Using the management of Black athlete protest (e.g., Colin Kaepernick, Naomi Osaka, LeBron James, Brittney Griner) in the post-Ferguson era as a foil, Fred Moten, Roberto Sirvent, and Charles Athanasopoulos engage in a critical conversation surrounding Black sociality which has bearing on the arenas of sports, art, and the academy. The discussants ponder the appropriate terms for considering how Black athletes themselves may have their own investments in the logics which reduce them to countable units: perversity, codependency, co-option, complicity, ambivalence, do words even go there? How do such terms come each with their own assumptive and diagnostic logics? How do we relinquish our search for purity (of an arena, person, community, object of study) as concomitant with Black liberation? Moten also comments on how the logics of individuation come to bear on academics in thinking about the meaning of “fellowship” in the university. Such commentary dovetails with Moten’s critical inversion of Allen Iverson’s infamous line on “practice” as a way of thinking about Black sociality beyond the “game.” The conversation thus ends with a reflection on how scholars, students, and activists can “see through” the individuating logics of recognition or purity by refocusing on the “practice” and “fellowship” of Black study/activism.

The pervasive practice of botting by using fame-enhancing bots and operating porn bots, and Instagram’s opaque and unreliable authenticity governance, has evoked human Instagram users to actively police and govern botting and other bot activity. Botting describes repetitive and quantitative posting, messaging and engaging on social media platforms to provoke reciprocal engagement. Running bot police accounts, Instagram users engage and try to play an active role in the authenticity governance process of Instagram. The article investigates why and how Instagram users govern two types of “inauthentic” Instabots, which concentrate on detecting automated interactions by fame-enhancing bots and reporting porn bots. Two case studies of three Instagram accounts and their content show different approaches to user-led authenticity governance and how these profiles perceive themselves as custodians of “authenticity.” The key findings reveal that their activities of pillorying and collective flagging are considered digital vigilantism that potentially cause harm to other users. Furthermore, they show mechanisms of peer surveillance and mutual moderation on a user level, and complex power asymmetries between the platform company, its moderation systems, advertisers, and its users.

Grief is typically portrayed as an individual experience that is a response to loss and provides the basis for personal growth; grief is something to work through, and, ideally, to benefit from, and represents a state change. But might it be possible to conceptualize grief of the future, a subjunctive grief that is based in speculation about change that brings that change into the present? The subjunctive invokes the wished for, the imagined, and the possible, and subjunctive grief serves to work through the experience of the future in the present. Focusing on debates around medical aid in dying and the parenting of a child with childhood psychosis, I consider grief in the subjunctive tense and how anticipation of change affects practices in the present. Attending to subjunctive grief provides an affective methodology that demonstrates interdependency and how conceptions of intimacy, love, and caregiving shape the experience of grief in the future tense.

This article critically engages with the emerging "media forensic" turn at the intersection of visual culture, new media practice, and humanitarian and political activism. This field purports to subvert dominant forensic and surveillant regimes, weaponizing these mediated modalities to document acts of humanitarian and political violence. Such practices have been widely celebrated for enhancing forms of legal and political accountability and justice. However, there are concerns that these practices may inadvertently mirror the state-sanctioned regimes of control and power they wish to expose, reinforcing settler-colonial histories of the forensic and evidentiary, whilst also excluding counter-hegemonic and experimental modes of emergent media investigation. To address these limitations, this article proposes a radical counter-history and praxis of the forensic, drawing on Indigenous epistemologies and critical decolonial thought. Analysing the work of the Indigenous media collective the New Red Order (NRO), the article argues that their ongoing Culture Capture project (2017�) exemplifies a counter-hegemonic mode of emergent media forensic practice. By asserting Indigenous epistemological agency over such modes of media investigation, the NRO challenges Western forensic practices� hegemony. The article advocates for expanding the scope of media forensic work to include diverse publics, communities, and aesthetic-political practices that offer subversive, decolonial forms of evidentiary practice.

Karrmen Crey's Producing Sovereignty explores the rise of Indigenous media in Canada since the 1990s, focusing on the intersection of cultural production, institutional influence, and Indigenous sovereignty. Using documentary and non-fiction films as case studies, Crey examines how Indigenous creators navigate and challenge colonial structures, using media as a tool for asserting identity and autonomy.

