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Katie Furl

@katherinefurl.bsky.social

890 followers 230 following 88 posts

Assistant professor of sociology, University of North Dakota | PhD, UNC-Chapel Hill | gender, race, class, & digital inequality | she/her | views my own katherinefurl.com

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Katie Furl @katherinefurl.bsky.social · Jul 22

New work from @alicetiara.bsky.social‬, Courtlyn Pippert, Elaine Schnabel, and me recently published in Social Media + Society! journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... (1/6)

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

journals.sagepub.com

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Reposted by Katie Furl

Karl Bode @karlbode.com · 13h

twice a year the entire U.S. press becomes a marketing extension of a single billionaire-owned retailer, and nobody in any position of editorial power thinks it's weird or gross

photo of Google News search results for Amazon Prime Day (the second this year)

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LSE Impact Blog @lseimpactblog.bsky.social · 2d

💥New: Academic careers have become a professional sport

✍️ @swallaschek.bsky.social

#AcademicSky #ECRchat #AcademicCareers

Academic careers have become a professional sport - Impact of Social Sciences

Academia like professional sports is increasingly a system defined by competition, precarity and quantification does this lead to a loss of meaning?

blogs.lse.ac.uk

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Katie Furl @katherinefurl.bsky.social · 3d

It’s the weirdest mix of relief and regret when the grading you’ve been putting off far too long only takes a couple minutes.

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Julian Sanchez @normative.bsky.social · 5d

One thing that comes through awfully clearly in these ICE videos is how many of these goons gravitated toward the job because being able to assault people with impunity is a big thrill for them.

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Sexy CHOAM Nomsky costume @samthielman.com · 7d

it's funny to me that the people who talk about the criminal mindset, which is not a real thing, are the same people who talk about the success mindset, which is just crime

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Cas Ⓜ️udde @casmudde.bsky.social · 7d

As long as the far right shapes public opinion, and mainstream parties follow public opinion, the far right dominates politics, whether in government or not.

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Gil Durán @gilduran.com · 14d

1/ A longtime Wired editor just wrote a mush-brained essay about how he totally missed the political rot of Silicon Valley (& still doesn't get it).

But in the late 1990s, a Wired journalist warned of a toxic ideology bubbling up from tech. Paulina Borsook has largely been erased. Let's change that

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Adam Sharp @adamcsharp.bsky.social · Sep 23

Happy Bi Visibility Day! Interesting fact for you... bisexuality was first discovered in 1995, thanks to the hard-hitting investigative journalism of Newsweek

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Jess Calarco @jessicacalarco.com · 17d

“What fascisms old and new have in common is they tend to look to women to fill in the gaps that the state misses."

And, I'd add, they get women to fill these gaps by making patriarchy's coattails the only way means by which women can achieve security or esteem.

www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...

From Nazi Germany to Trump’s America: why strongmen rely on women at home

Fascist regimes pushed narratives of domestic bliss, yet relied on women’s unpaid labor. In the US today, ‘womanosphere’ influencers promote the same fantasies

www.theguardian.com

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Robert Evans (the Only Robert Evans) @iwriteok.bsky.social · 19d

welcome to The Resistance,

*checks notes*

*sighs*

*weeps gently*

...michael eisner

Yashar Ali 🐘 @yasharali.bsky.social · 19d

Michael Eisner, who served as CEO of Disney for 21 years and acquired ABC while he was in charge, slams his successor Bob Iger for bending the knee.

Michael Eisner
@Michael Eisner
X.com
Where has all the leadership gone? If not for university presidents, law firm managing partners, and corporate chief executives standing up against bullies, who then will step up for the first amendment? The
"suspending indefinitely" of Jimmy Kimmel immediately after the Chairman of the FCC's aggressive yet hollow threatening of the Disney Company is yet another example of out-of-control intimidation. Maybe the Constitution should have said, "Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, except in one's political or financial self-interest." By-the-way, for the record, this ex-CEO finds Jimmy Kimmel very talented and funny.
10:17 AM • 9/19/25 • 208K Views

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Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · Sep 6

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or
even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in
the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or
apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we
are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not
considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This
is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse
and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece,
we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology
industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to
relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI
(black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are
in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are
both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and
Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf.
Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al.
2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms
are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

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Katie Furl @katherinefurl.bsky.social · 21d

Hi all, my younger sister’s cat recently required emergency surgery totaling thousands of dollars.

I wouldn’t typically share something like this on bsky, but Meredith is a kind, hardworking graduate student, and even the smallest bit would help her weather this.

www.gofundme.com/f/ivy-recove...

