At the beginning of every grad seminar, I suggest a few reading strategies for the social sciences:

Before picking up a text, learn something about the author & where this piece fits into their broader body of work to get a sense of key stakes, themes, & trajectories [1/9]

https://twitter.com/elisarapadas/status/1307896810955067393

Study the placement of a reading on the syllabus to get a sense of the overarching topics & concepts for the week, as well as those that precede and follow it—this can help you to *bring questions to the reading* [2/9]

A reminder for junior scholars: When engaging with media about your work, consider answering the questions you want to be asked regardless of what you’re actually asked—a central part of scholarly expertise is the ability to reframe a dialogue [1/5] Lately I’ve been asked by multiple media outlets to identify & discuss words whose etymologies are linked to histories of racism—instead of answering this question, I ask why we’re inclined to locate racism in words, & what (infinite) aspects of racism we ignore by doing so [2/5]

The notion that critical race theory is a radical left philosophy is particularly interesting—in many ways critical race theory is actually quite pragmatic, which reflects the attempted foreclosure of radical political alternatives...a thread newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/a… For some reason “white majority” would sound so much better as “white supremacist majority,” since whiteness is an inherently violent concept predicated on the disposability, domination, & dispossession of those it targets

When decolonial perspectives ground your research, they completely transform questions, methods, analyses, modes of representation, proposed interventions, and political commitments. A thread... Decolonial perspectives transform research questions by centering longstanding power relations in analyses of contemporary challenges, including racial inequity, poverty, labor exploitation, misogyny, heteronormativity, transphobia, trauma, migration, & ecological instability.

Sorry to Bother You is a raciolinguistic tour de force. A thread... Sorry to Bother You is one of the only films I’ve seen that frames codeswitching as an ideological and not merely linguistic practice—that is, “talking white” isn’t simply about talking like white people, it’s talking like white people imagine themselves to talk.