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annalivia.bsky.social
Anna Livia Brand
@annalivia.bsky.social
540 followers 400 following 98 posts
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annalivia.bsky.social
next week at Othering and Belonging Institute, UC Berkeley belonging.berkeley.edu/SRbooktalk
Book Talk: Structural Racism
belonging.berkeley.edu
October 20, 2025 at 6:12 PM
Reposted by Anna Livia Brand
kathleenclark.bsky.social
A master class from MIT in responding to authoritarian overreach:

Your “premise … is inconsistent with our core belief that scientific funding should be based on scientific merit alone.
… America’s leadership in science & innovation depends on independent thinking & open competition for excellence.
Dear Madam Secretary, I write in response to your letter of October 1, inviting MIT to review a "Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education." I acknowledge the vital importance of these matters. I appreciated the chance to meet with you earlier this year to discuss the priorities we share for American higher education. As we discussed, the Institute's mission of service to the nation directs us to advance knowledge, educate students and bring knowledge to bear on the world's great challenges. We do that in line with a clear set of values, with excellence above all. Some practical examples: • MIT prides itself on rewarding merit. Students, faculty and staff succeed here based on the strength of their talent, ideas and hard work. For instance, the Institute was the first to reinstate the SAT/ACT requirement after the pandemic. And MIT has never had legacy preferences in admissions. • MIT opens its doors to the most talented students regardless of their family's finances. Admissions are need-blind. Incoming undergraduates whose families earn less than $200,000 a year pay no tuition. Nearly 88% of our last graduating class left MIT with no debt for their education. We make a wealth of free courses and low-cost certificates available to any American with an internet connection. Of the undergraduate degrees we award, 94% are in STEM fields. And in service to the nation, we cap enrollment of international undergraduates at roughly 10%. source: https://orgchart.mit.edu/letters/regarding-compact • We value free expression, as clearly described in the MIT Statement on Freedom of Expression and Academic Freedom. We must hear facts and opinions we don't like - and engage respectfully with those with whom we disagree. These values and other MIT practices meet or exceed many standards outlined in the document you sent. We freely choose these values because they're right, and we live by them because they support our mission - work of immense value to the prosperity, competitiveness, health and security of the United States. And of course, MIT abides by the law. The document also includes principles with which we disagree, including those that would restrict freedom of expression and our independence as an institution. And fundamentally, the premise of the document is inconsistent with our core belief that scientific funding should be based on scientific merit alone. In our view, America's leadership in science and innovation depends on independent thinking and open competition for excellence. In that free marketplace of ideas, the people of MIT gladly compete with the very best, without preferences. Therefore, with respect, we cannot support the proposed approach to addressing the issues facing higher education. As you know, MIT's record of service to the nation is long and enduring. Eight decades ago, MIT leaders helped invent a scientific partnership between America's research universities and the U.S. government that has delivered extraordinary benefits for the American people. We continue to believe in the power of this partnership to serve the nation. Sincerely, Sally Kornbluth
October 10, 2025 at 2:47 PM
Reposted by Anna Livia Brand
desireefields.bsky.social
My department is hiring! We seek to hire an Assistant Professor in Global Black Geographies whose work engages "with the spatial dimensions of life in African and/or Black diasporic communities in the Global South". Job ad with more details: aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05026
Assistant Professor - Global Black Geographies - Department of Geography
University of California, Berkeley is hiring. Apply now!
aprecruit.berkeley.edu
August 14, 2025 at 12:14 AM
Reposted by Anna Livia Brand
mskellymhayes.bsky.social
Fascism erases and rewrites history. It debases facts. The fascist narrative supplants all else. Restricting the acquisition and exchange of information allows the regime to replace evidence with myths and propaganda, while silencing and punishing all contradiction.
June 24, 2025 at 9:12 PM
annalivia.bsky.social
so goes my writing session this am // helpful large animals
June 24, 2025 at 3:08 PM
Reposted by Anna Livia Brand
sifill.bsky.social
I said it would get worse very quickly. By tomorrow we will have completed the most dangerous & frightening 24 hours thus far of Trump 2.0. Just to name a few:
1. Defiance of a court order by sending migrants to Sudan without due process (despite clear DP decision SCOTUS) & Dist. CT. order.
May 21, 2025 at 2:03 AM
Reposted by Anna Livia Brand
colsonwhitehead.com
Bunker Rule No. 1: The people in control of the bunker are lying about what’s outside the bunker.
April 19, 2025 at 1:39 PM
Reposted by Anna Livia Brand
maggietokudahall.bsky.social
This is literally how the Holocaust started, and honestly I'm tired of saying so
April 9, 2025 at 1:45 AM
Reposted by Anna Livia Brand
kateontransport.bsky.social
Appreciate insightful coverage @keawilson.bsky.social @usa.streetsblog.org on our collaboration (@annalivia.bsky.social & Frechette) on walkability & inherent problems of Walk Score as tied to inequitable, racialized investment flows fueling destination proximity usa.streetsblog.org/2025/04/07/i...
Is 'Walk Score' Really Just a 'White Score'? — Streetsblog USA
A new paper argues that the popular real estate tools is driving investment to predominantly white urban neighborhoods, without expanding walkability for anyone else.
usa.streetsblog.org
April 7, 2025 at 2:37 PM
annalivia.bsky.social
delightfully large collaborator
April 4, 2025 at 2:43 AM
Reposted by Anna Livia Brand
maryannaise.bsky.social
“I insist on being shocked. I am never going to become immune. I think that’s a kind of failure to see so much of it that you die inside. I want to be surprised and shocked every time.”
― Toni Morrison
March 26, 2025 at 11:33 PM
Reposted by Anna Livia Brand
aaup.org
Columbia University has failed to defend academic freedom & freedom of speech & allowed a great institution to be bullied & extorted into submission by an administration hellbent on contorting higher education to their will.

