Lucille Dickess, 1934-2013

There's a great tribute to Lucille Dickess, the first president of HERE Local 34, Yale's Clerical and Technical worker union, up at the New Haven Independent today. Dickess died last week. After voting no on two earlier organizing campaigns (by the OPEIU and District 65), and scabbing during local 35's long strikes in the 1970s, Dickess, a registrar in Yale's department of Geology and Geophysics, became a rank and file leader of an organizing drive which emphasized constant, one on one, grassroots organizing and worker participation, leadership, and power. As an undergraduate during the long 2001-2003 contract fight, I met Dickess several times and saw her talk about her experiences at panels and at strategy meetings. She was always profoundly supportive of us undergraduate radicals, even half a decade after her retirement from the university. In late August 2003, Dickess and seven members of the Yale Union Retirees Association occupied the offices of the university's million-dollar-a-year investment guru, David Swensen, to demand information about the university's pension fund and why Yale hadn't contributed to it in two years. On the first afternoon of what became an overnight occupation, kickstarting the second of two strikes that year, several of us entered the building with a bag full of sandwiches and pepsis for the occupiers. They were confiscated at Swenson's office by rentacops who, comically, accused us of smuggling contraband, and demanded to inspect the sandwiches, which probably never made it to their intended recipients. But in addition to the sandwich inspectors, we also found Lucille, who had left the occupation to use the bathroom and was brilliantly and adeptly working the rentacops to gain re-entry back into the room where the other retirees had hunkered down. I was impressed with Lucille's bravery - there were, and are, a lot of very brave people in the federation of hospital and university employees - but also with the nonchalance with which Lucille dealt with the intimidating and obnoxious presence of the university's security, and her unshakeable commitment to continuing the occupation of Swensen's office until he agreed to a meeting.

Lucille helped to build and spent decades fighting for a union that has played a pretty formative role in my political and intellectual life, and in that of this blog. Her dedication and ability as an organizer have served as a model for me for almost a decade, and I've always been in awe of the work that she and her co-workers did to create what Jay Driskell (on Facebook) termed, appropriately and powerfully, "the union that created me." So, thank you, Lucille Dickess. You won't be forgotten.

Excerpt of transcript of the episode of Phil Donahue's daytime talk show filmed at  Yale during the 1984 Clerical and Technical workers' strike.  Lucille Dickess faced off against University President A. Bartlett Giamatti.

It seems that while we were all worrying about the DOD, Yale Psychiatrist Charles Morgan was already helping the Federal Bureau of Investigation, an institution with its own lengthy history in New Haven, to practice interrogation tactics on New Haven's growing Colombian immigrant population.

Local immigrant advocates like Kica Matos are more skeptical of Morgan’s use of New Haven immigrants for terrorism-related or military research. Matos, a longtime Fair Haven-based immigrant rights activist, said she and fellow organizers are gearing up a campaign to urge local Latino immigrants not to participate in Morgan’s research.
Matos said Morgan’s current study at the Gold building “troubles” her because it racially profiles “vulnerable communities of color.” She also questioned the ultimate purpose of the research into how to question and assess responses from foreign-born Latinos.
“Interrogations are inherently coercive,” said Matos, the director of immigrant rights & racial justice for the national Center for Community Change. “The FBI is not a friend of communities of color. They have a long history of engaging in the most subversive and devious engagement with communities of color.COINTELPRO is an example.”

EDIT: Yale responds by disavowing involvement in Morgan's private research, of course.

"Public reports stating otherwise are premature and based on speculation and incomplete information."

Yesterday I argued that the new partnership between Yale and the defense department ought to be read through the historical lens of the university's relationship with the state over the course of the last sixty years and the changing alchemy of the colonial relationship between post-industrial town and globalized gown.  Today, responding to media furor over reports of the new center's intentions to test interrogation on the minds and bodies of New Haven's immigrant population, Yale spokesperson (and former Eidelson nemesis) Tom Conroy puts forth this very history as an argument for why critics should shut up and trust the university's administration.

Volunteer interviewees would be selected from diverse ethnic groups who would be protected by oversight from Yale's Human Research Protection Program. Research would be conducted in a manner consistent with all other research at Yale and with the expectation that findings would be reported in peer-reviewed scientific journals.

In short, the center, if established, would be designed in the best traditions of Yale research and scholarship.

