Tiana Reid
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Tiana Reid
@tianareid.bsky.social
310 followers 81 following 290 posts
Assistant Professor in the Department of English at York University in Toronto
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To entice you, dear reader, here’s one of the Works Consulted pages from her 2022 black queer historical fiction, The Sleeping Car Porter.
November 6, 2025 at 4:15 PM
tianareid.bsky.social
Minh is launching her new book Memorial Park: Revisiting Vietnam, a critique of the art world, luxury, and diaspora: "Nguyen finds relics of proletarian romance and vestiges of totalitarian control amid an evermore corporatized society."
cream-coloured book cover of Minh Nguyen's new book Memorial Park: Revisiting Vietnam
September 13, 2025 at 2:56 PM
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Latest library returns
July 30, 2025 at 4:30 PM
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July 21, 2025 at 12:21 AM
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screenshot of an essay: This summer I found myself hurting. When I hurt I try to identify the source: is it coming from my core, or is it the outside circumstances that are raining down on me? The world felt darker than usual, yet I couldn’t really believe that. It had always been this bad. I tried to resist provocations of the newness of our generation, the new intensity of our conflicts, the new deaths of the dead. Maybe the news is just darker, I thought. Maybe it’s because of Twitter. There were Gaza and Debates About Gaza and there were planes crashing, all the time, crashing. There were mass deportations and ISIS and Ferguson and Rob Ford and Eric Garner and lost planes and is this the Coldest War ever? This summer I felt like I was trying to make sense of a senseless place. Most of the time I wanted to shout, “People are dying! People are dead!” but I was alive so I felt somehow indebted to a sort of logic of tempered feelings, which isn’t so much about being alive but about being dead and breathing. So I didn’t shout. Instead I enveloped myself in the work of two very different creative producers, the poet Fanny Howe and the hip-hop group Shabazz Palaces. This summer I believed in them, at a particular moment when I felt very much like not being in the world at all.
July 19, 2025 at 4:59 PM
tianareid.bsky.social
Stray Voltage: couch writing music for rage and imagination
Close up pic of orange vinyl record, Sun Ra’s Stray Voltage
June 30, 2025 at 6:32 PM
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Our union's statement on the resignation of Rhonda Lenton: "President Rhonda Lenton's resignation caps years of tumult and mismanagement which interfered with the excellent daily work and commitment to the university demonstrated by York’s faculty, librarians, staff, and students."
York University Faculty Association (YUFA) Statement on the Resignation of York University President Rhonda Lenton - June 26, 2025 that reads in part: President Rhonda Lenton's resignation caps years of tumult and mismanagement which interfered with the excellent daily work and commitment to the university demonstrated by York’s faculty, librarians, staff, and students. The Ontario Auditor General's 2023 report on York University identified grave deficiencies in representativity and transparency, including financial concerns arising from a bloated and overpaid senior management team that has defunded teaching, research, student services, and building maintenance. The York University Administration terminated the contracts of seven YUFA colleagues. Many York staff members – employees and contract faculty - have lost their jobs. President Lenton's administration suspended enrollments in 19 academic programs early this year with no financial rationale and no consultation, which led to dozens of statements of outrage and more than 8000 protest letters to York's Board of Governors. The Canadian Association of University Teachers initiated a judicial review into the decision, one that was undertaken without the approval of York’s Senate and created confusion and concern in the broader community. Along with earlier program suspensions, including at Glendon, York’s multilingual campus, these misguided decisions have likely impacted student numbers in recent years. Due to mounting concerns about poor leadership and mismanagement, in the past 16 months alone YUFA members have passed two separate motions calling for President Lenton's resignation. Under Lenton’s administration, York University has faced unnecessary labour strife, including two CUPE 3903 strikes in 6 years, one of which was the longest in the history of the Canadian post-secondary sector. In the summer of 2024, the administration threatened to lock out the York University Faculty Association. These ac…
