Gemma Sharpe
Assistant Prof in Art History, Cold War internationalism, Modernism in Pakistan and South Asia | GC-CUNY alum | Cleveland based | From across the pond
- Reposted by Gemma SharpeAh. Thank you. I have also thought recently about the consequence of my argument, which was: higher ed was marketing a palatable version of femininity to counter culture war claims of deviant feminists. One consequence is coding “wine moms” as domestic terrorists — a hop, skip, and a jump.
- Funny as my mind has been drifting to @tressiemcphd.bsky.social's essay on Bama Rush the last few days. Beyond the gender prescience, how Rush is the perfect rightwing foil to real community-building. Rush "community" as self-interested, exclusive, hierarchical, tidy and aesthetically pleasing, etc
- Funny as my mind has been drifting to @tressiemcphd.bsky.social's essay on Bama Rush the last few days. Beyond the gender prescience, how Rush is the perfect rightwing foil to real community-building. Rush "community" as self-interested, exclusive, hierarchical, tidy and aesthetically pleasing, etc
- Reposted by Gemma Sharpeprotip: to exclude economics journals from the search add "capitalism"
- Could someone invent a "Private Equity Lookup" app so I can check whether the family run "since 1875" local business isn't in fact a subsidiary of Billionaires International LLC? Something like those barcode apps that tell you when your moisturizer is full of arsenic would be awesome, thanks.
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- Sighs in art historian…
- Reposted by Gemma Sharpesomeone should invent a thing that's like a university but it's goal is to facilitate learning
- Reposted by Gemma SharpeAs I was just saying. They will scale up random “schools” based on market speculation and then close them down when demand wanes. Thats the plan.
- Reposted by Gemma SharpeREPEAT AFTER ME (but really, after Neil Kraus): Wage stagnation and underemployment are not problems that education can fix. We cannot "upskill" students into well-paying jobs that do. not. exist.
- Reposted by Gemma Sharpewhen i review an article charitably
- Reposted by Gemma SharpeAcademics in Assyria in the 7th c BC complain that admin is preventing them from doing research and teaching
- Reposted by Gemma SharpeThe #1 lesson from yesterday’s blowout: Humanities majors killed on the job market 1) Mamdani- Africana Studies 2) Spanberger -French 3) Sherill - Global History
- Reposted by Gemma SharpeOne anthropomorphic evolutionary event I didn’t see coming was the rise of the public utility and service sector into metaphorical powerhouses on social media, and I’m here for it 💯%!
- So rich to tell an indigenous artist that they're not taking up enough space... www.theguardian.com/artanddesign...
- Reposted by Gemma Sharpeby the end of this class students will gain insight into u.s. history while developing their skills as composers of rap interpretations of major historical events
- Reposted by Gemma SharpeThis is not OK www.thelondoneconomic.com/politics/how...
- Reposted by Gemma SharpeIt would be good if these kinds of retrospectives, as well as cultural coverage in general, included a look at the institutions' records in the political economy. Lowry's tenure included multiple rounds of bitter union action, including a 134-day strike in 2000, over low wages and poor healthcare.
- Reposted by Gemma SharpeI’m giving a talk at e-flux on Thursday 9/25, 7:30pm, “The Fluxhouse Cooperatives and the Future of the City.” The program will also include a performance of Maciunas’s “Solo for Violin” by Laura Ortman. www.e-flux.com/events/67832...
- Reposted by Gemma SharpeIf you have any lingering questions about how @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social could be both African and Asian, I talked to four artists whose backgrounds echo his; and whose work involves telling such stories. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/22/a...
- Reposted by Gemma Sharpeit's related I think to how liberal funders and institutions are allergic to spending on progressive media (eg how CAP shuttered ThinkProgress). rather than invest in that kind of long-term project the money vanishes into the election consultant maw
- Reposted by Gemma SharpeSay it again for those in the back: HUMANITIES USUALLY SUBSIDIZE STEM at most R1s. Yes we have receipts.
