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Mallory James

@secondordersocialresearch.com
679 followers 1K following 254 posts

political economy & engineering studies research. neurodiverse, first-generation college student, she/her. PhD anthropology, Chicago. academic writing teacher. energy expert on non-normative terms.

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Mallory James @secondordersocialresearch.com · 01/05/2026
It is 'bandcamp Friday' on a specific music platform that on certain Fridays, passes all their revenue to the musicians themselves. I recommend this band! countingcardsmusic.bandcamp.com/album/jormun...
countingcardsmusic.bandcamp.com
Jormungandr, by Counting Cards
10 track album
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Eveyweveydevey @eveyweveydevey.bsky.social · 01/05/2026
Okay kicking my own shins that I didn't check this out earlier!!! This is awesome! It reminds me of the SoCal skatepunk I grew up on. Melodic and a pechant for harmonic choruses but add a smidge of filth to it and a bit of a Metal feel and aesthetic...
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Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · 07/04/2026
everything we are seeing now is the consequence of having a political environment in which indifference to the deaths and suffering of other people - even by the state whose supposed responsibility is to safeguard their welfare - is a superpower rather than a political liability
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Todd Stoll @ctoddstoll.bsky.social · 09/02/2026
the disparity poem/collage: february 9th, 2026 © #Poetry #ŞehîdNamirin #JinJiyanAzadi
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Sleepy Lutz Schruttke @garstigesweib.eurosky.social · 08/03/2026
Apropos Fachkräftemangel: Eine Bekannte ist ausgebildete Erzieherin. Sie muss sich einen neuen Arbeitsplatz suchen. U.a. bewarb sie sich für eine Stelle in einem Gemeindekindergarten. Sie wurde abgelehnt, weil sie Fachkraft und damit zu teuer ist. Frauenarbeit muss billig sein! Nämlich! #Frauentag
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Mallory James @secondordersocialresearch.com · 06/03/2026
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Mallory James @secondordersocialresearch.com · 28/02/2026
Bridgebuilders and Historians Turned Metal Into Myth thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/bridgebuilde... #Bridges #Engineering #Evolution #Metal via @mitpress.bsky.social
thereader.mitpress.mit.edu
Bridgebuilders and Historians Turned Metal Into Myth
Historians often reinforce evolutionist narratives that rank civilizations and nationalize invention.
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Mallory James @secondordersocialresearch.com · 28/02/2026
Interesting combined material and conceptual history here: Bridgebuilders and Historians Turned Metal Into Myth thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/bridgebuilde... #Bridges #Engineering #Evolution #Metal via @mitpress.bsky.social #Anthropology #STS
thereader.mitpress.mit.edu
Bridgebuilders and Historians Turned Metal Into Myth
Historians often reinforce evolutionist narratives that rank civilizations and nationalize invention.
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CanihazCAREER @canihazcareer.bsky.social · 15/02/2026
Day 207: No funding this year? What a gift—extra time to reflect, build character, perfect the syllabus, and cultivate resilience. Cheerful perseverance will fund itself! ⏳ #AcademicChatter
A generative art cat waiting for grant
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Mallory James @secondordersocialresearch.com · 13/02/2026
In one week from today, our 📚 Energy and Social Science Reading Group 📚 will meet online to discuss Matt Wilde’s book A Blessing and a Curse: Oil, Politics, and Morality in Bolivarian Venezuela (2023): www.sup.org/books/latin-... #Anthropology #Venezuela #Oil
sup.org
A Blessing and a Curse | Stanford University Press
A Blessing and a Curse examines the lived experience of political change, moral uncertainty, and economic crisis amid Venezuela's controversial Bolivarian Revolution.
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Mallory James @secondordersocialresearch.com · 12/02/2026
Writing my journal article: Dealing with just one subsection at a time 👣 Laying all my sources out, at hand! 🗞🛠 #academicsky #academicchatter #anthropology #sts
Ten piles of printed academic articles are laid in an arc across a colorful carpet and wood laminate floor. Some stacked folders are seen in the distance.