The AAUP condemns this capitulation. We can & must fight back.
Columbia Concedes to Trump’s Demands After Federal Funds Are Stripped
The administration has moved to cut $400 million in federal funding to the university without changes to its policies and rules.
www.nytimes.com
March 22, 2025 at 2:32 AM
Reposted by Anna Livia Brand
julianagyeman.bsky.social
Excellent critique of walkability that challenges the neutrality of walkability metrics and contextualizes this neutrality within racial capitalism, arguing that Walk Score reflects and could contribute to inequitable investment flows and property (de)valuation. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
Is Walk Score white score? Deconstructing a walkability algorithm in the context of racial capitalism
Walkability functions as an assumed good in many urbanist circles, and numerous metrics claim to quantify it. We examine one widely used metric, Walk Score, to consider how it extends racialized pr...
www.tandfonline.com
March 21, 2025 at 6:48 PM
annalivia.bsky.social
new piece with Kate Lowe and Sarah Frechette on walk score as an algorithm of whiteness @kateontransport.bsky.social

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
Is Walk Score white score? Deconstructing a walkability algorithm in the context of racial capitalism
Walkability functions as an assumed good in many urbanist circles, and numerous metrics claim to quantify it. We examine one widely used metric, Walk Score, to consider how it extends racialized pr...
www.tandfonline.com
March 21, 2025 at 4:21 PM
annalivia.bsky.social
this interview makes me stupidly happy in such dark times. I cannot wait to read this
dukepress.bsky.social Duke University Press @dukepress.bsky.social · Mar 18
"Gone, Gone" by Todd Meyers @totomcgee.bsky.social uses a blend of prose, poetry, and ethnography to reckon with grief in the face of overdose death. Read a Q&A with him about the book: buff.ly/PKcAdIX
Cover of Gone Gone by Todd Meyers. Cover has an image of a variety of fruits, flowers, and cigarettes. The title in written in a large font in all capital letters, sideways across the cover. The author's name is written to the right of the title, sideways in all capital letters. A white man with glasses and short gray hair and a gray beard sits in front of a radiator. He is wearing a grey hoodie. There is a plant over his shoulder.
March 21, 2025 at 1:38 AM
Reposted by Anna Livia Brand
nikitagill.bsky.social
Painfully relevant.
In order for me to write poetry that isn't political, I must listen to the birds and in order to hear the birds the warplanes must be silent - Marwan Makhoul
March 19, 2025 at 8:19 PM
Reposted by Anna Livia Brand
nikitagill.bsky.social
What is happening to the people of Gaza can happen to any of us.
"Every bombed village is my hometown" - James Baldwin And every dead child is my child. Every grieving mother is my mother. Every crying father is my father. Every home turned to rubble is the home I grew up in. Every brother carrying the remains of his brother across borders is my brother. Every sister waiting for a sister who will never come home is my sister. Every one of these people are ours, Just like we are theirs. We belong to them and they belong to us.
March 20, 2025 at 4:05 PM
Reposted by Anna Livia Brand
palumboliu.bsky.social
academeblog.org/2025/03/20/a.... Extremely important statement by Constitutional law scholars. Please share if you can.
A Statement from Constitutional Law Scholars on Columbia
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following extraordinary statement was published today in the New York Review of Books and is reposted here with their permission.  The statement’s signatories incl…
academeblog.org
March 20, 2025 at 7:34 PM
Reposted by Anna Livia Brand
nikitagill.bsky.social
As Israel brutally attacks Gaza again, I am reminded of this devastating poem by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha.

