Steven High

@stevenhigh.bsky.social

1.4K followers 630 following 440 posts

Professor of History at Concordia's Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling. Current Project: Deindustrialization & the Politics of Our Time -- deindustrialization.org . New Book: The Left in Power: Bob Rae's NDP and the Working Class (Feb '25) .. more

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Political science 38%

Sociology 22%

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Reposted by Stephen D. Murphy

Steven High @stevenhigh.bsky.social · 11h

Leaked consultant's report at Queen's University points to a push to massively downsize the humanities and social sciences as well as the eradication of disciplinary based departments. I wouldn't be surprised if my university has the same consultants.
www.queensjournal.ca/leaked-consu...

Leaked consultant document details proposed restructuring at Queen’s - The Queen's Journal

As Queen’s unveiled its Bicentennial Vision for 2041, a leaked consultant document obtained by The Journal outlined specific structural changes on a similar timeline. Announced in the Queen’s Gazette ...

www.queensjournal.ca

Steven High @stevenhigh.bsky.social · 18h

Interesting upcoming event here in Montreal.

Steven High @stevenhigh.bsky.social · 19h

More on Jill McNight's powerful deindustrialization exhibition that originated in her @deindustrialpol.bsky.social artist-in-residency.
jonathanweston.co.uk/Jill-McKnigh...

Jill McKnight: Past and Future Pact — Jonathan Weston

Jill McKnight: Past and Future Pact More Information Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art Saturday 26 July - Saturday 9...

jonathanweston.co.uk

Steven High @stevenhigh.bsky.social · 19h

Great to see the work of former artists in residence Jill McNight and Jennifer Vanderpool in @deindustrialpol.bsky.social ripple outwards.

www.sunderlandculture.org.uk/whats-on/jil...
newsbywire.com/jennifer-van...

Jennifer Vanderpool’s Untold Stories Exhibition Opens at Wentworth Woodhouse

Almost half a century after the decline of South Yorkshire’s steel industry began to reshape the region, a new exhibition at Wentworth Woodhouse explores what the transformation has meant for the peop...

newsbywire.com

Reposted by Steven High, Michael D. McDonald

Dr. Damien P. Williams can't think of a fun display name right n @wolvendamien.bsky.social · 1d

Please read this extremely thoughtful & careful post on Tim Walz, Anne Frank, & the US Holocaust Memorial Museum from Martin Shuster, philosopher, Isaac Swift Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies, former Holocaust Memorial Museum Fellow, & scholar of genocide, the Holocaust, & authoritarianism:

Martin Shuster
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So apparently on Sunday Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, said in a press conference that "we have got children hiding in their houses, afraid to go outside ... many of us grew up reading that story of Anne Frank. Somebody’s gonna write that children’s story about Minnesota.”
Then on Monday--one day before International Holocaust Remembrance Day--the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum tweeted in response that: "Anne Frank was targeted and murdered solely because she was Jewish. Leaders making false equivalencies to her experience for political purposes is never acceptable. Despite tensions in Minneapolis, exploiting the Holocaust is deeply offensive, especially as antisemitism surges."
As someone who spent a year at the Museum as a fellow doing research, I feel embarrassed for the institution. First, it is very clear that Walz wasn't drawing an equivalence, he was drawing an analogy. So this kind of response reminds me of the atrocious positions that the ADL has started to carve out, and why it has become mostly a sycophantic joke, now seemingly mostly geared towards currying favor with MAGA.

Not unrelatedly, I am noticing that a lot of--oftentimes even well-intentioned--people are spending time trying to delineate exactly which historical referent best captures what's going on now, as if we have to pick only one. There is the now well-circulated meme that says: no, ICE isn't the Gestapo, it's actually American--it's slave catchers. But this is a kind of odd distinction: the Nazis were themselves influenced by the Americans (if you're curious read the excellent book by James Whitman, _Hitler's American Model_). Nazis came here and studied American legal systems and statutes ... and remarkably a group of "liberal" Nazis decided that they couldn't make German laws as *extreme* as American ones (and this "liberal" group in fact won the day; German laws weren't as extreme as many of ours). Equally, Nazi jurists and theorists like Carl Schmitt were deeply influenced by American notions of manifest destiny. So the Nazi and American contexts were already fused. The idea of foreign/domestic is already quite complex in this context. (And this is before we even speak of the many actual Nazis that existed here and the many people who materially supported Hitler and the regime).
We can complicate this picture more by noting that Nazism itself, even apart from these American influences, wasn't something that sprouted up out of thin air: it, too, had a(n experimental) history. Many of its barbaric practices and aims were developed and tested on colonial and imperial victims (as I have written elsewhere: there is a direct line from Shark Island concentration camp [called frequently simply "Death Island" where the Germans committed genocide against the Herero and Nama people] to the entire Nazi camp system). Thinkers like Hannah Arendt and Aimé Césaire drew our attention to this already in the middle of the last century.