But, as I suggested in my post yesterday, these traditions are themselves at issue.  How rigorously  and on what criteria the university's human subjects review board will screen the Department of Defense's initiatives remains a serious issue, but, as Batraville and Lew noted in their op-ed, there are larger issues at work than how the university and military find uses for poor and working class New Haveners.  We also have to ask why - what are the politics of this alliance, on both a global and metropolitan scale?  What are the forms of coloniality Yale and the DOD trace and reinscribe?  How does this center demonstrate continuities with and where does it break from the long history of the university's partnerships with the military and the state and with its use of the city as cheap labor, real estate, and research material?

Speaking of the university's coloniality, there is a long story in this week's edition of the Village Voice reporting on the current faculty rebellion against the NYU administration's janus-faced expansion plans in New York City and across the globe.  After a long period of quiescence from all but the most stalwart of the administration's faculty opposition, NYU's tenured professoriate's prerogatives have been so abused by the Sexton administration's top-down evangelical neoliberalism that faculty are organizing for a no confidence vote.  I'm skeptical of some of the rallying cries faculty sometimes use in opposing the NYU administration.  Collegiality and faculty governance mean almost as little to most of the university's workers - including the vast majority of its teachers, most of whom are adjuncts and precarious low wage graduate student teaching assistants - as they do to Sexton and his squadron of yes-men and women on the twelfth floor of the library.  More heartening are the ways in which faculty have taken up the question of the relationship between university expansion and student debt, the ways in which they understand the impossibility of an easy return to a mythic golden age of faculty democracy.   

Andrew Ross, a professor of social and cultural analysis at NYU and a vocal critic of the administration, suggests that there's something more systemic going on: The American university may be assuming a strange new role. Ross argues that the "interlocking directorates" of power theorized by C. Wright Mills 50 years ago—corporate, governmental, and military interests—is being updated. Universities like NYU, he says, are becoming "players in their own right."

 Up here in Albany, I feel pretty distant from NYU.  That distance lets me say things like that I think the faculty's success may depend in part on the role that student activists and grad employees (not to mention other groups of workers) will play in this developing movement - some have been working with the faculty.  I do not think that even a sizeable minority of NYU's already small minority of tenured teachers and researchers has enough institutional power at this point to beat the administration.  But I'm in Albany, not NYC, and therefore can offer no responsible diagnosis of the extent to which the faculty have secured alliances with other campus workers.  Victories at NYU - both in the form of the no-confidence vote and on the still nebulously demarcated prospect of a new GSOC election - would be a big fucking deal.

Still, though, given the relations of force within the higher education "industry," the discourse of collegiality, of the abrogation of faculty privilege, seems all the more insufficient.  At a moment when universities are selling naming rights to notorious private prison corporations, nostalgia for a past that was never quite as idyllic as its advocates imagine seems particularly unstrategic.  As university administrators increasingly fetishize MOOCs and other phantasms of a precarious present, academic workers need to think more expansively about what we are fighting for and with whom we are fighting.

Either that, or we should just tear everything down and build something else instead.

Probably both.

"Yale is Elitist in Its Basic Design"

Yale is teaming up with the Department of Defense to teach aspiring tortucrats how to interrogate brown people in New Haven.

That YDN op-ed i just linked to is, I think, pretty good about the racial politics of such a move, though in at least one respect I take issue with it.  I am certainly in solidarity with any attempts to obstruct the university's use of working class and poor New Haven residents to further the knowledge/power couplet of the neoliberal security state.  But I think it's important to historicize the longue duree of the university's mutually beneficial relationship with the state to hone such techniques on those very populations, and to recognize that the university has all too often used those communities for its own purposes - that this program is not evidence of the security state corrupting the university's curriculum and social mission, but is instead the latest development in a long and mutually constitutive relationship between the university's governing corporation and local, state, and federal police and military power.  

