iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Chloe Ahmann @chloeahmann.bsky.social · 16/04/2026

Over the past year, @anandian.bsky.social and I have joined forces with our students and the remarkable folks at South Baltimore Community Land Trust to produce a 4-part documentary series on the history of environmental (in)justice on the city’s southern edge. It’s called “Polluted By Design.”

Poster for screening and panel discussion of “Polluted by Design: Histories of Waste and the Struggle for Environmental Justice in South Baltimore.”

1113

Chloe Ahmann @chloeahmann.bsky.social · 19/11/2025

Friends attending #AAA2025 - some health stuff is keeping me from all the spooky fun in NOLA but I have to boost this Thursday sesh on “The Specter of Fascism” co-organized with the best comrades. GET THERE! There will be brilliant people, urgent scheming, ZINES. #anthrosky 👻📚✊✨

There is a specter haunting the globe. Once imagined as a hollow revenant of 20th century catastrophe, fascism again looms large in our political present: as a resurrected governing formation; a glaring threat to minority lifeways; a crisis of liberal norms; an incendiary charge to lob at one's opponents; and, perhaps most often, a question. Questions like the oft-invoked "Is this fascism, yet?" embed a temporality that makes it hard to mobilize, for they posit fascism as that which cannot be named until too late. Historically, conceptually, politically, we hold this position is untenable. Rather, the ghosts of fascism are emergent, tangible, hauntological presences across a spectrum of horizons.

This roundtable therefore gathers scholars who are not content to consign fascism to the extreme, nor to the 20th century. We study fascism that calls itself by many names and charges banal sites of social life: mundane violences that emerge in liberal institutions, structure school curricula, shape relationships with nature, identify as "critical" and "feminist." Turning from book burnings to blockbuster films, dictators to PTAs, and examining sites of racialized and gendered violence across the Global North and South, we consider fascism not as an ideal type but as it haunts the everyday – all with an eye toward grasping fash-ish moods before they advance into full-fledged fascist masses.

Despite a growing sense that fascism is on the rise, boundary work has muddled what could be a clarion call for antifascist research. Popular responses range from naive tolerance to bloody confrontation, and academics appear hamstrung by a similar dissensus. Some frame fascism as an illiberal force; others as an apparition that stupefies the masses into (neo)liberal norms. Some call developing a general theory of fascism the most pressing matter of our time; others hold the concept loses teeth when abstracted. Some lament that fascism "is not who we are" in liberal democracies, while others locate its inception at democracies' frontiers. These debates are hardly frivolous, but while they unfold, fascism unfolds, too. There are questions worth exploring that do not hinge on their belabored resolution. And anthropology, ever curious about the instability of meaning, is precisely the discipline to ask them.

In short: we believe anthropology has rarely been more needed, but also that our field needs work to meet this moment. Recent scholarship has gestured notionally toward the possibilities of an antifascist anthropology, but the time has come for thinking programmatically. Together, we ask what fascism becomes when unhinged from its natal contexts. We map its spectral presence in domains from home to healthcare, economy to education. We inquire how to approach it as an ethnographic object and as the condition of our lives and work. And we consider how to remake anthropology into an antifascist discipline that can fight back not only in theory, but in practice.

1121

Chloe Ahmann @chloeahmann.bsky.social · 07/05/2025

Ahem, may I interrupt all the unraveling to share a lil news

Email from the Anthropology Department Chair reads:

Dear Chloe,

I am delighted to share that I have just been informed that the provost has approved your tenure case. The final step is the board of trustees, but that is just a formality. So you can count on being an Associate Professor with indefinite tenure as of July 1.

Congratulations, and good work!!

8531

Chloe Ahmann @chloeahmann.bsky.social · 22/03/2025

Apropos of nothing, "Reading Fascists Reading Shakespeare" is now out in Public Culture. We grapple with the surprising glut of Shakespeare references in far-right fiction (so you don't have to) and ask wtf is going on there. The essay starts like this: doi.org/10.1215/0899...