In noting this, let me be clear that this does not erase or make less relevant the centuries of European antisemitism that fed into the Nazi project. That's the whole point: these are all related phenomena. European antisemitism influenced the way in which European colonialism and imperialism operated against indigenous populations in the Americas. Strikingly, as innovations mounted in "administering" the Americas, antisemitic policies also evolved in Europe. Administrators (oppressors) would sometimes even move from one sphere to the other and back. They were all synergistic (a brilliant examination of some of this is María Elena Martínez's _Genealogical Fictions_). (And one could, btw, also tell an important story about the development of Islamophobia in this very same orbit, since policies stumbled on in the Americas came back to oppress both Jews and Muslims in Europe).
This is all to say: Walz's analogy is not at all far fetched. The history of oppression doesn't move in any kind of neat or purely linear fashion. It is oftentimes recursive, shifting, necessarily granular. Neither is it a competitive history. It is, in the words of Michael Rothberg, a *multidirectional* history. Drawing these analogies in fact *helps* us understand all the involved phenomena better.
At least this is what "Never Again" has meant and means to me: it does not mean only never again for me or other Jews. And it does not mean never again only something that looks exactly like the Nazi genocide. I think also, btw, that this is what it meant for Otto Frank, who spent time *editing* his daughter's diary so that it could be available to anyone, not only to Jews.

For ultimately the Nazi genocide--any genocide--is a highly mediated phenomenon: it consists of many diffuse events, marshals an immense amount of people and institutions, relies on sometimes conflicting or contradictory cross-sections of society, and, indeed, emerges out of a process that does not neatly, especially as its happening, have a clear beginning, middle, and end, but rather arranges for itself a kind of constellation that harnesses a range of actors, perspectives, and also histories (this is one way to understand how German colonial projects or anti-communism or ableism were no less crucial to Nazism than European antisemitism). The genocidal outcomes emerge from the structural forms society adopts. And all of this without in any way eliding the special role that Jews played in the apocalyptic Nazi worldview.