June 27, 2025 at 8:04 PM
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Some stills from كیف لا نغرق في السراب / To Remain in the No Longer (Joyce Joumaa, 2023)
June 26, 2025 at 9:54 PM
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Summer 2025 cover of Aperture magazine Inside spread of Nuits Balnéaires profile in Aperture magazine Nuits Balnéaires Côte d’Ivoire Dreaming text and photo
June 25, 2025 at 3:57 PM
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reminded me of a Jamaica Kincaid essay
May 22, 2025 at 12:26 PM
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Crashed into this book
Picture of the book The Tragedy of Brady Sims by Ernest Gaines
March 22, 2025 at 12:05 PM
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Screenshot of phone reading in part: When the sign "Zora Neale Hurston" appears, because of her literary celebrity, we think we know her. We don't, of course. We can't possibly. A cursory glance at her oeuvre demonstrates uncontainable heterogeneity. And yet today, Hurston is defined by that impossible desire for knowing: a recuperative mode that obscures more than it reveals, aiming for closure, wholeness, and celebration over indeterminacy, ambivalence, and political probings. The desire to know, to pin down, is reassuring in its possessive finality. But that stable kind of knowledge is impossible; we can only read Hurston in all of her contradictions, an unfinishable and inconclusive task. Hurston has always been puzzling, even to "the most sympathetic researcher," as Maya Angelou has written. The Hurston we know today constitutes such a "meeting ground" of desire and loss, life and death. • yalereview.org
March 12, 2025 at 7:40 PM
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Cried and cried
Picture of Susie Boyt’s book Loved and Missed
March 8, 2025 at 11:19 PM
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The Writer by Ruth Chaney (Work Projects Administration, 1935-43)
February 15, 2025 at 12:42 PM
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No-context context from last year
Poster reading: FACTS FOR THE YORK UNIVERSITY FACULTY ASSOCIATION (YUFA) MARKHAM CAMPUS MONEY TROUBLES? York financed its capital projects using debt, so much so that the university has met its capacity for debt. York did not do a thorough cost analysis and underestimated the Markham project's cost recovery period by 6 years. Source: Value-for-Money Audit - Office of the Auditor General of Ontario (2024) In June 2022, the Board of Governors (BoG) announced that the opening of the Markham Centre Campus (expected in September 2023) would be pushed to 2024 due to delays in construction, resulting in an additional estimated $35 million in costs. Source: BoG Agenda Package (June 28. 2022) In February 2024, the Finance and Audit Committee of the BoG authorized a second increase of $20 million (including a buffer of $5.6 million), bringing the project's cost to $280.5 million - $55 million over budget. $225.5 MILLION +$55 MILLION Source: BoG Agenda Pkg_(Feb 27, 2024) York's BoG has opposed FIPPA requests for financial data. Neither the BoG nor the administration have clarified the York University Development Corporation's role in capital projects. This secrecy echoes the President of Laurentian University's request to keep key documents private in Laurentian's insolvency proceedings (see: Srigley 2021). Source: YUFA Governance Subcommittee Report (Dec 2023) WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT: York is now facing a deficit, which they say is due to "declining enrollment." To solve this problem, they are proposing significant restructuring to increase class sizes and anticipating hiking tuition fees when the province allows (according to a Feb 2024 media release, not before 2027). STUDENTS, TEACHING ASSISTANTS, AND FACULTY SHOULD NOT HAVE TO PAY FOR THE FINANCIAL MISTAKES OF THE UNIVERSITY'S ADMINISTRATION Poster reading in part FACTS FOR THE YORK UNIVERSITY FACULTY ASSOCIATION (YUFA) YORK HAS UNDERTAKEN SEVEN MAJOR CAPITAL PROJECTS IN THE PAST SIX FISCAL EARS, WITH COSTS RANGING FROM $11 MILLION TO $261 MILLION In the past five years, $735.3 million was spent on new buildings and major capital expansion. - in comparison, $94.7 million has been spent on deferred maintenance. According to the Facilities Condition Index, the university has reached a critical state, compromising the health and safety of everyone on campus. An email warning that water may appear