Hannah Alpert-Abrams

Thank you for standing up for what is right (and so sorry for all the challenges you've faced!)

You may not be able to create change in the moment. But you can't know what might emerge when you start working together with a shared purpose. Relationships are transformative.

In my opinion, one of the most important things we can do is identify allies and mobilize alongside them.

Want to organize a film screening? Ask a colleague to do it with you. Want to push back against a chair's decision? Invite coworkers to your house for strategies and snacks.

A1: Taking Action We are all capable of taking action to fight fascism. Which of the actions described here feel possible to you? Which are you already doing? Extramural Actions (Private and Public) ● Join the local chapter of an advocacy organization ● Attend marches and other public actions ● Call or email your elected officials ● Campaign for pro-democracy politicians ● Donate and raise funds ● Write an op-ed in your local paper On Duty Actions (Private and Public) ● Defend students & workers who are being targeted ● Defend student activists ● Join and participate in your union (or help organize one!) ● Join and participate in faculty or student governance ● Participate in a university divestment campaign ● Host a film screening on fascism and democracy ● Invite guest speakers to your classroom or a public event ● Organize a panel or table on higher ed and fascism at a conference ● Attend student actions such as marches and talks ● Organize an adjacent event, for example, on data privacy ● Organize a chapter of Faculty for Justice in Palestine https://www.fjp-network.org/

Here are some things from the workbook that you can do right now!

If you are an academic worker who is not sure what action might look like in your context, my workbook Taking Action in Higher Ed might help.

It has some tools for assessing risk and some suggestions for how to build solidarity and take steps to fight repression.

halperta.com/shalperta%20...

let's gooooo 🙌🙌🙌🙌🙌🙌

Thinking about the time as a federal worker that I had to get formal permission to attend an event because they would be serving cake.

Very exciting!

This is the job that AI will replace.

I am so interested in what researchers are finding about the application of new OCR tools to historical printed and handwritten texts....

... and having some feelings about the use of the word "solved." I remember being told OCR was a "solved problem" way back in 2015!

Yes, you are mentally paralyzed and psychologically traumatized by the satanic prayer wheel of dystopian events you cannot escape, but also, you are dehydrated.

Kind of just want to form a club and put every single candidate on it. ?????

"In 2013, historian Rhae Lynn Barnes was researching blackface in America when she encountered a stumbling block at the Library of Congress: Various primary sources on the subject were listed as 'missing on shelf.'" HT @monsieurwaldo.bsky.social

oh no I would vote for every single person running in this election

this is a crucial part of the NEH doge story that the NYT leaves out

There is no "escape hatch," no "offramp," no "social media migration" that will enable you to find a place free of sin. There will never be a "purely good" social media platform because we live in the WORST capitalist dystopia and our digital environments are continuous with that hellscape.

“Like temu released a movie” is so good

🧵 up and down if you want to understand what happened to the civil servants at the National Endowment for the Humanities who worked every day to uphold the Constitution (hint: it's the same thing that happened to your grants). #NEH

In that sense, the project has been a success.

My personal opinion is that the goal of this project was not destroy NEH.

It was to punish and demoralize federal workers and award recipients.

And it was to free up money in order to convert the agency, which has bipartisan support, from an intellectual institution to a propaganda machine.

That's because federal workers are committed by oath to uphold the constitution. As a judge noted last fall, the entire project of identifying and terminating so-called DEIA awards is a violation of the first amendment. (Not to mention a violation of basic decency and funding regulations and norms.)

But that's not what matters about what happened at NEH.

I was witness to some of the early efforts to identify DEIA projects for possible termination. Some strategies were more intellectually rigorous than others. All were morally bankrupt.

AI is not a good way to classify grant applications for all the reasons that it is not a good way to classify, idk, your archival collections or your personal photographs.

Categories are mutable and depend on cultural and individual norms. Agentic AI is not well suited to that.

This breaking story has a little bit of everything I am supposed to have an opinion on, doesn't it.

Hate that for you! It was also hard for me. I think it took me about seven years to recover if I'm being honest, but I can now say that there is hope on the other side.

Back to basics on grad ed reform Dear friends, Here in Brooklyn it's finally spring, kind of. The piles of filthy snow aren't completely gone, but the light is changing, the birds are waking...

I wrote about some VERY simple things that would make grad ed a lot better. Some of this is not that hard! Tl;dr: Make sure students have a clear sense of expectations, help them understand the institution, & put up some basic guardrails around advising.

buttondown.com/inkcap/archi...

I was gonna say something unkind about faculty but then I remembered so many of my friends are faculty now

I guess if I worked in a grad program where I got to reimagine what "comprehensive knowledge of the field" meant for a new generation of students, I would focus less on memorization and more on generative, generous, and collective engagement.

yes don't get me started on the dissertation.

This is also how we did our exams. And my committee was stellar! I still think the entire concept is like 50% nostalgia, 40% not having enough time to think about the pedagogical implications, and 10% "if I had to do it you should too"