Hi! This blog has been online for nineteen years and I am not running out of things to say. However, I find myself writing and working across different venues in 2026, mostly because I’ve found that embedding data visualizations and deeper citations works better on my separate research and teaching website with the tools available with Quarto. You might want to check out:
1933: It was celebrated as a great achievement in the practice of anthropology. It was organized alongside the other organizational cornerstones of Paris’ Museum of Man (Musée de l’Homme) and under the sponsorship of the museum’s leading figures. It brought to Paris over 3,500 objects of African traditional art and religion. And in so doing, it was celebrated in one of the two premiere issues of the surrealist magazine Minotaure, making it part of the closest approach between high art and ethnography. It fed into the galleries of the Museum of Ethnography at the Trocadero, and soon its successor on the same site, the Museum of Man.
Organized by the Institute of Ethnology at the University of Paris and the National Museum of Natural History, and established by the law of March 3, 1931, passed unanimously by the French [Parliamentary] Chambers, the Dakar-Djibouti Ethnographic and Linguistic Mission received, in addition to grants from numerous private individuals, the active patronage of twenty-three official institutions or organizations recognized as being of public utility, including three French ministries, the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, the University of Paris, the Museum of Ethnography, the National Library, the School of Oriental Languages, etc. In addition, the Rockefeller Foundation awarded the head of the mission a substantial grant, in addition to the regular fellowships.
Having departed from Paris on May 10, 1931, the Dakar-Djibouti Mission arrived in Dakar on May 31. From June 12, 1931, to February 7, 1933—the date on which it embarked in Djibouti to return to France—it traveled through French West Africa, Nigeria, Cameroon, French Equatorial Africa, the Belgian Congo, Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, Abyssinia, Eritrea, and the French Somali Coast. Throughout its travels—which it undertook by train, automobile, boat, and caravan—the mission conducted surveys and assembled collections.
And yet in 2025, the Dakar–Djibouti Mission could not be remembered as a simple landmark of French anthropological history, not without a new investigation that put its organizers and participants under the microscope. The Quai Branly Museum, which has taken charge of the vast religious and art collections of Musée de l’Homme, hosted a new exhibit, Mission Dakar-Djibouti (1931-1933): Contre-enquêtes (Mission Dakar-Djibouti (1931-1933): Counter-Investigations). The exhibit was co-curated by six scholars from Africa—at the Museum of Black Civilisations, Senegal; National Museum of Cameroon; National Museum of Mali; University of Gondar, Ethiopia; and University of Abomey-Calavi, Benin—and two from France (official announcement; English visitor’s guide).
And that results of that investigation are frankly devastating.
We write to you from a place of deep solidarity, our hearts heavy with the knowledge of the struggle you face within Iran’s prisons: the torture, the systematic neglect, the enforced silence, and the brutal reality of sham trials and executions. As former and current political prisoners, activists, and scholars committed to the global project of abolition, anti-authoritarianism and anti-imperialism, we see you across the distances of geography and the silence of censorship and internet blackouts. And we stand in solidarity with you, as you are at the intersection of two sources of oppression. […] Your struggle is as global as our collective dreams of freedom and dignity. We stand with you, and we reject the false binary of imperialism and hollow anti-imperialism. We invite global civil society and anti-imperialist activists and organizations to extend their unconditional support and solidarity to all incarcerated kin fighting for our collective liberation, to build relationships with Iranian political prisoners and uplift their voices, to put pressure on the Islamic Republic by challenging its narrative, and to call upon that government to immediately stop all the executions and free all political prisoners.
The Iranian authorities must stop their inhumane practice of death and incarceration now. And the US and Israel must end their barbaric wars and brutal sanctions that knowingly devastate our communities.
The writers take a metaphor from Siamak Namazi, an Iranian American who spent eight years in the country’s notorious Evin prison: ““What I hear from prisoners and my friends there is that they feel stuck between the two blades of a scissors, the evil regime that imprisons and tortures them and a foreign force dropping bombs on their heads in the name of freedom,” he told journalists in 2025, shortly after Israel bombed that prison, killing 80 guards, prisoners, and civilians.
Predictably, there has been a rejoinder to this letter from within the left. Vijay Prashad has risen to say that anti-imperialist solidarity with Iran’s military resistance the the US–Israeli war isn’t hollow at all. Prashad seems to miss that the letter wasn’t directed at any government, but from outsiders of one society to another, and he alleges that the writers’ metaphor is wrong: the scissors’ “blades are unequal” and “the image makes the aggressor and the attacked appear as parallel sources of the same danger.”