brown in HNES building, without explanation of the cause of the brown water. Faculty colleagues in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change clearing out flooded offices in the HNES building. WHAT DOES THIS CRITICAL STATE LOOK LIKE? Questionable water coming out of water fountains in Ross, or not working in some areas. Outdated electrical systems in Ross vulnerable to shorting out the only outlet in faculty member offices. DESPITE THIS DISREPAIR, AS OF MARCH 2024, DEFERRED MAINTENANCE REMAINS PART OF THE UNIVERSITY'S COST-REDUCTION PLANS Source: LAPS. Faculty_Council Uodaze (2024) Source: Value-for-Mony.Audit - Office of the Auditor General of Ontario (2024) 3:57 YUFA_RF Posts Follow yufa_rf WHERE DOES THE MONEY COME FROM? York is in a positive financial position, with a $1.9 billion positive net asset position at the end of 2022/23, and a yearly surplus over the past 5 years. But, in the past 5 years, while total revenue increased by 3%, total expenses increased by 16%, leading to a deficit. York also has reached its capacity for debt, in part because capital expansion projects (such as Markham) are largely financed by debt. York is now facing a deficit, which they say is due to "declining enrollment." To solve this problem, York is proposing significant restructuring to increase class sizes and anticipates hiking tuition fees. Yet, the Government of Ontario recently announced that the tuition fee freeze will continue until 2027 for Ontario students STUDENTS, TEACHING ASSISTANTS, AND FACULTY SHOULD NOT HAVE TO PAY FOR THE FINANCIAL MISTAKES OF THE UNIVERSITY'S ADMINISTRATION. April 8, 2024 yufa_rf + 3:57 YUFA_RF Posts Follow April 8, 2024 yufa_rf While student enrolment held steady over five years, the Senior Administration at the University grew in size by 37%, with a 47% increase in their compensation. During the same five-year period, six employee unions on campus had their wages unlawfully capped at 1% due to Bill 124 (which has now been repealed and deemed unconstrutonal WHERE DOES THE MONEY GO? INCREASED SENIOR LEADERSHIP 1 Vice President and 3 Associate / Assistant Vice President positions were created for the new Division of Equity, People, and Culture, in line with York's Decolonizing. Equity. Diversity. and Inclusion Strategy 2023-2028 Meanwhile, 10 additional Associate / Assistant Vice President positions were created without explanation. According to the Auditor General of Ontario (2024): "While a university with sustained growth in revenue and/or enrolment may choose to increase its senior administration to better manage that growth, this was not the case at York* (p. 31). THE GROWTH IN SENIOR ADMINISTRATORS HAS FAR OUTPACED THE UNIVERSITY'S GROWTH. Sonia tea dee Pie alte the pride, evice a Goers sere the ones, our eary PUres Locate a 12 April 8, 2024
February 12, 2025 at 9:14 PM
tianareid.bsky.social
I’d never regret raiding those bookshelves in Jamaica.
A stack of old Doris Lessing books
February 3, 2025 at 8:04 PM
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reminds me of this rather damning epigraph to Creole Indigeneity: Between Myth and Nation in the Caribbean by Shona N. Jackson
screenshot of epigraph to Creole Indigeneity which includes one quote from Aimé Césaire's "Birds" and another from Basil Rodrigues's "Natural Ways"
January 7, 2025 at 12:01 PM
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December 25, 2024 at 10:10 PM
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December 2, 2024 at 9:40 PM
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“It is, again, a time for revolutionaries to expropriate printing presses. The internet, for all its underground potential, has become almost entirely privatized, bordered, unfree.” www.writersagainstthewarongaza.com/campaigns/vi...
A woman in Jabalia holding a newspaper
November 30, 2024 at 5:37 PM
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Rereading Angela Davis's "Reflections on the Black Woman's Role in the Community of Slaves"
screenshot of "Reflections on the Black Woman's Role in the Community of Slaves" by Angela Davis
November 23, 2024 at 12:04 PM
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It's called "minor green" actually
November 22, 2024 at 1:43 PM
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We boycotted the Giller Prize.
November 19, 2024 at 3:51 AM
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November 17, 2024 at 4:58 PM
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that glare, a warning
Actors Carol Ohmart and Carolyn Craig in a still from House on Haunted Hill (1959), directed by William Castle
November 17, 2024 at 11:47 AM