Writing in 1970, amidst the tumult of the New Haven trials of nine members of the Black Panther Party for the murder of suspected informant Alex Rackley, the authors of "Go to School, Learn to Rule: The Yale Method"  - a collaboration between the American Independent Movement and the Africa Research Group (the former was a dissident New Haven labor-left organization which formed in 1966 around the congressional campaign of a Yale sociology professor named Robert Cook, whose members included local radicals like the Yale grad student Rick Wolff and alumnus turned labor organizer John Wilhelm, and should not be confused with the American Indian Movement) recognized that the university was itself "the vanguard of liberal repression," that it "exercised its power to control and exploit the local community", that it's hospital resembled a "colonial outpost where the doctor is the colonial administrator."  AIM (and ARG) traced the university's "constant policy of abusing and exploiting the New Haven community" through the university's relationship with and role in the city's powerful urban renewal machine, which displaced thousands of New Haven residents during the 1950s and 1960s.  

The pamphlet is important for my research for the ways it links an analysis of the university's labor politics to its imperial spatial practices within and beyond New Haven, themes which have recurred throughout the long and often bitter labor struggles between the university and diverse groups of its employees between the 1930s and the present.  But I bring it up here for its analysis of the university's relationship to and interest in what it described as the machinery of state repression.  In the late 1960s, Yale was already training the New Haven Police Department in its interactions with the city's growing Puerto Rican population which had been at the center of the city's riots in the summer of 1967.  How far this went beyond the instruction of rudimentary cop-Spanish I don't know - not much, I imagine.  But by 1970 the university's relationships with the Department of Defense and its Social Science Research Center had eclipsed its collaboration with the NHPD for most New Haveners.  For the authors of "Go To School: Learn To Rule", the university's Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) represented the "right of the university to train officers for an army whose main function is to suppress wars of national liberation, ghetto riots, strikes, and other interruptions of the smooth running of the capitalist order."  The university's ROTC program, which was recently restored after having been driven off campus by student militants in the 1970s, was, the pamphlet's authors were careful to note "not an alien intruder at Yale," but rather, "in a Yale which is run like a corporation by a corporation for the corporations," it was "only natural for it to train the defenders of these corporations."  Thus, noted GTSLTR, "the movement to abolish ROTC was not a movement to purify an otherwise unsullied temple of learning, it was, instead, a direct blow to American Capitalism."

The relevance of this critique to the present moment is pretty straightforward.  The same is the case, I argue, with the conflicts over the creation of the university's Institute of Social Sciences, which was a target not only for radicals like AIM and the city's Panthers, but also for more institutionally acceptable segments of the city's political spectrum.  For its AIM critics, the ISS was, like ROTC, counterinsurgency, "an attempt to reinforce the organizations and institutions of a repressive capitalist society precisely at the points where they are weakest."  The institute represented a colonial model of expropriating knowledge from, and producing technocratic mastery over, the people who lived in Yale's shadow, a population which was, throughout the 1960s, becoming both poorer and more disproportionately racialized.  (As New Haven's industrial decline continued throughout the next two decades these trends would only accelerate, as would the relative importance of the university as employer and landlord in the political economy of the city and region.)   

None of these ventures likely involved the deliberate instruction of state agents in interrogation tactics to the extent that this new venture will - though here the 1967 post-riot partnership with the NHPD does seem an appropriate analogue.  But all of them used New Haven as a laboratory and a playground.  All of them understood and appropriated the city and its inhabitants as instruments of and appendages to the will of university administrators.

In their condemnation of the new center, Batraville and Lew write

As a university, Yale purpose’s is to forge a global community of scholars working together to produce, share, debate, question, challenge and reformulate knowledge. Its purpose is not to promote the agenda of the U.S. political elite.

 The authors of "Go To School, Learn To Rule," and the histories of struggle over the relationship between Yale and New Haven from which that document emerges, offer us the profound insight that Yale's purpose is and has for quite some time been in part "to promote the agenda of the U.S. political elite."  I don't even think that the university's current President would substantially disagree with that claim.  My purpose is not to scold Yale activists for naivete and bourgeois idealism.  I think it makes a great deal of sense to organize against and resist such measures as this new center.  But I think part of that organizing needs to incorporate a recognition of the long history of the university's imperial relationship to its workers (today's the 21st anniversary of one of the university's many strikes) and neighbors, its entanglements in human terrain mapping avant-la-lettre, and the long complicity of its academic departments in imperial and intelligence projects such as CIA recruitment and Cold War exceptionalism.  (For this last point, see also Michael Holzman, "The Ideological Origins of American Studies at Yale," American Studies 40:2 Summer 1999.)