Prashad’s argument is not just worn out — from being repeated so many times in so many different contexts. It builds on a shocking refusal of memory. Counting only the most recent uprising, in late 2025 and early 2026, the blades of violence from without the country and from the Islamic Republic security force are similarly deadly.
The glaring and tragic reality is that by the one measure that matters the most, human lives lost, the repression of the past year’s protests was as destructive as the external war. The Iranian government’s own figure of deaths in the protests, 3,117, is scarcely smaller than its count of the deaths from two rounds of war: 3,528. Human rights monitors and medical source have reported figures up to ten times as high in the repression. The blade cutting Iran from within is certainly no less sharp than the missiles and bombs sent by the United States.
While not the only place it can start, deep solidarity can begin by treating each life and each death as worth just as much as ours.
Photos: Left: mourner sits next to the grave of slain protester Ali in Tehran (Guardian gallery) / Right: mourners crouch atop grave of slain schoolchild, Minab (Andolu Agency gallery).
… is the subject of this short interview segment I did at WikiConference North America 2025. The interview was with the team creating Rabbbit Hole, a documentary on Wikipedia currently in the final stages of production. But it’s also an introduction of how creating knowledge on open platforms can be part of a your research trajectory.
Twenty-six other Wikipedians who were interviewed at WCNA are featured here.
I’m going to be writing a lot more about AI, among other things.
In part this is because a nearly unfathomable investment is being made into this technology,. Huundreds of billions of dollars being poured into a very particular set of tools, based on the idea that AI represents a thing of essentially infinite value: harnessable intelligence.
This itself is a bit of a strange proposition since there are eight billion humans on our planet, intelligent creatures with minds well-suited to a wide variety of forms of intellectual, creative, and artistic work. Even if one imagines that we could create an electronic appliance that thinks as well as a human (and I’m deeply skeptical of this, but that’s a different post), there isn’t a clear case for swapping out a human and swapping in a machine intelligence.
(A fair amount of this fantasy rests on the idea that machine intelligence will be “better” than human intelligence at accomplishing everyday tasks. There’s no reason to assume this is true.)
Maybe we should take some time to think about the story of mechanical “superiority” here: It has been true since at least the invention of wallpaper that a mechanical process of reproduction of visual art is a faster and cheaper way to put artistic decoration on a wall. Wallpaper printing is, in my experience, a pretty good analogy for AI text and image creation: it is only possible for factories that have ingested existing designs to create wallpaper images. They are mechanically produced. They can be subtly redesigned. They are repetitive but spew out in vast quantities. They enable many people to benefit from the work of a single artist, or allow mediocre approximations of art to take up vastly more wall space than was possible before that technology. But ultimately, wallpaper printing factories are not a replacement for visual artists. At their best, they are a tool for visual artists to multiply their impact, and at their worst, their mediocre products crowd out space for pleasing art.
Art endures. But perhaps fewer of us engage in it because we can so readily put the art of others on our walls.
But even that is a choice that each of us can readily reverse in a heart beat. I’m sitting in a room where most of the visuals within in my line of sight—a painting by a friend of my sister’s from a half century ago, a weaving of a landscape from Sorata Bolivia, a square canvas with the words HOME SWEET HOME sketched out in pencil, two of my father’s paintings made in his eighties—were crafted by hand, and a handful of others are prints. But among them sit four dozen books, each filled with tiny reprints of visual art from the Egyptian pyramids to revolutionary poster makers to early twentieth century animators to Afro-Futurists.
The technology of mechanical reproduction did not end the age of art.
Each book on my living room shelf is a cabinet of curiosities, but that doesn’t remove any of the awe from my children or myself visiting an actual museum or artist studio.
Likewise, the technology of text synthesis will not end of age of human thinking.
Without a doubt, the most horrifying event of the first day of the new US–Israeli war on Iran was the air strike on a girls’ primary school in Minab (Wikipedia), in the southwestern province of Hormozgan. Video from the town show scores of adults, many of them screaming, outside the school, as smoke billows from the building.
This morning, I asked Google Gemini (version 3, in Thinking mode) to help research details on the strike and its possible motivation.. What began as my attempt to extract further details from foreign language sources soon ended with Gemini’s lurid story of a school-destroying missile blowout and of long-smoking deep impact craters from underground missile installations. (All presented in short outline form, of course.) My efforts to direct its research towards specific types of sources were unsuccessful and actual sources for steps along the chain were often left out.