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Counting Cards @countingcardsmusic.bsky.social · 06/02/2026
It's bandcamp Friday and you can help support my music. Below is the @etherdiver.bsky.social review of my debut album. countingcardsmusic.bandcamp.com/album/jormun...
countingcardsmusic.bandcamp.com
Jormungandr, by Counting Cards
10 track album
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womensartbluesky.bsky.social @womensartbluesky.bsky.social · 05/02/2026
Christi Belcourt, contemporary Métis visual artist known for her paintings which depict floral patterns inspired by Métis and First Nations historical beadwork art #WomensArt
Four paintings featuring multicoloured and significant floral designs on black backgrounds
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Mallory James @secondordersocialresearch.com · 04/02/2026
Returning today to data and unpublished writing that are more than 10 years old, but speak to a phenomenon of ongoing interest. 🥲😶 I am filled with compassion towards my younger self, even while amused at her evident immaturity in the academic profession:🧵 #AcademicSky #STS #Anthropology
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Mallory James @secondordersocialresearch.com · 29/01/2026
There's an image, now, to illustrate the book destruction we wrote about: ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/112... 😢
ieeexplore.ieee.org
Special Issue Editorial: Extraction by Design—AI, Value, and the Future of Work
In August 2025, Australia’s Productivity Commission acknowledged that “large AI models are already being trained on copyrighted materials without consent or compensation” [1, p. 25]. In doing so, they...
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Mallory James @secondordersocialresearch.com · 14/01/2026
Looking forward to energy #anthropology panel proposals for #EASA 2026! 🔌🔦 nomadit.co.uk/conference/e...
nomadit.co.uk
P153: Opacity and Energy Knowledge: Getting to Just, Sustainable Energy Policy in a Polarizing World [Energy Anthropology Network (EAN)]
This panel explores changing cultural visibility and opacity of energy in anthropological research and impacts on energy justice and sustainability. It asks
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Mallory James @secondordersocialresearch.com · 14/01/2026
Looking forward to energy #anthropology panel proposals for #EASA 2026! 🔌🔦 nomadit.co.uk/conference/e...
nomadit.co.uk
P153: Opacity and Energy Knowledge: Getting to Just, Sustainable Energy Policy in a Polarizing World [Energy Anthropology Network (EAN)]
This panel explores changing cultural visibility and opacity of energy in anthropological research and impacts on energy justice and sustainability. It asks
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Mallory James @secondordersocialresearch.com · 14/01/2026
Interesting resource for enabling the more deliberate use of language in our professional #writing! #AcademicSky #STS #anthropology www.selfdefined.app
selfdefined.app
Home «
A modern dictionary about us. We define our words, but they don't define us.
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Mallory James @secondordersocialresearch.com · 10/12/2025
Our #energy #anthropology network panel for #EASA Poland 2026! . . . 👁️Thematizing visibility, mediation, and justice🔌🤨 Please send abstracts by 26 Jan. nomadit.co.uk/conference/e...
nomadit.co.uk
P153: Opacity and Energy Knowledge: Getting to Just, Sustainable Energy Policy in a Polarizing World [Energy Anthropology Network (EAN)]
This panel explores changing cultural visibility and opacity of energy in anthropological research and impacts on energy justice and sustainability. It asks how scholars might contribute to “energy w...
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Mallory James @secondordersocialresearch.com · 06/01/2026
"An interdisciplinary team is not a group of people trained in 'interdisciplinarity'. It’s a group of people who have deep knowledge and sound judgment in their disciplines." Interesting point I just stumbled across here: theconversation.com/why-the-inte... #AcademicSky #AcademicChatter
theconversation.com
Why the ‘interdisciplinary’ push in universities is actually a dangerous antidisciplinary trend
Talk of “breaking down the barriers” is all too often a cover for breaking down academic disciplines to create administrative flexibility.
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Mallory James @secondordersocialresearch.com · 16/12/2025
I haven't lived in DC for quite a while, but somehow I still was invited to this #Anthropology event, which I am appreciatively watching a recording of now: youtube.com/watch?v=6_1Q...
youtube.com
Surviving DOGE: Anthropological Adaptations and Career Shifts
YouTube video by Washington Association of Professional Anthropologists
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Mallory James @secondordersocialresearch.com · 16/12/2025
Anthropic settlement checks are arriving in the mail to book authors who suffered #AI #plagiarism. This reminds us that beyond a one-off check, #AcademicSky authors, #nonfiction #writers and community members need sustainable livelihoods and the ability to hope for a positive 'Future of Work.' (1/2)
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Mallory James @secondordersocialresearch.com · 15/12/2025
"Thinking of AI technologies by means of the relationship between mining (as a practice) and energy (as a concept) reminds us of how regrettable environmental legacies can hide behind a clean and innocent-sounding key term set forth as a social good." #AI #STS ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/112...
ieeexplore.ieee.org
Special Issue Editorial: Extraction by Design—AI, Value, and the Future of Work
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Mallory James @secondordersocialresearch.com · 12/12/2025
"How can it be possible to predict a package’s arrival down to the hour, yet know almost nothing about the conditions of its manufacture?" Indeed. logicmag.io/scale/see-no...
logicmag.io
See No Evil
An investigation into how software wires global supply chains, and what code conceals.
