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RKK

@ronakkapadia.bsky.social
1.5K followers 806 following 340 posts

Books: INSURGENT AESTHETICS | SURVIVING THE LONG WARS | Writing: BREATHING IN COMMON | Curator: www.survivingthelongwars.online | art/abolition/war/security/empire/futurism/healing/disability/justice | Pisces ♓️🐟. Personal account.

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RKK @ronakkapadia.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
This Friday 10/2 arthistory.uic.edu/events/ronak...
arthistory.uic.edu
Ronak K. Kapadia, “Radiant Opacities: Minoritarian Art and the Respiratory Commons” | Dept. of Art History and Museum & Exhibition Studies | University of Illinois Chicago
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RKK @ronakkapadia.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
This Friday 10/2 arthistory.uic.edu/events/ronak...
arthistory.uic.edu
Ronak K. Kapadia, “Radiant Opacities: Minoritarian Art and the Respiratory Commons” | Dept. of Art History and Museum & Exhibition Studies | University of Illinois Chicago
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George Monbiot @georgemonbiot.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
Intending to write another column about the treatment of #ME/CFS patients this week, pegged to new research findings on the biological basis. My question for sufferers: Are any of you still being offered inappropriate (psych/GET etc) "treatments"? Please email george at monbiot dot info. Thanks.
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RKK @ronakkapadia.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
theguardian.com
Abandoned, dismissed and gaslighted: there is no excuse for the way ME sufferers have been betrayed | George Monbiot
Changes in guidance and science seem to have little impact on millions of devastated lives. It’s a social crisis playing out behind closed doors, says Guardian columnist George Monbiot
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RKK @ronakkapadia.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
All eyes on the young lesbians of western mass right now, but if you want to actually understand why smart people with clue continue to mask (rather than piling on to the punching down on sick and disabled ppl), you can read this: www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/m...
smithsonianmag.com
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RKK @ronakkapadia.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
Very disorienting to watch a US film on Netflix where my name was repeatedly uttered (and perfectly pronounced) over and over again (everyone is crazy about Ronak in this film; true to life!). I'll defer my review of the film for another day... :>
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RKK @ronakkapadia.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
In a very 2013-style #representationmatters kind of way, I watched the new Netflix film "Best of the Best," about South Asian American college dance team competitions, last night. The leader of the UCLA dance team is named RONAK www.netflix.com/title/81776971
netflix.com
Watch Best of the Best | Netflix Official Site
Two childhood besties join UCLA's competitive Bollywood-fusion dance team, only to find the road to the US championships is fiercer than they imagined.
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RKK @ronakkapadia.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
In 10 days at UIUC: calendars.illinois.edu/detail/1169?...
calendars.illinois.edu
“Breathing Through the Roaring 2020s: Fascism, Imperial Breathlessness, and the Art of Breathing Otherwise” with Ronak K. Kapadia
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RKK @ronakkapadia.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
I just signed a @theactionnetwork.bsky.social petition: UIC United Faculty - Contract Now! . Sign here: actionnetwork.org/petitions/ui...
actionnetwork.org
UIC United Faculty - Contract Now!
UIC United Faculty members have been working without a contract since August 16th, 2026. Under cover of the current federal assault on higher education, administrators at UIC and across the Universit...
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RKK @ronakkapadia.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
Don’t have a ton of respect anymore for leaders/“bosses” who are not close readers / close listeners. Both are important, now more than ever. 🤖
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RKK @ronakkapadia.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
The mustache has officially entered my faculty webpage: 👨🏽🚨 updates on my new book too, stay tuned for upcoming IRL colloquium talks as well: gws.uic.edu/profiles/kap...
gws.uic.edu
Kapadia, Ronak K. | Gender and Women's Studies | University of Illinois Chicago
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RKK @ronakkapadia.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
Chambana pals: I'm coming to your campus 4 weeks from today; save the date to hear some new work from me!: calendars.illinois.edu/detail/1169?...
calendars.illinois.edu
“Breathing Through the Roaring 2020s: Fascism, Imperial Breathlessness, and the Art of Breathing Otherwise” with Ronak K. Kapadia
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RKK @ronakkapadia.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
Got a new professional faculty headshot yesterday for the start of Professor Year 14. I had to document the ‘stache! What do we think? 👨🏽👨🏽‍🏫 📸 : Katie Klema
The author in a black knit polo out in nature
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RKK @ronakkapadia.bsky.social · 10/08/2026
The refusal to reckon with COVID’s ongoing devastation is bound up with the broader retreat from even the limited racial and gender redistributive projects that briefly became thinkable in its wake. You don’t get to bury the catastrophe and preserve the politics it made possible!!
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RKK @ronakkapadia.bsky.social · 10/08/2026
If Leftists & even the “radlibs,” or whatever lane AOCIA et al. now occupy, had actually worked thru the ongoing trauma of COVID collectively, rather than memory-holing the profoundly unequal suffering of 2020 onwards, we might not be watching politicians rush to repudiate the “Woke 1.0” era.
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Matt Seybold @mattseybold.bsky.social · 15/03/2026
The thing is, I think these are all fundamentally correct & completely reconcilable political economies of the contemporary.
Technofeudalism (Varoufakis, Durand)
Too Late Capitalism (Kornbluh)
Muskism (Slobodian & Tarnoff)
End Times Fascism (Klein & Taylor)
Vectoralism (Wark)
Gutenberg Parenthesis (Sauerberg, Jarvis)
TESCREAL (Gebru & Torres)
Neofeudalism (Dean)
Tech Fascism (Duran)
Platform Capitalism (Srnicek)
Surveillance Capitalism (Zuboff)
Klepto-Keynesianism (Seybold)
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Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 04/07/2026
Well that's a bit on the nose.
How the heat is upending plans for America's 250th Birthday.
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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 02/07/2026
this guy has it
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Anil Dash @anildash.com · 27/06/2026
I don’t know how much it landed outside the city, but one of Zohran’s first big breakout campaign moments was when he jumped into the water in a suit at Coney Island for the Polar Bear Plunge back when he was polling at <2%
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Mekka Okereke @mekka.mekka-tech.com · 26/06/2026
🤔 "War?" "Hijack?" "Takeover?" Y'all use the weirdest vocab to describe voters calmly walking into a voting booth and filling in the bubble next to the name of the candidate that says things like "Childcare can be cheaper!" and "Let's fix that bike lane!" and "Elon should pay more tax than you do!"
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derek guy @dieworkwear.bsky.social · 26/04/2026
every few months, americans are asked to resume their banquet and pretend a shooting didn't just happen
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RKK @ronakkapadia.bsky.social · 05/03/2026
You can't convince me that the imperial horrors of the 2020s are not explicitly connected to the c19 pandemic's necropolitical social reordering, which anesthesized everyone into absorbing mass death and disablement as the background noise to the dystopian here and now. War crimes = shoulder shrugs?
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MS @mimosaishere.bsky.social · 21/04/2026
Re-sharing @ronakkapadia.bsky.social post, which hits queer & trans* studies, medical humanities, disability justice & abolitionist thought, among others cc @edrabinski.bsky.social @alexanderchee.bsky.social @noethematt.bsky.social @ethnography911.bsky.social - pls reshare
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RKK @ronakkapadia.bsky.social · 20/04/2026
Academic/art friends & comrades, I’m beginning to circulate a new talk for AY 2026–27 drawing on my book in progress, *BREATHING IN COMMON.* I would be glad to bring it into conversation with departments, programs, centers, classrooms, workshops, & reading groups. Please help me circulate this note!
Academic/art friends and comrades, I’m beginning to circulate a new talk for AY 2026–27 and would be glad to bring it into conversation with departments, programs, centers, classrooms, workshops, and reading groups.