Donate to help cover the costs of Ivy's emergency surgery!, organized by Meredith Furl

Help cover the cost of Ivy's foreign body surgery! For those … Meredith Furl needs your support for Donate to help cover the costs of Ivy's emergency surgery!

www.gofundme.com

Reposted by Katie Furl

Paul Nadeau @pauljnadeau.bsky.social · 23d

Relevant that this photo's a staple of my class slides to illustrate how expanding media in early America allowed postcards with images like this to be circulated, taking slavery from an abstract phenomenon to a concrete horror show that inflamed public opinion and helped build abolitionism

Jim Goldgeier @jimgoldgeier.bsky.social · 23d

www.washingtonpost.com/climate-envi...

National park to remove photo of enslaved man’s scars

The Trump administration is ordering the removal of information on slavery at multiple national parks in an effort to scrub them of “corrosive ideology.”

www.washingtonpost.com

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Sherrilyn Ifill @sifill.bsky.social · 24d

This may explain why there’s an aggressive response to people who merely post Kirk’s own words. It threatens the existence of the alternate Kirk - the motivational speaker that had been marketed to young kids and white Christian groups through selective quotation & clips.

ML @mlpoole.bsky.social · 24d

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Prisonculture @prisonculture.bsky.social · 28d

@bluesky moderation is suspending people for posting Kirk's own words which tells you everything you need to know.

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Pavel @spavel.bsky.social · Apr 15

"AI work is just as good as human work" is a statement that *always* flows from the direction of power. Employers to workers, producers to consumers, but not the reverse.

Because it's not a thing people actually believe, but an argument: slop is good enough for you; you are slop.

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Zohran Kwame Mamdani @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social · Sep 8

"How Are the Very Rich Feeling About New York’s Next Mayor?"

A Dramatic Reading of The Recent New York Times Dispatch from the Hamptons.

Presented by The Gilded Age's Morgan Spector.

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Katie Furl @katherinefurl.bsky.social · Sep 2

Pictured: window, glorious window. After so many years of windowless fluorescence, your view of the outside world is deeply cherished.

An office window, with a view of other office buildings, and a small plant.

Reposted by Katie Furl

Benjamin Balthaser @blbalthaser.bsky.social · Aug 30

My students, who attend a working-class rust-belt college, openly talk abt how much they hate AI & are afraid of its consequences. I wonder how much of the oft-reported student enthusiasm for the tech is the merely result of the NYT’s Ivy League bias

We built a calculator that doesn't work, but don't worry, it's also a plagiarism machine that will tell you to kill yourself. It runs on the world's oceans and costs 10 trillion dollars.

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ghost malone ergo propter malone @proptermalone.bsky.social · Aug 29

well this is exceptionally gross

Reuters @reuters.com · Aug 29

Exclusive: Meta has appropriated the names and likenesses of celebrities — including Taylor Swift, Scarlett Johansson, Anne Hathaway and Selena Gomez — to create dozens of flirty social-media chatbots without their permission, Reuters has found reut.rs/3JWb00R

Exclusive: Meta created flirty chatbots of Taylor Swift, other celebrities without permission

Meta has appropriated the names and likenesses of celebrities – including Taylor Swift, Scarlett Johansson, Anne Hathaway and Selena Gomez – to create dozens of flirty social-media chatbots without their permission, Reuters has found.

reut.rs

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Alondra Nelson @alondra.bsky.social · Aug 28

Call for Papers!

"Technology and Inequality in Culture, Media, and the Arts"-a special issue of Poetics, coedited with @jticona.bsky.social + Angèle Christin

www.ias.edu/stsv-lab/pla...

Technology and Inequality in Culture, Media, and the Arts

Call for Papers Technology and Inequality in Culture, Media, and the ArtsA Special Issue of Poetics: Journal of Empirical Research on Culture, the Media and the Arts

www.ias.edu

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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · Aug 28

Full resignation letter from Demetre C. Daskalakis, a CDC leader, does not hold back.
"The recent shooting at CDC is not why I am resigning. My grandfather, who I am named after, stood up to fascist forces in Greece and lost his life doing so. I am resigning to make him and his legacy proud."

My resignation letter from CDC.

Dear Dr. Houry,

I am writing to formally resign from my position as Director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), effective August 28, 2025, close of business. I am happy to stay on for two weeks to provide transition, if requested.

This decision has not come easily, as I deeply value the work that the CDC does in safeguarding public health and am proud of my contributions to that critical mission. However, after much contemplation and reflection on recent developments and perspectives brought to light by Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., I find that the views he and his staff have shared challenge my ability to continue in my current role at the agency and in the service of the health of the American people. Enough is enough.

While I hold immense respect for the institution and my colleagues, I believe that it is imperative to align my professional responsibilities to my system of ethics and my understanding of the science of infectious disease, immunology, and my promise to serve the American people. This step is necessary to ensure that I can contribute effectively in a capacity that allows me to remain true to my principles.

The recent change in the adult and children’s immunization schedule threaten the lives of the youngest Americans and pregnant people. The data analyses that supported this decision have never been shared with CDC despite my respectful requests to HHS and other leadership. This lack of meaningful engagement was further compounded by a “frequently asked questions” document written to support the Secretary’s directive that was circulated by HHS without input from CDC subject matter experts and that cited studies that did not support the conclusions that were attributed to these authors. Having worked in local and national public health for years, I have never experienced such radical non-transparency, nor have I seen such unskilled manipulation of data to achieve a political end rather than the good of the American people.