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Mallory James @secondordersocialresearch.com · 10/12/2025
Our #energy #anthropology network panel for #EASA Poland 2026! . . . 👁️Thematizing visibility, mediation, and justice🔌🤨 Please send abstracts by 26 Jan. nomadit.co.uk/conference/e...
nomadit.co.uk
P153: Opacity and Energy Knowledge: Getting to Just, Sustainable Energy Policy in a Polarizing World [Energy Anthropology Network (EAN)]
This panel explores changing cultural visibility and opacity of energy in anthropological research and impacts on energy justice and sustainability. It asks how scholars might contribute to “energy w...
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Mallory James @secondordersocialresearch.com · 08/12/2025
I have words, and I am going to use them. I have a voice, and I am going to use it. #AmWriting People in my birth country are trying to curtail the existence of the form of expertise my colleagues and I represent, #Anthropology. But we won't be erased. We will persist! Go #SocialScience go! ❤️‍🔥💪🏼❤️‍🔥
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Robin G Nelson @robingnelson.blacksky.app · 26/11/2025
The NSF Bio Anthro Program DDRIG, Cultural Anthrpology DDRIG, and Archaeology DDRIG have all been archived (as of yesterday afternoon). Please speak with your grad students and plan accordingly. To say I am angry and depressed about this is an understatement.
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Mallory James @secondordersocialresearch.com · 28/11/2025
📖 Would you like to join us next week to discuss the book Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia (2022)? 📖 #STS #energy #anthropology #history #energyhistory #technologyhistory Our reading group is meeting for the last time in 2025! (1/6)
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Joerg Lau @joerglau.bsky.social · 23/11/2025
„Quiet, Piggy!“ Just think about that for a minute, and what it means to live in a time when a President can assault a woman in public like that without any consequences. It‘s quite a testimony to the age of regression we live in.
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Counting Cards @countingcardsmusic.bsky.social · 12/11/2025
"...this infuses responsible professionalism with class-specific loyalties that could more readily serve to dampen, rather than amplify, critiques of engineering’s wider harms." www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
tandfonline.com
Class, Critique, and Containment: Arcs of Historical Change in Australian Engineering Ethics Codes
Participation in national professional associations is a common strategy for self-distinction. Since 1919, some Australian engineers have joined a national association, affirming agreement to align...
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Mallory James @secondordersocialresearch.com · 13/11/2025
"Universities provide the fundamental infrastructure for decision-making in industry and government. And they provide the tools for bolstering democracy - indeed, this was what the systems we have inherited from the post-war moment were largely for." open.substack.com/pub/hannahfo... #AcademicSky
open.substack.com
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Mallory James @secondordersocialresearch.com · 12/11/2025
LMU posted my publications onto the Department's page!! 🥰 www.en.ekwee.uni-muenchen.de/publications...
en.ekwee.uni-muenchen.de
Articles in English - Institute for European Ethnology and Cultural Analysis - LMU Munich
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Mallory James @secondordersocialresearch.com · 11/11/2025
So interesting
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Mallory James @secondordersocialresearch.com · 08/11/2025
Just read this interesting piece from 2018 defining the "analog slot" for social studies of technology, and I think this concept should remain part of the conversation for #sts and #anthropology as we increase our attention to the social studies of #AI. doi.org/10.14506/ca3...
doi.org
What Should an Anthropology of Algorithms Do? | Cultural Anthropology
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Mallory James @secondordersocialresearch.com · 06/11/2025
"But what if we do not have common problems, but bitter conflicts over the very definition of our problems, in a context of ever greater polarisation?" #AcademicSky #research #science Horizon Europe’s collaborative projects ask for the impossible www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/hori...
timeshighereducation.com
Horizon Europe’s collaborative projects ask for the impossible
Social sciences funding would be best spent on narrower calls. But would it dry up if we stopped pretending we can save the world, asks Andreas Schedler
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Mallory James @secondordersocialresearch.com · 05/11/2025
Random heartwarming news: Yesterday, I discovered that the Bavarian State Library, which does not allow people to wear their coats into the library, started providing red blankets to be used by the students inside the library who are cold 🥰 #gratitude
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Mallory James @secondordersocialresearch.com · 05/11/2025
So many of the doors that I walked through have closed behind me: 😢 Admissions are literally paused at the place that built my mind 🧠and asked me to become more than I was: socialsciences.uchicago.edu/programs-stu... We hope it's temporary . . . 🚪😿 #Science #academicchatter #educationsky
socialsciences.uchicago.edu
Doctoral Programs | The University of Chicago Division of the Social Sciences
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Mallory James @secondordersocialresearch.com · 05/11/2025
I am *still* not using Facebook or Instagram, or corporate-controlled outlets NYT or Wall Street Journal, from April 2025 to now. My attention is valuable--yours too💰 Here's a how-to guide: imaginethenews.com/media-libera... #MediaLiberationDay #MediaRevolution #TheRevolutionWillNotBeMonetized
imaginethenews.com
Media Liberation Day
On November 5, 2025,   The Media Revolution (UK) is launching the Media Liberation Day campaign, a movement bringing awareness to the rupture in the legacy mainstream media system. Now captured by...
