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Showing posts from January, 2021

White supremacy, the Trump moment, and the complicity of the political class: Anti-racist interrogations

The expression of White supremacy in the U.S. capitol is not an exception. It exists in continuity with the everyday work of the machinery of White supremacy. The White supremacist terrorist attack on the U.S. Capitol is reflective of a larger infrastructure of White supremacy. It is in many ways both a mirror and a culmination of the ongoing work of powerful political and economic interests invested in keeping White supremacy alive and in perpetuating it.  This infrastructure of White supremacy has been held up by the political class, enabled by it, and reproduced by it.  It has been funded by the capitalist class, finding support in powerful economic forces.  White supremacist messages have been and continue to be circulated in the mainstream media. Digital infrastructures of White supremacy are funded by powerful economic interests.  In other words, the political class is complicit in the perpetuation of White supremacy, funded by powerful economic forces.  I...

Thoughts on solidarity and supporting student activists to #EndSexualHarassment

  A corrupt university system with administrators that are deeply complicit in perpetuating a culture of sexual harassment and faculty predatory behaviour surveils, hounds and punishes student activists for bringing the sexual harassment to light and for speaking up against sexual harassment. For all its PR speak about remedies, it is this truth that we must hold close, and continue to agitate to dismantle the culture of sexual harassment. We must also organize to protect those, especially student activists, whose bodies are on the line. A corrupt system that is deeply complicit in perpetuating sexual harassment blames me, the CCA, and CARE for teaching students to organise on sexual harassment. It gives us and the CCA too much credit. And most importantly, deeply complicit in technocratic authoritarianism, it fails to see the agentic capacity of students. It is the role of Ministry of Education and the Minister of Education specifically to protect student activists that bring sexu...

COVID-19, Contact Tracing, and Population Health: Surveillance and Authoritarian Power

On January 4, 2021, Singapore's Minister of State for Home Affairs Desmond Tan told parliament that the contact tracing programme TraceTogether introduced by the state in June 2020 as a technology for COVID prevention and management can also be used "for the purpose of criminal investigation."   The TraceTogether programme is rhetorically constructed as a voluntary programme that uses either a smartphone app or a bluetooth token to track locations that users check into as well as monitor who an user has been in contact with. During and since its launch in June, 2020, the programme has been celebrated as an exemplar of technology-enabled COVID-19 prevention and management, having been projected by the World Health Organisation (WHO) as an exemplar of effective COVID-19 response. As with various facets of Singapore's technocratic management projected as models, the "Singapore model" of COVID-19 management held up the TraceTogether programme as an organizing f...