Some immigrants have gone a week without showers. Others sleep on bare floors. Medications have gone unprovided. As detentions have soared, former detainees, lawyers, family members and lawmakers tell us conditions in facilities across the country have become intolerable.

please stop using AI

CFP: Farmers and Rural Lifeworlds in Current Narratives and Discourse, Bolzano, Italy, 4-5 Dec 2025 networks.h-net.org/group/announ...

fun fact three fighter jets is roughly equivalent to the NEA’s 2024 budget

Rethinking the Impossible Times: Lessons from a Life in the Soviet Union (Marina Levina)

Authoritarian Discourse in Central and Eastern Europe: Language Ideology and Possibilities of Mobility (David Boromisza-Habashi); An Extractive Peace: Negotiating the Value of Land in Wartime Ukraine (Zenia Kish);

Hosted online by the National Communication Association from 3:00-4:30pm EST, register at above link. Program: Br/Others in Arms: Profitable Patriotism, Weaponized Peace, & Russia’s War in Ukraine (Julia Khrebtan-Hörhager);

📢TOMORROW: Understanding Authoritarianism: Lessons from Ukraine and Europe online panel with Marina Levina, Julia Khrebtan-Hörhager, David Boromisza-Habashi and me exploring how communication studies can contribute to countering authoritarian rhetorics and fictions
www.natcom.org/zoom-meeting...

Global research and practitioner experts will present on transnational environmental crime, organized crime and environmental crime convergences, ecoviolence and people, species justice, poaching, trafficking, and environmental crime journalism. See speakers here: cecrninfo.wordpress.com/events/

Upcoming: Canadian Environmental Crime Symposium at Ontario Tech U to launch the new Canadian Environmental Crime Research Network May 8 & 9 in person and online. Register at link.

Featured speakers: @Julia Khrebtan-Hörhager, David Boromisza-Habashi, Zenia Kish & Marina Levina. Register here: www.natcom.org/zoom-meeting...

This panel will feature Ukr, Euro, N Amer, and Russ scholars who will analyze how rhetorics of land, peace, & identity have been weaponized by Russia against Ukraine; translated into larger Euro geopolitical contexts, & strategically adopted to organize the authoritarian thought in the US

*Upcoming Event* Understanding Authoritarianism: Lessons from Ukraine and Europe hosted by the National Communication Association, 23 Apr. 3-4:30pm EST. Learn from comm scholars about how culture & communication connect rising authoritarianism in Europe & the US. Free Registration; please share!

This is very, very, very bad

In the Bay Area, pedestrian cross-walk signal voices were hacked to imitate Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, and not in a good way. Here’s a sample in Redwood City:

This month's roundup shares scholarship by @emilyreisman.bsky.social, @landstuff.bsky.social, @zeniakish.bsky.social on agrarian platform capitalism, news and commentary on recent rural-related happenings, a map of news access across the state of Nebraska, and more!

"The Ethiopia lawsuit is one of the only measures of accountability Meta currently faces in the Global South for how its platform has been weaponized by military and paramilitary groups to destabilize nations and target ethnic minorities."

Columbia gives Trump basically all he asks for, fires their president when it seems she may not comply fast enough, and then still gets all its remaining funding frozen.

These demands are not good-faith demands about antisemitism. They are efforts to break universities.

Upcoming event with some stellar communication colleagues organized by the fantastic Marina Levina. More details coming soon! Online and open to all.

This is a very clear explainer of the structure of university Boards for those outside academia. This is who is bowing to the Trump administration.

That facial recognition system at Madison Square Garden sure has been REALLY great for proving that all the worst predictions and fears us researchers have had about facial recognition were accurate and valid:
www.theverge.com/news/637228/...

New Rubio order (leaked to me) directs the State Department to spy on student visa holders and applicants social media for "a hostile attitude toward U.S. citizens or U.S. culture (including government, institutions, or founding principles).”

www.kenklippenstein.com/p/exclusive-...

Three Ways to Support Detained Farmworker Organizer Alfredo “Lelo” Juarez: labornotes.org/blogs/2025/0...

👇🎯 The public isn't going to understand this, unless the presidents of R1 universities around the country <loudly> & <collectively> get out into the public square & start explaining this & calling out the existential threat to the entire 🇺🇸 university system. The silence is deafening right now.