“It doesn’t matter what you had planned.
It doesn’t matter who you are.
Prove you're human.
Prove you stand on two legs.
Run.”
Running Orders BY LENA KHALAF TUFFAHA They call us now, before they drop the bombs. The phone rings and someone who knows my first name calls and says in perfect Arabic "This is David." And in my stupor of sonic booms and glass-shattering symphonies still smashing around in my head I think, Do I know any Davids in Gaza? They call us now to say Run. You have 58 seconds from the end of this message. Your house is next. They think of it as some kind of war-time courtesy. It doesn't matter that there is nowhere to run to. It means nothing that the borders are closed and your papers are worthless and mark you only for a life sentence in this prison by the sea and the alleyways are narrow and there are more human lives packed one against the other more than any other place on earth Just run. We aren't trying to kill you. It doesn't matter that you can't call us back to tell us the people we claim to want aren't in your house that there's no one here except you and your children who were cheering for Argentina sharing the last loaf of bread for this week counting candles left in case the power goes out. It doesn't matter that you have children. You live in the wrong place and now is your chance to run to nowhere. It doesn't matter that 58 seconds isn't long enough to find your wedding album or your son's favorite blanket or your daughter's almost completed college application or your shoes or to gather everyone in the house. It doesn't matter what you had planned. It doesn't matter who you are. Prove you're human. Prove you stand on two legs. Run.
March 18, 2025 at 2:45 PM
Reposted by Anna Livia Brand
timothysnyder.bsky.social
If you let the executive deport people to a foreign gulag just by pronouncing the word “terrorism,” then expect to be called a “terrorist” soon yourself.
March 17, 2025 at 3:21 AM
Reposted by Anna Livia Brand
pronounced-ing.bsky.social
Printable 2x4 labels (& more) in this thread. Full sheets at bit.ly/4kOXREP: load your labels, print, stick 'em up wherever. (Don't be a jerk.)

Will this magically solve things? No.
But it helps like-minded people to take their own actions, by letting them know they're not alone. ❤️👊
pronounced-ing.bsky.social Celeste Ng @pronounced-ing.bsky.social · Mar 4
Got a printer? You can start fighting fascism. Here's a thread of things you can print and distribute. 👇

I promise doing something--even this--feels better than raging silently. And maybe it'll show you that standing up is possible and open you up to more things you can do.
March 14, 2025 at 4:01 PM
Reposted by Anna Livia Brand
guarddemocracy.bsky.social
JUST A REMINDER ...

... of how close we are today ...
March 12, 2025 at 9:42 PM
Reposted by Anna Livia Brand
chanda.blacksky.app
As predicted, women in New Hampshire had a hard time voting yesterday because of the new proof of citizenship law:

“It doesn’t have my married name on it,” she said. Town voting officials then sent her away a second time, to get her marriage certificate.

www.nhpr.org/nh-news/2025...
NH’s new ID requirements send some would-be voters home to grab passports, birth certificates
The law requires all new voters to show proof of their U.S. citizenship. For some, that meant making multiple trips to and from the polls before finally casting a ballot on Tuesday.
www.nhpr.org
March 13, 2025 at 9:50 AM
Reposted by Anna Livia Brand
chanda.blacksky.app
Relevant historical fact:
The Gestapo were formed on April 26, 1933 and came under control of the SS a year later.
premthakker.bsky.social Prem Thakker ツ @premthakker.bsky.social · Mar 9
NEWS: Last night, the Department of Homeland Security detained a Palestinian who helped lead the Columbia encampment.

Agents told him his visa was revoked. He said he had a green card. They were confused—then said that was revoked too.

His attorney demanded a warrant. Agents hung up instead.
BREAKING: DHS Detains Palestinian Student from Columbia Encampment, Says Advocates
Agents told him his student visa was revoked. But he had a green card. Agents then said that was revoked too.
zeteo.com
March 9, 2025 at 7:56 PM