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Robert Reich @rbreich.bsky.social · 03/11/2025
The 400 richest Americans are now worth a record $6.6 trillion. The entire bottom 50% of America is worth just $4.2 trillion. Read that back. When 400 people control more wealth than half a country’s population, we have a very serious problem.
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Mallory James @secondordersocialresearch.com · 29/10/2025
Five years ago, my newest @engrstudies.bsky.social paper was chapter 2 of my #Anthropology dissertation. I am trying to keep the space alive for the intersection of disciplinary knowlege X a topic that lots of interdisciplinary and #STS scholars have already 👣 traveled through.
Several archival papers have been printed and annotated, sitting atop a desk. A green folder is visible with a label saying "ethics code trajectory study."
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jon ben-menachem @jbenmenachem.com · 21/10/2025
Wow. Harvard nuking its PhD programs - Science PhD admissions reduced by more than 75% - Arts & Humanities reduced by about 60% - Social Sciences by 50–70% - History by 60% - Biology by 75% - The German department will lose all PhD seats - Sociology from six PhD students to zero
thecrimson.com
Harvard FAS Cuts Ph.D. Seats By More Than Half Across Next Two Admissions Cycles | News | The Harvard Crimson
The Faculty of Arts and Sciences slashed the number of Ph.D. student admissions slots for the Science division by more than 75 percent and for the Arts & Humanities division by about 60 percent for th...
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Mallory James @secondordersocialresearch.com · 29/10/2025
There's another energy reading group starting up! Perfect for those who prefer to meet earlier in the day, earlier in the week:
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Mallory James @secondordersocialresearch.com · 28/10/2025
Hi #STS! I am sure that many if you have read and/or taught the work of 'our' Ludwig Fleck--who technically pre-dated STS although claimed as canonical for history and philosophy of science for "Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact" (1979 [1935])--but here's some biographical info...(1/3)
gavi.org
Vaccine subterfuge: How vaccine-makers fooled the Nazis from inside a concentration camp lab
Confined first at Auschwitz then Buchenwald, a Jewish microbiologist conspired with a ragtag team of scientists and rebels to send dud typhus vaccines to the German soldiers on the eastern front.
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Anthony Michael Kreis @anthonymkreis.bsky.social · 27/10/2025
Whenever people complain about the number of folks relying on food stamps, it is worth reminding them that SNAP is, by too large of a degree, a subsidy for corporations that refuse to pay a living wage and their political allies who reject public policy prescriptions to reduce income inequality.
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Alisa Bokulich @alisabokulich.bsky.social · 14/09/2025
Ann Johnson Institute Writing Retreat for #HPS & #STS scholars, 6-12 July 2026 at Ampersand Inn, Newton New Jersey. Theme is "Context of Discovery in Science & Technology", and the objective is project completion. 10 scholars will be selected. Applications due 17 November 2025 sc.edu/study/colleg...
sc.edu
The Ann Johnson Institute for Science, Technology and Society - McCausland College of Arts and Sciences | University of South Carolina
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Mallory James @secondordersocialresearch.com · 26/10/2025
Found this insightful
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Mallory James @secondordersocialresearch.com · 25/10/2025
But that was where the First Ladies used to work: www.thepersistent.com/white-house-... ♀️😭 ❕️ Is the idea here that we women (but only the richest of us) are supposed to sit around in dresses and be looked at, 👁📷 rather than actually DOING IMPORTANT WORK? 📝 #strongwomen #feminist
thepersistent.com
Trump Has Demolished a History of Work by First Ladies
The East Wing was the nation's symbolic heart.
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Mallory James @secondordersocialresearch.com · 23/10/2025
Interesting defense of the analog over the digital for #sustainability. Are #STS thinkers able to work with this line of argument and move it forward, or are we instead necessarily trapped into the reactive space of critiquing technosolutionism? islandpress.medium.com/in-praise-of...
islandpress.medium.com
In Praise of Analog Cities: Futureproofing in a Time of Crisis
By Mikael Colville-Andersen
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Mallory James @secondordersocialresearch.com · 23/10/2025
Today I got a genuine giggle from opening my email inbox to hear that certain people "would be truly honoured to welcome you as an invited Speaker at the prestigious World Conference Plant Science and Sustainable Agriculture" 🌱on the basis of my paper published yesterday. 😂 (1/5) #AcademicSky
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