(Dis)Orientation

Location

We’ll meet at NYPL’s Stavros Niarchos Library Foundation, 5th Ave + 40th St, Room 604 (the conference room along 5th Ave — hang a left when you exit the elevator!) at 4pm!

Agenda

This week we’ll meet one another, discuss our individual interests in the class and our collective goals, calibrate our logistical demands (i.e. figure out where y’all are coming from, and how much travel time we should build in!), and explore our plans for the spring and beyond.

Looking Ahead

We’ll be foraging with Field Meridians in late April; you might be interested in planting some seeds by attending this virtual 2026 Foragers Gathering hosted by the Bronx River Alliance on February 21 at noon! (via LinYee Yuan) 

Today’s Presentation

Today’s Resources

I’ll be drawing on the following texts in my presentation today. You needn’t track them down and/or read them, but you’re welcome to do so if you’re so inclined!:

Decline of Web Search  

• Jessica Camargo, “Revised Definitions of the Verb ‘To Google,’” McSweeney’s Internet Tendency (December 9, 2025). 
• Kalley Huang, “For Gen Z, TikTok Is the New Search Engine,” The New York Times (September 16, 2022); Dmitri Brereton, “TikTok:  The Search Engine for Experiences,” DKB Blog (March 2, 2023). 
• Brian X. Chen, “Is A.I. the Future of Web Browsing?” The New York Times (July 11, 2025). 
• John Herrman, “SEO Is Dead. Say Hello to GEO,” New York Magazine (August 4, 2025). 
• Suzannah Showler, “Your Internet Browser Does Not Belong To You,” Wired (October 3, 2023). 

Militarization of Public Space

• Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (Verso, 1990). 
• ** James Folta, “‘Everything We Do Matters.’ Minneapolis’s Moon Palace Books Is a Hub for Anti-ICE Resistance,” LitHub (January 29, 2026). 
• J. David McSwane and Hannah Allam, “Unfettered and Unaccoutable: How Trump is Building a Violent, Shadowy Federal Police Force,” Pro Publica (October 18, 2025). 
• “The Militarization of American Cities Is Underway, Starting with DC,” Invisibible.
• Mariame Kaba, “Arrested at the Library: Policing the Stacks” (2025). 

Colonization

• Yara Hawari, “Neocolonialism in Gaza,” New Internationalist (January 6, 2026). 
• Alberto Toscano and Brenna Bhandar, “Slumlord Empire,” Protean (February 27, 2025). 
• Julian Borger, “Trump’s Territorial Ambition: New Imperialism or a Case of the Emperor’s New Clothes?” The Guardian (January 10, 2026). 
• John Nichols, “Donald Trump’s 21st-Century Colonialism,” The Nation (January 9, 2026). 
• Inae Oh, “A New Theory Explains Why Trump Keeps Threatening Global Takeovers,” Mother Jones (January 6, 2026). 
• Christian Davenport, Rocket Dreams: Musk, Bezos, and the Inside Story of the New, Trillion-Dollar Space Race (Crown, 2025). 
• Dan Falk, “Unpacking the Flaws of Techbro Dreams of the Future,” Mother Jones (May 21, 2025). 
• Guy Standing, “How Private Corporations Stole the Sea from the Commons,” Global Policy (August 23, 2022). 
• Adrian Cato, “Thinking through Deep Seabed Mining with Black Feminist Marine Ecologies” in Kristie Patricia Flannery, Renisa Mawani, and Mikki Stelder, eds.,  Oceans as Archives (Routledge, 2025). 

Instrumental Education 

• Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Herder & Heder, 1970). 
• Henry A. Giroux, “Chartering Disaster,” Truthout (June 21, 2010). 
• Rob Horning, “Fog of Bafflebag,” Internal Exile (August 10, 2024); “Commodified Incuriosity,” Internal Exile (September 1, 2024). 
• A.R. Moxon, “Your Ignorance Doesn’t Make You an Expert,” The Reframe (August 31, 2025). 
• Katrina Miller, “Nobel Prizes This Year Offer Three Cheers for Slow Science,” The New York Times (October 9, 2025).
• Jonathan D. Jansen, ed., On Discovery: How Knowledge is Produced Across the Disciplines (Cambridge University Press, 2025).

Reclamation

• Alden Burke, “How to Fall Down a Rabbit Hole,” Syllabus Project (November 2023).
• Richard Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out (Basic Books); NOVA documentary (1983). Like so many of history’s “intrepid explorers”, Feynman’s a complicated character. 
• Rose Casey, “In Defense of Imagination,” Public Books (March 27, 2024). 
• Nico Baumbach, “The Last Good Dad: On Fredric Jameson’s Pedagogy,” Parapraxis 5 (date?). 
• André Breton, “The Language of Stones,” The Paris Review (July 7, 2025); originally published in Le Surréalisme, même, 3 (Fall 1957).
• Jarrett Earnest, “‘I Am the Heir to Delacroix’” [on Jack Whitten], The New York Review (July 24, 2025).
• Verlyn Klinkenborg, “Such Flexible Intensity of Life,” New York Review of Books (October 9, 2025) – on other-species curiosity and navigation.