My final request was for links documenting its hallucinated conclusions from satellite imagery. Gemini offered (nonfunctional or misleading) links to prestigious Western news sources — AP, New York Times, Reuters — that either did not show satellite photos of Minab or were entirely fabricated. By the time it was done, Gemini was fabricating the false claims that: “The NYT ‘Visual Investigations‘ unit … specifically highlights the proximity of the Shajareh Tayyebeh school to the IRGC tunnel entrances” and that “The AP were among the first to publish the “before and after” comparisons of the Hormozgan sector.”
Details of the chatbot connversation after the jump…
I really enjoyed being a part of this panel, hosted and organized by Wiki Education.
Wikipedia at 25: Authority, Legitimacy, and the Future of Knowledge
Wednesday, January 14, 2026 9 am Pacific / 12 pm Eastern
Twenty-five years ago, Wikipedia launched with the ambitious idea that knowledge could be created collaboratively and shared freely with the world. Just a quarter century later, the online encyclopedia has become a foundational part of the global information landscape, drawing billions of page views each month and impacting how people learn and make real-world decisions. But what have we learned about its role in our knowledge ecosystem — and what comes next?
Panelists will explore Wikipedia’s growth, evolution, and relationship to traditional knowledge institutions like universities, libraries, archives, and museums. Together they’ll consider questions of authority and legitimacy: How has Wikipedia challenged and complemented historic models of knowledge production? What responsibilities come with its incredible reach and power to shape public opinion? And how might the next 25 years reshape who creates knowledge, how it is validated, and who it serves?
Panelists:
Phoebe Ayers, Librarian, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Carwil Bjork-James, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Vanderbilt University
Ryan McGrady, Senior Research Fellow, Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Steven Mintz, Professor of History, University of Texas at Austin
This edition of the Wiki Education Speaker Series will be moderated by LiAnna Davis, Wiki Education’s Chief Programs Officer and Deputy Director.
The event will include a public Q&A. We encourage you to bring your questions and join us in celebrating 25 years of Wikipedia — and looking ahead to what’s next!
If you’ve taken a step back from the endless stream of video-documented destruction in Gaza, something even Israel-aligned political voices have been compelled to describe as “a wall of carnage,” perhaps it is time to re-engage with the political realities of the society that has waged war (at high and lower intensity) on the occupied territories of the Gaza Strip and West Bank for the last twenty-seven months. If so, let me recommend four videos and one podcast episode to catch up with Israeli politics, seventy-thousand violent deaths into the current period.
Israeli human rights groups: “Our Genocide”
In July, the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem issued a report concluding that Israeli policy had taken a decisive turn from a destructive military occupation to “coordinated, deliberate action to destroy Palestinian society in the Gaza Strip.” Checking each of the elements of the crime of genocide, they enumerate actions including:
“an intensive military campaign in the Gaza Strip that includes mass killing, both in direct attacks and through creating catastrophic conditions that increase the massive death toll; serious bodily or mental harm; large-scale destruction of infrastructure and living environments; destruction of the social fabric, including Palestinian educational institutions and cultural sites; mass arrests and abuse of Palestinians in Israeli prisons, which have effectively become torture camps; mass forced displacement, and making the ethnic cleansing of Gaza one of the official war goals; and an assault on Palestinian identity through the deliberate destruction of refugee camps and attempts to undermine the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA)”
B’Tselem was joined by Physicians for Human Rights Israel in denouncing the genocide in Gaza. Their conclusions came after many similar conclusions by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, United Nations human rights experts, and genocide, scholars, but they represent a crucial bridgehead in to Israeli Jewish society. (B’Tselem is a non-sectarian institution that includes Jewish Israelis, Palestinian citizens of Israel, and Palestinians from the Occupied Territories.) Their perspective very much remains a minority position in Israel, where a June 2025 poll found that 87% of the ruling coalition supporters, 67% of moderate voters, and even 30% of supporters of the left-wing opposition all agreed that there are “no innocents” in Gaza. (More recent polling confirms this.) Political supporters of equality between Palestinians and Israelis continue to navigate difficult strategic questions about how to represent themselves and enlarge their numbers.
In Jerusalem and Tel Aviv: Denial of Palestinian suffering
Guardian reporter Matthew Cassel’s three-part series “Along the Green Line” serves to illustrate the hardening line in Israeli society. Partisans of Israeli victory increasingly see the notion of Palestinian territory itself as a thing of the past. The first episode show such Israelis’ point of view including their ambitions to expel Palestinians and replace the Al-Aqsa mosque. Meanwhile Palestinians continue to narrate their historical presence.
In a separate video, Cassel meets with Israelis on the streets of Tel Aviv and asks them about the understanding of the war, in light of the reports of genocide. After meeting with B’Tselem, he finds many Israelis who hold tight to the notion that mass casualties in Gaza are a staged deception, a product of “Gazawood” film-making rather than grim reality. Even at an anti-Netanyahu demonstration, Cassel asks “why there is little mention of the Palestinian victims of this war in Gaza?” and manages to find just one person willing to prioritize Palestinian suffering.
