today, the internet does that job. I am of America and for America, and proud to be so. Our country did not get here by being typical. And a big part of America’s success has been freedom in the economic realm and everywhere else. Freedom is ethical — it minimizes coercion — and practical — it drives creativity, invention, and prosperity.
Map of an incredibly cold US - 80% of the contiguous United States will be below freezing, 27% below zero.
As a gender-care refuge state with protections built into state law, Minnesota has doubled down on what evidence overwhelmingly shows and all major medical societies have agreed upon: Gender care for youths is safe, effective and necessary. This election has brought national attention to our work as leaders of our respective health care institutions’ programs to provide gender care for youths. It has been stressful to provide this care in the political spotlight. We know how hard it can be to feel hopeful about the future, with lawmakers across the country attacking our services and care for our patients in a way that has never been felt before. While it can be hard, the political spotlight demands tremendous responsibility. And we’re up for it. We have a clear purpose. So we’d like to tell you what we’re telling everyone:
American academics, why aren't you in the streets? When Canadian federal science was gutted by the Harper administration, thousands of scientists marched on parliament hill. There were years of coordinated protests and policy moves from academia and NGOs that led to the Trudeau-led Liberal party literally campaigning on restoring federal science and research funding and capacity as a platform issue. One of their first acts upon forming government was to establish an arms-length Office of the Chief Science Advisor. Why are you all not in the streets right now? Not coordinating, not fighting back? Why does it seem like your admin are just rolling over and taking it? Why is this sub full of people pre-emptively scrubbing language out of your courses and grants rather than standing the hell up? Talk to your union reps, get together with your colleagues and the national NGOs doing this work (eg Union of Concerned Scientists). Get advocacy and policy training from groups like COMPASS. Look to international groups like Evidence for Democracy for playbooks. Most academics have resources, privilege, influence. Stand the hell up.
National strategy call Feb 13 8pm ET / 7pm CT / 6pm MT / 5pm PT Hands off our healthcare, our research, our jobs Labor for Higher Education Sponsored by AAUP, AFT, CWA, HELU, UAW
This is the absolutely crucial part. Without political control of the payment's heart, the Trump administration and Elon Musk must chase down every agency and bend it to their will. They are in the process of doing that, but bureaucrats can notionally continue to respect the law and resist their efforts. They are helped in this effort by court injunctions they can point to. This is bureaucratic trench warfare. But if Musk and Trump can reach into the choke point, the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, they could possibly not need agency cooperation. They can just impound agency payments themselves. They could also possibly stop paying federal employees they have forced on paid administrative leave, coercing them to resign. These possibilities are what every Treasury expert I’ve talked to instantly thought of the moment they read the Washington Post reporting and are incredibly alarmed about.