It is untenable to serve in an organization that is not afforded the opportunity to discuss decisions of scientific and public health importance released under the moniker of CDC. The lack of communication by HHS and other CDC political leadership that culminates in social media posts announcing major policy changes without prior notice demonstrate a disregard of normal communication channels and common sense. Having to retrofit analyses and policy actions to match inadequately thought-out announcements in poorly scripted videos or page long X posts should not be how organizations responsible for the health of people should function. Some examples include the announcement of the change in the COVID-19 recommendations for children and pregnant people, the firing of scientists from ACIP by X post and an op-ed rather than direct communication with these valuable experts, the announcement of new ACIP members by X before onboarding and vetting have completed, and the release of term of reference for an ACIP workgroup that ignored all feedback from career staff at CDC.

Their desire to please a political base will result in death and disability of vulnerable children and adults. Their base should be the people they serve not a political voting bloc.

I have always been first to challenge scientific and public health dogma in my career and was excited by the opportunity to do so again. I was optimistic that there would be an opportunity to brief the Secretary about key topics such as measles, avian influenza, and the highly coordinated approach to the respiratory virus season. Such briefings would allow exchange of ideas and a shared path to support the vision of “Making America Healthy Again.” We are seven months into the new administration, and no CDC subject matter expert from my Center has ever briefed the Secretary. I am not sure who the Secretary is listening to, but it is quite certainly not to us. Unvetted and conflicted outside organizations seem to be the sources HHS use over the gold standard science of CDC and other reputable sources. At a hearing, Secretary Kennedy said that Americans should not take medical advice from him. To the contrary, an appropriately briefed and inquisitive Secretary should be a source of health information for the people he serves. As it stands now, I must agree with him, that he should not be considered a source of accurate information.

The intentional eroding of trust in low-risk vaccines favoring natural infection and unproven remedies will bring us to a pre-vaccine era where only the strong will survive and many if not all will suffer. I believe in nutrition and exercise. I believe in making our food supply healthier, and I also believe in using vaccines to prevent death and disability. Eugenics plays prominently in the rhetoric being generated and is derivative of a legacy that good medicine and science should continue to shun.

The recent shooting at CDC is not why I am resigning. My grandfather, who I am named after, stood up to fascist forces in Greece and lost his life doing so. I am resigning to make him and his legacy proud. I am resigning because of the cowardice of a leader that cannot admit that HIS and his minions’ words over decades created an environment where violence like this can occur. I reject his and his colleagues’ thoughts and prayers, and advise they direct those to people that they have not actively harmed.

For decades, I have been a trusted voice for the LGBTQ community when it comes to critical health topics. I must also cite the recklessness of the administration in their efforts to erase transgender populations, cease critical domestic and international HIV programming, and terminate key research to support equity as part of my decision.

Public health is not merely about the health of the individual, but it is about the health of the community, the nation, the world. The nation’s health security is at risk and is in the hands of people focusing on ideological self-interest.

I want to express my heartfelt gratitude for the opportunities for growth, learning, and collaboration that I have been afforded during my time at the CDC. It has been a privilege to work alongside such dedicated professionals who are committed to improving the health and well-being of communities across the nation even when under attack from within both physically and psychologically.

Thank you once again for the support and guidance I have received from you and previous CDC leadership throughout my tenure. I wish the CDC continued success in its vital mission and that HHS reverse its dangerous course to dismantle public health as a practice and as an institution. If they continue the current path, they risk our personal well-being and the security of the United States.

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Katie Furl @katherinefurl.bsky.social · Aug 26

Learned of two R&R decisions in as many days! Fall semester off to a truly blessed start 😁

Reposted by Katie Furl

Karen Benjamin Guzzo @karenguzzo.bsky.social · Aug 23

When people talk about bringing back manufacturing, they don’t actually want factory work. They are longing for the days of strong labor unions where workers had good working conditions, clear steps in a job trajectory, decent wages, health care, & a pension.

This takes us further from that.

Mel Buer @melbuer.bsky.social · Aug 23

This flew by my radar this week, but massively important: the 5th circuit court of appeals ruled that the NLRB’s structure unconstitutional.

It is a huge blow to “American workers who hope to organize their workplaces without fear of retaliation. It represents a partial negation of the New Deal…”

Elon Musk Just Won His War on Labor Unions

The Fifth Circuit has done the mogul’s bidding and neutered the National Labor Relations Board, in a move that will likely substantially damage workers’ rights.

newrepublic.com

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Alexander Luckmann @aluckmann.bsky.social · Aug 20

Academia may not give you job security, flexibility, or wealth, but it will let you unexpectedly connect to eduroam in foreign cities

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