In much proto-nationalist discourse and academic and historical work, marronage has come to represent an open receptacle of competing narratives and desires in the history of slavery, revolt, and Blackness. Paying attention to the ways marronage is portrayed across the different nations and territories of the Caribbean reveals grand narratives of heroism, the formerly enslaved outsmarting and outlasting planters and colonial officers in the hills and mountains of the West Indies and the swamplands of the US South. Through these narratives, this article argues, the maroons are mythologized both as figures of resistance against the racial terror of slavery and as the founding fathers of the post-Abolition, post-Independence Caribbean nation-state. These heroic yet limited depictions of marronage, though important in showing the ways the maroons were able to unsettle the plantocracy, fail to reckon with the impossibility of redress in the afterlives of slavery and the limits of sovereignty in the wake of the non-event of Emancipation. Marronage offers neither a clean break from slavery nor an easy path beyond, yet the proto-nationalist accounts of its praxis that I explore here insist on turning the incapacity of the enslaved into the capacity�to resist, to survive�of the heroic maroon. Through its calculated erasure of slavery, the marronage produced in these narratives generates its own set of aporias, pointing us in the direction of freedom but reminding us, at the same time, of its impossibility. What is at stake in this article is not an exploration of the future of marronage but the exploration of its past and its supposed break from slavery, as well as an interrogation of the ideals of Black resistance and Caribbean sovereignty and freedom that the heroic maroon is tasked with representing.

This article examines the Ontario education system�s use of surface level practices intended to counter racism but that often fall short of creating authentic and sustainable change. Many schools across the province have focused their efforts on celebrating identity awareness days, weeks, and months, yet these initiatives largely reveal an apparent disconnect in understanding of the significant impact of white supremacy that is deeply embedded within the educational structural system. Stories from students, families, and community members reveal ongoing, often unintentional, acts of harm or violence against Indigenous, Black, racialized, and marginalized students, demonstrating a deep-seated failure to address systemic racism. The article explores the presence of harmful ideologies of white supremacy frameworks that permeate every facet of the education system, including the curriculum, communication, disciplinary actions, assessment, and institutional traditions and practices. By examining these issues, the article offers strategies for disrupting these structures, in order to dismantle white supremacy from the education system to support and empower Indigenous, Black, racialized, and marginalized students. By providing these practical examples rooted in a transnational solidarity lens, the article aims to empower educators to disrupt and dismantle white supremacy in the classroom and promote meaningful and long-lasting change.

In this essay, I argue that the rhetoric behind "not in my name" actually mobilizes the same gesture as the popular Zionist move to innocence. While anti-Zionist Jews preface our solidarity with Palestine through an account of our own experience with suffering and persecution, so too does the Zionist Jew put that same suffering to use, albeit to opposite means. In other words, there is a fine line between the rhetorical purpose of anti-Zionists� saying that genocide is not a Jewish value and Zionists� using this same rhetoric to label Israeli violence as self-defense and not genocide. In fact, it is not a stretch to suggest that anti-Zionism�s re-emphasis on Jewish values as the means by which we validate Palestinian struggle is not a stand against Jewish supremacy but rather an appeal for it.

Both sensuality and profanity dwell within love�s truthful self-expression. James Baldwin�s oeuvre reads race relations in the United States, revealing a skewed balance between sensuality and profanity rectified through authentic sensual connections across racial lines. This essay introduces Baldwin�s work as an exemplar of world reading, an ingredient of cultural literacy, to argue that sensuality prevents society from dismissing negative emotions as merely symptomatic of race or class resentment. Centering on profanity, the argument relies on how Baldwin deftly constructs sensuality as an inversive emotional balm for healing the US race problem through the feminine energeia found in his pervasive testicular discourse.

Leigh Claire La Berge�s Marx for Cats reimagines the history of capitalism by analyzing archival documentation about felines. By updating bestiaries to include contemporary criticism of capitalism, La Berge positions cats as the key to an economic revolution. While the title and cover suggest a playful, possibly unserious analysis, La Berge carefully constructs a detailed history from feudalism to capitalism to point readers toward an animal-friendly future that reconsiders power structures and dares to imagine a world beyond capitalism.