- Reposted by Gemma SharpeIf you work in higher ed, you need to get your folks together and end the use of course evals or at least bar their consideration in evaluation, promotion, and hiring. This needed to happen yesterday because they don't measure learning, they measure instructor gender, but now it's a snitch pool.
- Reposted by Gemma SharpeSecond hand embarrassment causes me physical pain. Forgive my bluntness, but my pelvic floor sort of cramps when I see it. I watched 1/2 of Saved by the Bell with my eyes closed because Screech hurt my stomach. I’m basically bleeding out watching this ad.
- Reposted by Gemma SharpeWe are in a weird space. Expertise has to yield to populism to preserve the institutions that confer expertise but the market is using fake populism to juice every bit of profitable expertise before it all goes boom. Shorter: the managerial class, yo.
- Reposted by Gemma Sharpe[This post could not be retrieved]
- Reposted by Gemma SharpeNo one is “replacing” teachers with AI. People are redistributing money to tech companies for AI and replacing permanent salaried workers with contingent, poorly paid ones whose labor is to patch together the system that is being broken by AI.
- Reposted by Gemma Sharpeoh no the bad guys can’t imagine doing anything societally responsible and ethically competent with one’s privilege it’s almost as if the quiet part is loud like the point of privilege is to hoard it and lord it over others huh weird
- Reposted by Gemma Sharpecrush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their consultants
- Reposted by Gemma SharpeThe average age of Apollo 11 Mission Control was 28 years old. The oldest was 36.
- Reposted by Gemma SharpeIf a colleague had the reliability rate of an LLM, they would be fired. If ordinary* software did, it would be uninstalled. LLMs require the chat format, because chat makes us party to the conversation. We insert the meaning ourselves - and hold it to a different standard. It's the mirror effect.
- If a human told you things that were correct 80% of the time but claimed, flat out, with absolute confidence, that they were correct 100% of the time, you would dislike them & never trust a word they say. All I'm really suggesting is for people to treat chatbots with that same distrust & antagonism.
- Reposted by Gemma SharpeFacts. But instead of creating a narrative pitting faculty v. staff in terms of pay/ equity, the better narrative is faculty & staff on the same side v. administrators who are paid vastly better than both. Oh, & the exhausted assistant in this example works for & was hired by… administrators.
- Reposted by Gemma SharpeI was fine with the protests against the king until they threw the tea into the ocean.
- Got a first smile out of our newborn reading the Trump/Musk tweets out loud
- Reposted by Gemma Sharpe63% of American adults had unfavorable views of Martin Luther King Jr in August 1966, per Gallup surveys 46% of Mississippi GOP voters said interracial marriage should be illegal in a 2011 PPP poll to push w/e is popular instead of trying to popularize justice is to admit you lack moral leadership
- Do yourselves a favor and read this article. The best satirists of British culture quaintness couldn’t have come up with better: www.theguardian.com/environment/...
- “When you see her perched somewhere, it’s lovely. You think, what a beautiful bird. But when you’re outside and you hear that squawk, you don’t have much time. You know she’s coming down.”
- In April, the Romford Recorder carried a story about Nikki Dix, 37, who was attacked as she walked in nearby Havering country park. She took a picture of what she thought was a buzzard and carried on walking, then felt a bang on the back of her head. “I was dead shocked,” she said.
- Or let’s try a bigger idea: we give proper support public libraries doing their best to provide research access and databases to the *entire* reading public? Not just private institutions and the current/former academic class 🤷🏻♀️
- Like, if you wanna talk about “blunting harms…”
- I say this as someone with a still-valid NYPL library card and access to the brilliant Ohio/Cleveland library system. Aside from the recent loss of ILL from the latter (presumably due to recent funding cuts), the two cover most of my academic needs plus Libby, etc. Public libraries are a miracle.
- Also I know this is an obvious point but universities are being attacked through cuts to their their public funding and claims to public good. Private solutions will do nothing to solve the “harms” of that. Ivory tower brain gets us literally nowhere in this fight.
- We dismiss the fruits and labor of culture and care little for intellectual property, creativity and expertise.