$Screenshot of first page of article in the journal Public Culture. Title reads atop the page in bold font: Reading Fascists Reading Shakespeare: Literary Populism in White Power Fiction. Beneath that, authors: Chloe Ahmann and Devin Proctor Beneath that, the article: Five days after he helped Donald Trump win the 2016 US presidential election, news broke that chief strategist Steve Bannon once penned a rap musical based on William Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. The play, set amid the 1992 Los Angeles riots, features a grisly war between the Bloods and Crips, who trade poetic spars like, “I’m an OG from the hood,” and “I will return to rep my peeps!” Rarely has Roman tragedy been such comedic fodder. Within weeks, Bannon’s collaborator leaked the script, and choice excerpts landed in the New York Times. By spring, NowThis had staged a table read with seasoned actors. Subscribers to Vanity Fair soon learned that this was Bannon’s second adaptation. During his fabled time in Hollywood, the would- be playwright pitched an intergalactic take on Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. Reporting on the play is, understandably, hilarious—a bit of light within a dark 100 days when brazen White supremacists filed into the West Wing and fractured liberal norms with a ferocious speed. As newspapers mourned democracy’s demise and prophesied fascism’s rise in the United States for the first (but not the last) time in this century, stories on Bannon’s Shakespeare fandom broke from the seriousness of it all. What made them funny?$

150

Chloe Ahmann @chloeahmann.bsky.social · 22/03/2025

This. When we speak out in defense of the university, let it not be the university as it existed on Jan 19, 2025, which was a deeply authoritarian space. Let it be the one our students brought to life against all odds and for which they continue to be criminalized.

Post from the bad place that says: “Columbia didn't cave--administrators are using this crisis to implement the draconian measures that *they want*” Paired with a screenshot from an article, with this line highlighted: “Additionally the school believed there was considerable overlap between needed campus changes and Trump’s demands.

0165

Chloe Ahmann @chloeahmann.bsky.social · 07/03/2025

Join us for a teach-in this coming Monday on (gestures) all of this. Learn what the f@%# is happening. 5-7 pm eastern time, hybrid event, deets in poster. Please share!

Poster for teach-in event at Cornell, Monday 3/10 from 5-7pm. In person in Goldwin Smith Kauffman Auditorium and online via the QR code. Topics include: executive orders and the courts; attacks on LGBTQ+ rights; the rise and fall of DEI; immigration and deportations; higher ed and academic freedom; the end of American democracy?

030

Chloe Ahmann @chloeahmann.bsky.social · 26/01/2025

This is normal behavior for a democracy right 🫠 legiscan.com/US/text/HR26...

Text from house resolution designating Antifa a “domestic terrorist” group

1161058314

Chloe Ahmann @chloeahmann.bsky.social · 16/11/2024

Hey team — especially anthros — if you happen to find yourself (in two or three dimensions) at #AAA2024Tampa next week, a few cuties are doing a virtual panel on everyday and emergent ecofascism. Friday 10:15am eastern time. Link TBA. Should be… timely! 😬😬😬

Poster with black text atop a background that fades from orange to teal. Text reads: Anthropologies of Everyday and Emergent Ecofascism. American Anthropological Association 2024 Annual Meeting. Zoom link TBA. 11/24. Speakers: Chloe Ahmann, Mona Bhan, Alexandra Cotofana, Radhika Govindrajan, Julia Leser, Zeynep Oğuz, Yuka Suzuki, Noah Theriault.

23710

Chloe Ahmann @chloeahmann.bsky.social · 09/11/2024

Lots of bad going around BUT ALSO a few of us are hosting a book party at the #AAA2024Tampa at earth & bone studio. Friday from 8–late. We'll have food, drinks, music, and catharsis. Good vibes only. Come hang! 📚🥂💃🎉

Poster with six rectangles on top of a bone-colored background. Text on the bottom reads in black: "DRINKS / FOOD / BOOKS / MUSIC / VIBES." Give of the rectangles are book covers, with titles, "Futures after Progress," "Excited Delirium," "Petro-state Masquerade," "Voice and Nation in Plurinational Bolivia," and "A Burdensome Experiment." The sixth rectangle reads: "Join us for a book party. Friday, November 22, eight til late. Earth & Bone. 108 N 11th St."

13210

Chloe Ahmann @chloeahmann.bsky.social · 16/04/2024

Holding something you’ve lived with and worked toward for 14 years is a surreal experience. Grateful to the folks at UChicago Press, to friends and mentors who helped shape me, and to dear ones in Baltimore who taught me everything. Happy 📚🎉 day everyone!