Drawn from my forthcoming book, *Breathing in Common*, the talk asks what it means to sustain life in common when air itself has become a site of governance, risk, exposure, and abandonment.

Thinking with contemporary art, disability justice, abolitionist medicine, and COVID-era aerosol knowledge, I trace how breath functions as shared infrastructure under empire, and how queer and trans artists of color theorize collective survival through opacity, luminosity, care, and improvisation.

I’d be especially glad to connect with those working in feminist studies, queer and trans studies, critical race and ethnic studies, disability studies, medical humanities, environmental humanities, art history, visual culture, and abolitionist thought.

I’m open to virtual, hybrid, and in-person invitations. For in-person events, I’m happy to participate, provided thoughtful safety precautions are in place.

If you’re organizing something for the coming academic year, please feel free to DM me or email me. I’d also appreciate shares to colleagues, programs, and organizers who might be interested.pSelfie featuring author in a red shirt that says Museums Are Not Neutral in white lettering
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RKK @ronakkapadia.bsky.social · 20/04/2026
Academic/art friends & comrades, I’m beginning to circulate a new talk for AY 2026–27 drawing on my book in progress, *BREATHING IN COMMON.* I would be glad to bring it into conversation with departments, programs, centers, classrooms, workshops, & reading groups. Please help me circulate this note!
Academic/art friends and comrades, I’m beginning to circulate a new talk for AY 2026–27 and would be glad to bring it into conversation with departments, programs, centers, classrooms, workshops, and reading groups.