- Reposted by Gemma SharpeAfter years of head-scratching, I think we all viscerally understand how (not necessarily why) the 1918 flu pandemic was memory holed.
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- Reposted by Gemma SharpeAcademics desperately searching for the country that's going to take advantage of the evisceration of US universities and coming up with nothing plausible really goes to show how Trump is symptomatic of a much wider malaise.
- Reposted by Gemma Sharpe"We have more and more conviction that we need people who majored in history, in English, and things that have nothing to do with finance or technology."
- In honour of tonight’s celebrations #eurovision
- YouTube algorithm just sent me the first performance of Riverdance at the 1994 Eurovision Song Contest and somehow it manages to both hilarious AND a total masterpiece at the same time. Do yourselves a favor: youtu.be/w0v_pu6miJ8?...
- Reposted by Gemma SharpeThe weaponization of therapy speak and accommodation is really going to tank the whole endeavor
- Reposted by Gemma SharpeYou don’t have a “learning style” but between the evisceration of faculty governance and the personalization of learning done under the guise of access (when it’s just about admissions and marketing) everyone can claim that they have a sciencey sounding reason to cheat. 🤷🏾♀️
- Reposted by Gemma SharpeNation of people who would rather choke themselves unconscious than catch the eye of someone they don’t know on public transport is worried they may become an island of strangers.
- Reposted by Gemma SharpeHe's making it quite difficult for anyone with a conscience to vote Labour again while he remains leader of it.
- Reposted by Gemma SharpeLovely to hear from the Prime Minister that the historical policies which allowed my Mum to remain in the UK after studying here, thus enabling my existence, was a “squalid experiment in open borders”.
- Reposted by Gemma SharpeStarmer echoing Powell on 'strangers', the references to Birmingham, to lack of 'integration' and speaking English. It's such a despicable mix of all the worst parts of racism over the last half century. Even the way they upload his script, a desperate media spectacle www.gov.uk/government/s...
- Reposted by Gemma SharpeYet another Keir Starmer promise has been broken. What he is proposing is cruel and divisive and will only undermine our public services. You can't beat the far right by pandering to them or by throwing migrant workers and communities under the bus.
- Even if Keir Starmer comes to his senses and changes course, nobody will buy it. The cynicism of that man is spectacular. Only way forward is to replace him.
- Reposted by Gemma SharpeNext season of The Bear right here.
- Reposted by Gemma SharpeYou mean to tell me that Chicago gets to claim Michael Jordan, the first Black President AND the first American Pope? Good lord you ain't going to be able to tell them NOTHING.
- Reposted by Gemma SharpeEvery time a student sends their art history professor an email saying, "I was in X museum and saw that work we discussed in class!" a puppy smiles, angels sing, and a double rainbow irradiates the horizon.
- Apropos of nothing…
- Reposted by Gemma Sharpe[This post could not be retrieved]
- Reposted by Gemma SharpeHey scientists. I need you to speak up EVERY time someone makes a "why research is valuable" webpage and demand inclusion of humanities and social science.
- Reposted by Gemma SharpeI think one thing chatGPT's invention has revealed is how many people - including some very important people in society - find just basic reading and writing to be laborious and cumbersome to perform, and how oddly closely that type of strained literacy correlates with having other shitty opinions.
- Reposted by Gemma SharpeOne crucial and foundational upshot of that is that CUNY is still a university, while Columbia in a very meaningful sense is not. "But how will we pay for big research?" is the wrong question right now. Big research is important. But it's not what makes a university a university.
- Reposted by Gemma SharpePoor universities are already doing the kinds of things Gessen recommends. CUNY serves the broad public, and we have broad public support. The public is not alienated from us the way they are from Columbia. Whenever we march through the streets for CUNY funding, people honk and cheer!
- Reposted by Gemma SharpeWay to go, Harvard, for making us all say nonsensical things like “Way to go, Harvard.”
- Reposted by Gemma SharpePouring out a little liquor today for the handful of women astronauts who survived years of onerous training, men, and men only to have the press make Katy Perry their equal.