082

Chloe Ahmann @chloeahmann.bsky.social · 27/09/2023

I took the cover photo in 2016. It was a weird year for the United States. The book captures that, too. But mostly it’s about local efforts to realize a good future after industry, and the rifts competing visions opened between neighbors. May the next book about this place…

Text reads: A powerful ethnographic portrait of South Baltimore, a place haunted by toxic pasts in its pursuit of better futures.

Baltimore is a city where promises of progress have revealed themselves to carry lethal costs. In Futures after Progress, anthropologist Chloe Ahmann explores the rise and fall of industrial lifeways on Baltimore’s far southern edge and the uncertainties that linger in their wake. Focusing on the community of Curtis Bay—one of the most polluted places in the country—she also follows local efforts to realize a good future after industry, and the rifts competing visions opened between neighbors.

Text reads: Examining tensions between White and Black residents, environmental activists and industrial enthusiasts, local elders and younger generations, Ahmann shows how this community has become a battleground where some lives are written off as the cost of doing business. But this is a story of hope, too. Rigorous and moving, Futures after Progress offers insight into the deep roots of our ecological predicament, giving us a glimpse into what lies ahead for a country beset by dreams deferred and a planet on the precipice of change.

100

Chloe Ahmann @chloeahmann.bsky.social · 27/09/2023

…from industry or government. Yet. Organizers continue to carry the weight of pushing for a future without this deadly imposition. Just yesterday residents broadcast this demand, using the same iconic image.

Two images stacked on top of one another. The top image shows a playground in South Baltimore, with a massive open-air coal pile in the background. A speech bubble from a child reads, “We won’t live with millions of tons of coal 1,000 ft from our homes anymore…” The second image is the same, but with the coal pile vanished. The pair was broadcast in September 2023 by organizers in the neighborhood.

100

Chloe Ahmann @chloeahmann.bsky.social · 27/09/2023

📣 We have a COVER! I am so grateful that my book is coming out this spring with @UChicagoPress. It’s the product of relationships going back at least 12 years, when I landed in South Baltimore to teach. Longer if you count my family’s ties to this place over generations. 🧵

Book cover for “Futures After Progress: Hope and Doubt in Late Industrial Baltimore, by Chloe Ahmann. Black title text sits in the pale blue sky above a playground with red bars and a dark yellow slide. Large open-air coal piles can be seen in the immediate background.

132

Chloe Ahmann @chloeahmann.bsky.social · 26/09/2023

Deets: - Friday October 6th from 2–4pm UK time - In person at the University of St. Andrews School 5 Lecture Theatre and on Zoom

Text reads: Time is political, and honing a sharp analysis of time can mean wielding political power. Honing an analysis tuned to the exigencies of a moment can mean wielding more, but this accommodation has its costs. This talk unfolds on Baltimore’s industrial edge during a moment on the edge—the late Cold War—considering how residents made sick over years of toxic exposure and anxious for a buyout of their homes learned not to politicize slow violence. They chose instead to dramatize their imminent demise in the event of an industrial disaster: a studied response to the Cold War US state’s fixation on apocalypse. In the sense that they eventually secured a buyout, this argument was a success. But it hinged on an agreement to limit charges to the hypothetical. It proceeded as if the gravest obstacles to life lay then, in the devastating future, and not now, ambient and tedious...

000

Chloe Ahmann @chloeahmann.bsky.social · 26/09/2023

📣Hey Bluesky! I'm honored to be delivering the inaugural keynote for the Anthropology of Time Network next week. My talk will be called "TIME BOMB: Toxic Disavowal in the Shadow of Apocalypse." And there's a virtual option! DM me for a zoom link and peek the abstract in the comments.

Black and white image depicts an elderly man walking into his South Baltimore row home. He wears a uniform from his factory job. In the background, at the end of his residential street, sits a giant oil tank marked with a "TEXACO" sign. Text on top of image reads: "TIME BOMB: Toxic Disavowal in the Shadow of Apocalypse. Chloe Ahmann" and "Public keynote – live and online. Details in the comments."

262

Chloe Ahmann @chloeahmann.bsky.social · 22/08/2023

This Barbie has a new piece out in CulAnth - and an image on the cover. ✨✨ Come for the analysis of rumor as theory and tactic in a late industrial environment where conspiracy abounds. Stay for my absolutely bumbling journey chasing clues up, down, and around… journal.culanth.org/index.php/ca...

Cover of Cultural Anthropology’s August issue shows a black and white photo of a playground in South Baltimore. Enormous open-air coal piles look in the backdrop.

030