Drawn from my forthcoming book, *Breathing in Common*, the talk asks what it means to sustain life in common when air itself has become a site of governance, risk, exposure, and abandonment.

Thinking with contemporary art, disability justice, abolitionist medicine, and COVID-era aerosol knowledge, I trace how breath functions as shared infrastructure under empire, and how queer and trans artists of color theorize collective survival through opacity, luminosity, care, and improvisation.

I’d be especially glad to connect with those working in feminist studies, queer and trans studies, critical race and ethnic studies, disability studies, medical humanities, environmental humanities, art history, visual culture, and abolitionist thought.

I’m open to virtual, hybrid, and in-person invitations. For in-person events, I’m happy to participate, provided thoughtful safety precautions are in place.

If you’re organizing something for the coming academic year, please feel free to DM me or email me. I’d also appreciate shares to colleagues, programs, and organizers who might be interested.pSelfie featuring author in a red shirt that says Museums Are Not Neutral in white lettering
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RKK @ronakkapadia.bsky.social · 07/04/2026
"Surviving the Long Wars" takes on new, surreal, ridiculous, epic, infuriating, humiliating, heart-wrenching, and nervous-system-destroying meanings by the minute.
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RKK @ronakkapadia.bsky.social · 01/04/2026
It feels so absolutely silly to be working on a book project about expanding infrastructures of breathable life in a moment when the most powerful demonic forces on the planet are trying to destroy life-sustaining infrastructure everywhere you look… bleak, exhausting, ridiculous times.
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RKK @ronakkapadia.bsky.social · 01/04/2026
Should I get critical feedback from writer friends on a grant proposal I've been feverishly working on for the past week, or just turn it in way ahead of schedule to be over and done with it? A memoir.
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RKK @ronakkapadia.bsky.social · 31/03/2026
“a failure to thrive or to publish.” Frankly, I feel that second books, privilege or not, are a miracle if they happen at all."
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RKK @ronakkapadia.bsky.social · 31/03/2026
All of ­these imaginations bump up against the real­ity of something other­ wise, a gained humility and the embarrassment of having proffered declarative words at all in print form, and that friction can result in an emotionally confused manuscript or a nonarrival:
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RKK @ronakkapadia.bsky.social · 31/03/2026
nonarrival of the bk, or (2)a relaxed act of self-­expression, “letting it out” as a follow-­through of built confidence or a sense of explosive release along the lines of unbounded gestures, or (3) a result of further entrainment, having “learned one’s lesson,” or “gained bibliographic authority.”
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RKK @ronakkapadia.bsky.social · 31/03/2026
I just stumbled on this first footnote in Mel Chen's second book INTOXICATED (p. 165, no. 1): "I’m thinking ­here of the ­ jumble of associations with second books in the mythography of tenured academics, often (1) an emotional complex of “second book jitters” that sometimes leads to extended ...
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RKK @ronakkapadia.bsky.social · 31/03/2026
Academic pals: looking for inspo and seeking examples of your favorite "second monographs"? In grad school, mine was always Saidiya Hartman's LOSE YOUR MOTHER for its style and substance swerving away from traditional expectations toward creative non-fiction and something more. What are your faves?
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RKK @ronakkapadia.bsky.social · 29/03/2026
If/then: how to celebrate the destruction of empire when so much of our (minoritized) lives/hopes/dreams in the imperial core are bound up in the structural dominance of the United States, historically?
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RKK @ronakkapadia.bsky.social · 29/03/2026
Sunday thotsicle: the impending strategic defeats of US/Israel in Iran/West Asia may lead to the accelerated crumbling of US empire, but not without further pain/misery for people around the Global South as well as minoritized people in the imperial core.
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Megan Wachspress @meganwachspress.bsky.social · 16/03/2026
If he's going to get a national profile on the strength of a younger woman's campaign, I'm going to come out and say it: during his short-lived tenure as a math professor, Biss had an inappropriate romantic relationship with one of his undergraduate students. I was that student.
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Long COVID Justice @longcovidjustice.org · 13/03/2026
This #LongCOVIDAwarenessMonth, we’re excited to announce that our new oral history website is live! Featuring 100+ hours of interviews of people living with #LongCOVID. We’re building a living history of Long COVID, and bringing voices from the margins to the center. ListeningForTheLongHaul.org