PS: Oh, BTW, the very name of this blog originates in Yale President Richard Levin's role on the Bush administration's sham of a WMD inquiry following the invasion of Iraq. As noted, Yale's purposes have been aligned with US empire for a long time.

PPS: I hope this doesn't come across as too critical of Batraville and Lew in a dickish and academic sense.  I don't know them but I support their work.  Here's a link to the petition they and others are circulating.

Some meandering and undertheorized thoughts about birds, gender, race, and class

I've been thinking lately a great deal about the politics of gender and expertise in online birdwatching exchanges. I've approached these questions from position which is immanent to them, that is I understand myself to be a birdwatcher - however much a novice I am to many of the imperatives of that practice. So I don't presume any particular expertise, but I also implicate myself, to some extent, in the logics I am critiquing.

Although sometimes a solitary activity, birdwatching is also a deeply social one, and its sociality - or at least the immediacy of its sociality, appear to have been changed significantly by internet-age communication technology, although i'm a bit skeptical of the facile technological determinism such a claim would imply. Contemporary birdwatchers make exhaustive use of email lists to notify each other of rare and unusual sightings. On Facebook groups, they discuss (and dispute) bird identification, spread news of sightings, discuss trends, mobilize for purposes of wildlife conservation, habitat protection, and socialize. In future posts, perhaps I'll get into the major critiques of conservation of wildlife and habitat as a distinctly conservative and indeed, some argue, racist and classist form of activism. Here, I'm more interested in thinking about the ways in which mechanisms of expertise and knowledge operate through an often gendered lens.

Birdsplaining, to steal a mode of neologizing from a well-read Rebecca Solnit piece, is ubiquitous. (Bird-related mansplaining might be a more accurate transmutation, but it doesn't roll off the tongue quite so easily.). Birdwatchers are, that is, constantly explaining things to each other in a variety of formats and fora, constantly evaluating and assessing each other's knowledge almost as often as they assess and evaluate the identification of particularly tricky species of birds. Although birdwatching depends heavily on an ethos of charity and mutual aid, an ethos motivated in no small part by anxieties over the social reproduction of the hobby and/as an environmentalist practice with an instrumental relationship to the preservation of the environment, and although most birdwatchers I've met have been deeply generous with their time, their car seats, and their knowledge, it is also a sphere in which anxieties over elitism, distinction, access, and propriety are omnipresent. Well-rehearsed debates concern alleged differences between the field habits of birdwatchers and of bird photographers, the ethics of playing recordings in the field, of reporting owl sightings or baiting owls with live mice (generally understood to be a big no-no), and the sanctity of private property, whose observation is less an objectivist fetish of individual ownership than it is an anxiety over continued access to rare birds in non-public places. There are guardians of these practices, collectively designated ones and self-designated ones, just as there are people who are collectively celebrated as experts, as authorities, as gurus, and people who understand themselves as such and wish to be recognized as such.

On state email lists like Massbird, posters run the gamut from people who rarely birdwatch beyond their backyard to world travelers and renowned naturalists like David Sibley, principal author and illustrator of the celebrated line of field guides. There are dedicated birders of all ages, college students and twentysomethings and pensioners, proletarians and hedge fund managers. You can birdwatch with a pair of sixty dollar nikons and do it pretty well, or you can buy $2500 Swarovski Optik Swarovisions, spend another three thousand on a spotting scope and eyepiece, and twenty five thousand on a DSLR and lenses. You can burn through gas tanks and plane tickets chasing rarities or confine yourself to wherever public transportation will take you. Some of the gradients of power are premised on experience - how many birds has a birdwatcher (or birder, a distinction I will get to in a bit) seen? How many years has she been birding? How familiar is s/he with the birds of a given area, their locations, habitats, behavior, movements? Other gradients may be similarly rooted in experience but also dependent on forms of knowledge obtained through more traditional means which depend on access to forms of Bourdieuean cultural and academic capital: knowledge of ornithological terminology and controversies, writing style, grammar, spelling, and punctuation in posts to email lists and Facebook groups; ability to explain the identification of difficult species to others; ability to identify and name subspecies - which most field guides don't explain, and so forth.