Fifty miles south in the Israeli communities of the so-called ”Gaza envelope” there is little more sympathy for Gazans, but far less denial. A resident of a border town shows Cassel the remaining destruction from the three-day invasion of his town of Kfar Aza by Hamas in October 2023, leading to the deaths of 80 Israelis (including 19 taken hostage and 24 members of the security forces). A resident who leads tours of the wreckage for visiting Israelis speaks frankly about 50,000 Palestinian deaths as a possible recompense for the 1,200 Israelis killed in the attacks, and acceptable measure to deter future Palestinian violence. He narrates the violence as an almost clinical measure: “Clean it out and then bring in something good.” Meanwhile across the Green Line, Malak, a young Gazan woman fears that her journalism could lead to the deaths of her already-displaced family.
The West Bank: “The threshold of despair”
NPR radio show This American Life devoted an August 2025 episode to “The Other Territory,” the West Bank. In its opening it quotes from a plan drawn up by Bezalel Smotrich, now overseer of the occupied territory as Minister of Finance and a defense official. In this document from before his appointment, Smotrich wrote, “The point will come when [Palestinian] frustration will cross the threshold of despair and will lead to acceptance and understanding that their cause stands no chance. It simply isn’t going to happen.” The episode is in essence a chronicle of the forms that despair takes, both outside and inside Israeli prisons. This, of course, continues regardless of the partial ceasefire in Gaza. For those of us whose governments back this process, it is essential listening.
This is Charles McMillian, who begged George Floyd to do anything to survive, and who begged Officer Chauvin to stop killing him. I love this man’s courage, his caring, his ability to put on a suit and hope that his words will matter in the trial of Floyd’s killer in the way they didn’t matter in the moment Floyd’s life hung in the balance, and I love him in his grieving for the helplessness of that situation in public.
It was and remains a crime for him to have lifted a finger; and more importantly to have pushed a cop aside to save George Floyd’s life. It was and remains a crime for the teenager who knew it was wrong and made a video record for the world to take that killing knee off of that dying neck. It was and remains a crime for the bystanders who tried pleas, who tried insults, who tried logical reasoning and public shame to just stop the killing. Had they touched the killer, it would legally have been assault. More importantly, had the killer responded by shooting them, I doubt we would even be having this trial.
It is a wrenching injustice that in May 2020, Charles McMillian was forced to beg George Floyd to try to save his own life. As much as it is a wrenching injustice that George Floyd’s anguished reply was “I can’t.”
This is the danger of investing some people with the power of being the law. And the danger of failing to strip them of that protection when they turn their badge into a license to abuse and kill.
And also, the fact that Chauvin did this in front of our elder, our youth, our children, our cameras all mean something. That he did not relent in his killing act even when George Floyd was dead. He must have needed to show that all their cries would go unheard. And he acted in the tradition of a long line of white men and law men brutalizing one of us in public to terrorize us all.
Americans, citizens and immigrants alike, protested on Saturday, June 14, in exceptional numbers as a wave of No Kings protests became the most widespread public repudiation of the second Donald Trump administration. These protests, which were undoubtedly energized by the standoff between Los Angeles-area communities and Federal troops, could mark a turning point from isolated protests to mass resistance.
Protests are called demonstrations for a reason. And these were displays of political strength for a movement that has a lot to prove: that it better represents the country than a president elected with a slim plurality in November 2020, that it is better able to capture public enthusiasm than an incipient fascist movement, and that it is undeterred by the state violence shown through military deployments, arrests of opposition leaders, and near-disappearances of a growingnumber of immigrants.
So what does success look like for a mass display of public will?
One simple metric is comparative: did a the anti-Trump movement out-organize and out-turnout their opponent. And here, the juxtaposition with Trump’s military parade — a celebration of the US Army’s 250th birthday on Trump’s 79th — will be unforgettable.
But in a larger sense, protesters make a political statement through crowds (and yes, through many other kinds of actions, but June 14 was largely a day for crowds). When they succeed, that message is “indisputable in its overwhelmingness,” as Argentina’s Colectivo Situaciones described the protests that brought down three presidents on December 19 and 20, 2001. Through some alchemy of place, time, presence, voice, and action, crowds constitute themselves into the “The Voice of the People.” And assert that they, and not their government, will decide the future.
I want to use this occasion to share how those of us who study mass protest try to conceptualize just how protests achieve that kind of political impact.
Carwil without Borders 