Reposted by Anne Applebaum, Mariana Mazzucato, Stephen M. Walt , and 179 more Anne Applebaum, Mariana Mazzucato, Stephen M. Walt, Michael E. Mann, Joanna Bryson, Anna O. Law, Marc Lynch, Kim L. Scheppele, Elizabeth Saunders, Rebecca Solnit, Archon Fung, Nandita Sharma, Matthew Bunn, Nancy Kanwisher, Yadvinder Malhi, Michael Wagner, John T. Jost, Stephan Lewandowsky, Robbert Sanderman, David M. Schultz, Simon Burgess, Marco Festa‐Bianchet, David M. Farrell, Will Jennings, Ashish Arora, Peter Thorne, Martin J. Attrill, Jesse M. Shapiro, Christina C. Hicks, Richard Betts, Richard J. Butler, Mattias Hallquist, Patrick A. Jansen, Jonathan A. Foley, Michael T. Meyer, Joshua S. Weitz, John R. Hutchinson, Mieke Van Houtte, Steve Peers, John McLaren, Andrew Watt, Andreas Ortmann, Tim Bale, Tom Shakespeare, Valerie P. Hans, Mark D. White, Victor Asal, Steven S. Smith, Jill Marshall, Rosemary A. Joyce, Caroline Krafft, Jürgen Maier, Leigh Sparks, Marina Jirotka, David Rothschild, Martin Gaynor, Elizabeth Stokoe, Melissa Johnson, Vincent Tiberj, Michael J. Allen, Rupert Read, Christian E. Weller, Ian M. Kinchin, Dawn J. Wright, Joseph Schafer, Hester Blum, Markus Jäntti, Anders Nilsson, Alison Phipps, Dominik Wiedenhofer, Ramón López Facal, Gerard H. Kuper, Libby Robin, David S. Cohen, Joni Lovenduski, Alan Stewart, Patrick Walsh, Sanford F. Schram, Kevin Carey, Shelly Lundberg, Inderjeet Parmar, Göran Bolin, Jussi T. Eronen, Marta Mìrazón Lahr, Raffaella Ravinetto, Smith, Peter Schöttler, Andrew Leyshon, Melanie C. Green, Janet Murray, Steven High, Jo Barraket, David R. Miller, Robert Wolfe, Duncan Bell, Jesús Rodríguez Pomeda, Patrick Svensson, Wilson McLeod, Stephen D. Murphy, Gerald Friedman, Stacy D. VanDeveer, Fabio Giglietto, Beatriz Gallardo Paúls, Lyndsey Stonebridge, Juan Moreno‐Cruz, Todd Pugatch, Howard Stevenson, Stephen Ryan, Elizabeth Stevenson, Michael D. McDonald, Anne Norton, Josef Früchtl, Manuel Puppis, Graeme Warren, Talia Schaffer, Graham Dutfield, Marco Haan, Antoine Bernard de Raymond, Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, Paul Fisher, Michelle Williams, Alberto Corsín Jiménez, Christian Fisch, Lisa Diedrich, Nicola Carr, Enrique Fatás, Philipp Sarasin, Jessica Silbey, Feargal Cochrane, Stuart White, Mary Jane Curry, Susan Strasser, Marko Lindroos, Claire L. Adida, Sharon Erickson Nepstad, Caterina Froio, Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, Patrick Meier, Vaughan S. Roberts, Raúl Pacheco-Vega, Ryan K. Brook, Florian Keusch, Andrew Rudalevige, Olivier Jourdan, Hisham Zerriffi, Sean P. Corcoran, Patrick Stokes, Cullen S. Hendrix, Jon Dean, Eric J. Sundquist, Guillaume Allègre, Eric J. Segall, Melanie O’Brien, Jason A. Heppler, Karen O’Leary, Uwe M. Martens, Alexander Woywodt, Thomas D. Carroll, David S. Tanenhaus, Kate Jackson, Pam Jarvis, Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Mary McAuliffe, Aviel Roshwald, Pepper D. Culpepper, Émilien Ruiz, Nathan P. Kalmoe, Ryan Calo, Jaap Kooijman, Aidan O’Sullivan, Dan Immergluck, Jeannette Sutton, Fiona Armstrong, Beth Tellman, Lorna Hughes, Fabian Holt, Ernesto Castañeda, David Spurrett, Dunlap, Stuart Shapiro, David Darmofal, Lars Gamfeldt

Bruce Springsteen @brucespringsteen.net · 2d

I wrote this song on Saturday, recorded it yesterday and released it to you today in response to the state terror being visited on the city of Minneapolis. It’s dedicated to the people of Minneapolis, our innocent immigrant neighbors and in memory of Alex Pretti and Renee Good.

Stay free

Bruce Springsteen - Streets Of Minneapolis (Official Audio)

YouTube video by Bruce Springsteen

youtu.be

Reposted by Steven High

Prof David Bailey @dgbailey.bsky.social · 5d

Great to see our @regionalstudies.bsky.social paper (with a stellar list of authors, me excluded…) getting lots of reads.: ‘critical review of the UK's Modern Industrial Strategy: lessons for ‘place-based’ policy.’ @https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00343404.2025.2597466

A critical review of the UK's Modern Industrial Strategy: lessons for ‘place-based’ policy

The paper explores the implications for regional development contained within the UK’s recently launched Modern Industrial Strategy White Paper (2025). We critically examine the industrial strategy...

www.tandfonline.com

Steven High @stevenhigh.bsky.social · 5d

Seeing a lot of courage in the streets of Minneapolis. The city deserves the Nobel peace prize (not those willing to give theirs away to curry favor from this tyrant).

Steven High @stevenhigh.bsky.social · 7d

A nice review of my book from Jamie Swift.

thekingstoncrow.substack.com/p/from-swift...

From Swift’s Shelf: ‘Highly personal’ disillusionment with the NDP

Book offers insights for today's struggling party

thekingstoncrow.substack.com

Steven High @stevenhigh.bsky.social · 8d

Very much looking forward to reading this new edited volume (released last month) - a fantastic line-up!

@deindustrialpol.bsky.social

www.atlande.eu/nos-ouvrages...