In Science for the People, Max Ajl explores the life and work of Tunisian agronomist Slaheddine el-Amami, who, “more than almost any other postcolonial theorist of development…perceived that technological sovereignty and national liberation” must proceed hand-in-hand. Inverting the “European canon” of decolonization, where the “agrarian question” emerged as tertiary to the questions of politics and […]

The New Inquiry recently republished a translation by Sophie Lewis, of a groundbreaking 2016 essay by German feminist and communist Bini Adamczack, on “circlusion”—or, the opposite of “penetration”—a playful neologism that flips the script on the ways we speak about, and experience, sex and power. Lewis’s English version achieved the status of cult classic, as […]

Writing for Mad in America, Jenny Logan implicates canonical literary representations of madness as darkness—“a black hole,” “an enveloping darkness”—as a complicating factor in poor health outcomes for Black women. Pointing to forgotten, or suppressed, or critically fabulated narratives of psychic distress written by Black women, from Marita Bonner to Saidiya Hartman, Logan argues that […]

In London Review of Books’ recent symposium on the overturning of Roe v. Wade, “Prejudice Rules,” Sophie Lewis zeroes in on the pernicious and monetizable effects of expanded criminal punishment for abortion seekers. The ostensibly life-affirming aim, she notes, of putting an end to abortion is hardly credulous from the historical point of view—“You can’t […]

Writing for Mad in America, Jenny Logan reviews an essay by activist and survivor-researcher Indigo Daya, in which Daya examines how human rights violations are built into standard psychiatric care around the world. But these violations may not be immediately recognizable as such, Logan writes, describing how a patient’s personal narrative or sense of knowing […]

BISR faculty Geo Maher recently sat down with Doug Henwood of the Behind the News podcast to talk about the state of policing in the US since the summer of 2020. He notes what he terms an “open counter-insurgency” on the part of police (and police unions) in response to the defund-and-abolish movement—one that takes […]

Writing in the Introduction to a new, and timely, anthology of essays on abortion access and reproductive justice from Verso and Lux magazine, We Organize to Change Everything, BISR faulty Jessie Kindig reminds readers that “an attack on abortion is never just about abortion.” The anthology—released this month as the Supreme Court issued its devastating […]

Writing in The Nation, BISR faculty RH Lossin heaps praise on Deborah Shaffer and Stewart Bird’s 1979 documentary film Wobblies, recently re-released by Kino Lorber, calling it “an important correction to the conventional wisdom that the IWW was a failure—as well as a reminder that its successes were the result of its willingness to take […]

Writing in Salvage magazine, BISR faculty Sophie Lewis characterizes the American right’s sustained and increasingly successful attacks on reproductive freedom and its regime of forced care more generally as “class war,” against which the democratic party’s faith in legislation and the discursive frames of “privacy” and “choice” are woefully, even lethally, insufficient: “The so-called pro-life […]