I feel that I should again note the tremendous generosity that birdwatchers often show each other. In the year or so that I've been regularly birdwatching, I've been the recipient of such generosity on many occasions. A half dozen or so people picked me up during my long walks through the Parker River national wildlife refuge, offered me rides to the train station, and sometimes helped me find birds. In Central Park, a spring migration "hotspot", several very experienced birders helped me find several dozen species i'd never seen before. So birders help each other. They help each other break their own big year records, they help novices to see and identify new species, they share knowledge, time, automobiles, optics, and advice. During the year that I lived in Massachusetts, when I first encountered many of the social aspects of the birdwatching community, I wondered about the racial limits of the incredible generosity folks were showing me. Had I been a young African American man walking along a lonely dirt road adjoining a swamp, I'm sure I would have had a more difficult time getting rides, from the almost universally white motorists who drive the six mile stretch between Sandy Hook State Park and the PRNWR visitors' center, in winter one of the best places on the east coast to see Snowy Owls (don't get me started, though, on the fetish of the white bird, a fetish I think is less the product of birdwatchers than of a more generalized racial nomos.) Not all of the birders I have met are white. The NYC birding scene has a lot of East Asians, and a very small number of Latinos, South Asians, and African Americans. But, despite the widespread commodification of birdwatching as part of the broader expansion of ecotourism globally and within the US, to birdwatch is often to make use of public and private spaces in ways which non-birdwatchers may at first find suspect - parked cars along the sides of roads in rural residential or agricultural areas alight suspicions that racialized bodies may be less able to defray than might white men and women, and access is not the only problem. During the summer after my first year of college I had a low-paying job netting and banding birds on Northern Arizona's Mogillon rim. It tempered my enthusiasm for birdwatching for a while, in part because I didn't know what I was doing, and in part because of what I read as problematic racial dynamics between a few of the white deputy project leaders and some researchers and volunteers from Colombia, Peru, and Argentina. I've noticed similar logics in things I've heard white birders say since I found my way back, ten years later. In a world where "race" is still, for some, a synonym for "subspecies" and a long-tailed duck remains an "oldsquaw", birding can at times become a distinctly if unintentionally racial project, linking discursive whiteness to the North American wild, positing a chthonic spiritual connection to the natural world in spaces that are always already mediated not only by human labor (one of the great insights of Jeffrey Kimball's film Birders: The Central Park Effect) but also by the traces and continuing presence of colonial appropriation and racial genocide. I think about this a lot in relation to places like the Lower Rio Grande National Wildlife Refuge, on the U.S.-Mexico border, where birdwatchers have struggled with jingoists and the federal government over the impact of border militarization, yes, but which stands too as monument to the ways in which the state values migratory birds far more than migratory people on land carved from the country from which many of the refuge's treasured avian vagrants and many (human) migrants originate during a mid-eighteenth century war of conquest for the expansion of the slave power in North America.

Class distinctions matter too, determine, to some extent, auto- and other forms of mobility, and in multiple senses, what it is that birders see when they see birds.there is a gulf between the $50 pair of Bushnells and the far more expensive Carl Zeiss HD binoculars that come with names like victory and conquest which make clear the connections between the birder gear market and hunting, manhood, "the two fisted birder" against the feminized and ridiculed figure of the birdwatcher, a name some are actively trying to reappropriate) and, (maybe this is a stretch) the neocolonial logics which make possible and undergird ecotourism's geography of difference, its relation to what Anibal Quijano has termed "the coloniality of power."

But I said I was going to talk about gender - itself a problematic proposal for birdwatching, where gender is so often presumed to be a biological fact that can be recognized by plumage, brood patches, and in-hand measurement. Female raptors and falcons and owls, after all, are always much larger than males of their species. Gender is often treated, at least for birds, for the ornithological gaze, as something that can be empirically known and mapped on to particular bodies through a correct alchemy of observation and, if necessary, manipulation. But bird gender is more metaphor than anything else, a metaphor for all the stories we tell each other about human gender. In so many of the ways naturalists discuss avian mating behavior and reproduction, they construct a representation of bird domesticity, of the nest as a humorously atavistic mirror of the nuclear family. The male brings home the bacon (or bugs, squirrels, fish, pigeons, nuts, seeds, etc) while the female incubates and protects the homebound offspring. The transposition of the narrative tropes of the bourgeois nuclear family as framing mechanism for bird reproduction seems to me an even stronger indication of the social construction of avian gender than the extant examples of "reversal" (e.g., phalaropes, in which the "male" raises the young after the more colorful "female" does a dance to "attract" "him" or transgression - The periodic stories of "gay" zoo penguins, which insert their subjects into a deeply homonormative recapitulation of said bourgeois domesticity.* To talk about gender in birding milieus is to talk about people, people who engage in spectacular macho bullying like the anonymous individual who emailed a member of the Massbird list a couple weeks ago to accuse her of being a phony and in the lower echelons of the Massachusetts birder hierarchy; people whose gendered entitlement to confirmation of their own expertise goes undiagnosed and uncontested, people who post exasperated grandiose self-aggrandizing comments on Facebook pages and email listserves; people who attempt to represent and practice birdwatching as exercise in mastery/masculinity and therefore as an exercise in commodity fetishism, the bird as a "tick" on a list.