Background is aqua and purple gradient. Large gradient text across the top says: "Listening for the Long Haul, a new website documenting Long COVID oral history." Below this is a set of illustrations including a bird flying, a window, a face mask, a microphone, a person lying in bed with headphones, a person tucked under blankets with a food bowl and laptop, a radio, an armchair, and a sound wavelength. Along the bottom edge are logos for Long COVID Justice and History Moves.
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RKK @ronakkapadia.bsky.social · 05/03/2026
You can't convince me that the imperial horrors of the 2020s are not explicitly connected to the c19 pandemic's necropolitical social reordering, which anesthesized everyone into absorbing mass death and disablement as the background noise to the dystopian here and now. War crimes = shoulder shrugs?
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RKK @ronakkapadia.bsky.social · 04/03/2026
If you filter your water in your home, but not your indoor air, you’re doing it wrong. Humans drink about 2 to 3 L of water a day but they breathe in about 11,000 L of air! Ventilate and filtrate, folks. You’re welcome.
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RKK @ronakkapadia.bsky.social · 28/02/2026
We live under the rule of the Epstein Class, which either rapes little girls or bombs little girls in its infinite quest for world domination. Miserable timeline. No War with Iran. Let Iran Live. End the Forever Wars. War is the Opposite of “Women, Life, Freedom”!
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RKK @ronakkapadia.bsky.social · 28/02/2026
We live under the rule of the Epstein Class, which either rapes little girls or bombs little girls in its infinite quest for world domination. Miserable timeline. No War with Iran. Let Iran Live. End the Forever Wars. War is the Opposite of “Women, Life, Freedom”!
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Qasim Rashid, Esq. @qasimrashid.com · 26/02/2026
IL is on the verge of electing a Senator far more aligned with Trump, MAGA power brokers & ICE infrastructure expansion than the values of a deep-blue state. Here’s what Raja Krishnamoorthi hopes you don’t know about him & how we elect someone better.
qasimrashid.com
WARNING: Illinois Is About to Elect a MAGA-Aligned Senator
But it's not too late -- here's what we need to do to prevent a catastrophic failure and instead elect someone whose record aligns with our values
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RKK @ronakkapadia.bsky.social · 26/01/2026
How do we get every (yt) liberal a CRASH course in abolition, state violence, counter/insurgencies, settler colonialism, disability justice, & racial capitalism??0? Like June 2020-style study & collectivism? BC the political regression is painful. We gotta retool for the remainder of this decade.
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RKK @ronakkapadia.bsky.social · 21/01/2026
I say this a lot, but it’s worth repeating: academics who casually speak of the “covid years” as if they’re in the rear view mirror only and not *currently still ongoing* are intellectually and morally impoverished. All of their critical contributions should be questioned with skepticism as such.
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RKK @ronakkapadia.bsky.social · 21/01/2026
I say this a lot, but it’s worth repeating: academics who casually speak of the “covid years” as if they’re in the rear view mirror only and not *currently still ongoing* are intellectually and morally impoverished. All of their critical contributions should be questioned with skepticism as such.
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Ken Jennings @kenjennings.bsky.social · 07/01/2026
The “prosecute the former regime at every level” candidate has my vote in 2028.
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Nick Turse @nickturse.bsky.social · 20/12/2025
THE U.S. HAS KILLED MORE THAN 100 PEOPLE IN BOAT STRIKES. WE’RE TRACKING THEM ALL. The Intercept is keeping count of all publicly declared U.S. attacks on boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean. theintercept.com/2025/11/17/t...
theintercept.com
The U.S. Has Killed More than 100 People in Boat Strikes. We're Tracking Them All.
The Intercept is keeping count of all publicly declared U.S. attacks on boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean and the number of civilians killed.
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Bright D Limm 임대중 @bdlimm.myatproto.social · 21/12/2025
Shaming rarely works on most people, so I will simply say: follow the facts, both scientific and economic, for they tell the same story: The pandemic is far from over. SARS-CoV-2 is still spreading; COVID-19 is still disabling millions today. It's never too late to align one's conduct with reality.
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Tim Carvell @timcarvell.bsky.social · 21/12/2025
Now seems like a swell time to point out that Frontline just released this excellent 11-minute mini-documentary about what happened inside CECOT.
m.youtube.com
Surviving CECOT (full documentary) | Deported to a Maximum-Security Prison | FRONTLINE + ProPublica
YouTube video by FRONTLINE PBS | Official
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