I don't want to essentialize a gender binary where one is fluid and permeable. But there is something interesting about the anxieties which surround birdwatching's apparent passivity, it's closeness to but not conquering of, and therefore it's deeply feminized -in an admittedly essentialist characterization of femininity- relationship to nature, one which both renders women birders somewhat invisible except as a testament to American Exceptionalism (i.e. in conversations about how historically male "twitching" is in the UK) and devalues the labor they perform which sustains birders' organizations and bird populations (keeping and watching feeders, for instance.). These gendered conflicts limn -and police- the boundaries between citizen science and hobby, academic ornithology and Internet nerd trollwar. I suspect that I am not the first to have written on this subject. I will likely have more to say on the subject later.



*The queer theorist and historian Lisa Duggan defines homonormativity as "a politics which does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions but upholds and sustains them while promising the possibility of a demobilized gay constituency and a privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption."

Subprime Student Debt

Some 33% of the U.S.' student debt, explains this Wall Street Journal article about a new TransUnion report, is now held by people whom the rating agencies classify as subprime borrowers.  This is debt that may never be repaid.  A third of subprime student debt - one ninth of the U.S. total student debt, was 90 days or more past due in March of last year, the article notes, a nine percent increase from a 2007 figure.  Student debt, a ubiquity across much of the  U.S. student and professional population, is only likely to continue to grow as the gap between the rising cost of tuition and declining real wages expands.

Why are TransUnion, Fitch, and Moody's interested in, and rating, student debt?  Because of the market in Student Loan Asset-Backed Securities, (SLABS,) the trade in securitized student debt.  The prospect of a market failure akin to the one spurred by the collapse of the subprime housing debt market five years ago has led many to invoke the specter of another bubble.  But, as Malcolm Harris has argued, perceptively, student debt, as one of a very few types of debt from which their can be no legal release, is, like court-imposed criminal penalties and child support, in something of a class of its own.  As Harris notes:

Besides, no interested party cares if student debtors pay up soon; they will have to someday, and the longer it takes them, the more interest accrues, the bigger the haul. In the meantime, markets and investors are empowered to just pretend the money is there anyway.

Thus, the metaphor of the bubble is problematic.  Harris suggests that this subprime will yield no burst, but instead will slowly "fill with value from the bottom," in the form of commdified labor extorted from borrowers by a mixture of state and non-state forms of coercion.  "Assuming current rates of repayment and issuance," Harris concludes, "the $1 trillion outstanding total will double within a decade. And short of suicide, expatriation, or revolt, there’s not much 37 million American student debtors and counting can do about it."

If there's good news, it's that the beginnings of that revolt may be underway.  In the last few years organizations like the Edu-factory collective, the Occupy Student Debt Campaign, and now Strike Debt (which has a meeting this comming Sunday from 2-4 PM at Judson Memorial Church in Manhattan) have staked out the lines of an incipient debtor revolt.  How this revolt develops, and what other forms it generates are, as always, up to us to determine.

Is This What Democracy Looks Like?

None of you know this, but there are several unpublsihed draft posts for this blog i never finished.  I have been otherwise ignoring it though, I admit.  But I've been doing some other writing elsewhere, cranking out a dissertation chapter draft, co-writing an essay for an edited volume (more on that in a future post,) and writing an essay on occupation and student struggles for this e-book dossier on the Occupy movement edited by Rana Jaleel, A.J. Bauer, Cristina Beltran, and Andrew Ross and published in cooperation with the Social Text collective.  Many other friends and comrades contributed to the volume, and I urge anyone still aware of this blog's existence to check it out.