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Nathan K. Hensley

@nathankhensley.bsky.social

4.4K followers 2.2K following 3.4K posts

Action without Hope (2025) • Forms of Empire (2016) • Fresno, Silver Spring • https://www.nathankhensley.net/ • he/him/his • Everything here in personal capacity only https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/A/bo242060390.html

www.nathankhensley.net

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Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 4h

Yes, totally. I think this is how many of our colleagues were essentially co-opted into projects whose ultimate goal was the dissolution of the institutions of knowledge we care about

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Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 4h

flipped classrooms & the unquestioned shift toward “student-led learning” were also part of the deprofessionalization->adjunctification->mechanization program whose ultimate goal was a fully administrative university

John Downes-Angus @johndownesangus.bsky.social · 5h

The over-reliance on standardization as the mechanism for writing instruction really was a pretty unbeatable context to produce de-professionalized teachers okay with using AI to grade

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Reposted by Nathan K. Hensley

abc @thekitchentapes.bsky.social · 19h

Something about this reminds me of how excited I was to start classes as a first-gen student at the University of Central Florida. My whole family was excited. My grandfather had a fourth-grade education, and I was going to Learn Big Things and Think Deep Thoughts. There was pride in that.

Jake Grumbach @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social · 21h

Just got back from Normal, IL for a lecture at Illinois State University. Established in 1857 after this small town lawyer named Abe secured the funding. Was reminded once again that US public universities are the triumph of civilization

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Reposted by Nathan K. Hensley

The Tennessee Holler @thetnholler.bsky.social · 1d

“YOU hit HER.”

CHICAGO - Trump’s ICE goons ram into a passing car after snatching someone, then brutally drag the female driver of the car they hit out of her car with guns drawn and arrest her too. (Her brother says she’s a citizen)

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Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 1d

hugely important topic! would absolutely come to that

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Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 1d

😂

Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 1d

absolute power corrupts absolutely. moderating a panel, only a little ✨

NAVSA 2025 @navsa2025.bsky.social · 2d

Are you the only human being who remains uncorrupted when given power? Consider moderating a panel!

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Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 1d

look at this picture of @marymullen.bsky.social's book on the shelves of @sel1500to1900.bsky.social !!! 🤩

Photograph of books on the SEL shelves, featuring Mary Mullen's NOVEL INSTITUTIONS and also Dockside Reading and The British Industrial Canal, among others

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Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 1d

It was very great to talk w/ the amazing SEL managing editor Kelly McKisson about institutions & pandemic-time in dialogue w work by @marymullen.bsky.social, @annakornbluh.bsky.social @mltondre.bsky.social, @devingarofalo.bsky.social, Liz Miller, Barbara Leckie, & others

@sel1500to1900.bsky.social

The Great Unread Era of the Global Shutdown: Pandemic Time, Remaindered Ideas, and the Vacuum of Reception, An Interview with Nathan K. Hensley Professor of English, Georgetown University – SEL's Marg...

marginalia.blogs.rice.edu

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Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 2d

it helps me, as a reader, to imagine the words SPONSORED CONTENT written across the masthead of every major newspaper and tv news outlet now

Dan Sinykin @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social · 2d

And who is the author of this op-ed? The billionaire CEO of an asset management firm who helped author the compact.

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Reposted by Nathan K. Hensley

Dan Sinykin @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social · 2d

And who is the author of this op-ed? The billionaire CEO of an asset management firm who helped author the compact.

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Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 3d

can't wait to read this!

Reposted by Nathan K. Hensley

Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 3d

Accepting this as an argument means accepting that, as an educator, your primary commitment is not to educating your students, or to propagating knowledge of your subject, but to finding and securing new markets for products in whose success your employers (or their bosses) have some kind of stake.

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Reposted by Nathan K. Hensley

The Pembroke Center at Brown University @pembrokecenter.bsky.social · 3d

Out of the Archives: a 1992 letter from Judith Butler in the papers of Hortense J. Spillers. Butler is giving the Pembroke Center Publics Lecture Wednesday, November 5. Tickets have sold out, but the lecture will be recorded and available on our YouTube playlist: www.youtube.com/playlist?lis....

Image shows a typewritten letter to Professor Hortense Spillers, signed by Judith Butler, Professor of Humanities. The letter is on Johns Hopkins University stationary.

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Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 3d

I do not think the work of philosophy or thinking is to sustain fantasies. The life of the mind is always lived inside the body, which means the opposite is also true — but nobody owns our minds. Solidarity.

Reposted by Nathan K. Hensley

Post45 Journal @post45.bsky.social · 3d

The 11th annual Post45 Graduate Symposium will be hosted by Duke University's Department of English, February 20-21, 2026! Check out the CFP (post45.org/graduate/202...) and please share with anyone who might be interested.

Abstracts are due November 14.

Abstract submission form QR code for the Post45 graduate symposium at Duke, February 20-21, 2026. The form is also accessible at https://tinyurl.com/2e2dr4wv.

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Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 3d

Aha! I see I am out of the RG loop! That sounds amazing

Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 3d

(i find that contact with difficult and real ideas can be weirdly stabilizing in the maelstrom of serially-worsening late-imperial news cycles)

Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 3d

Just saw that you can read this for free online and — well, if you haven’t read it before, you should

ctheory.indiana.edu/resources/fa...

From Jameson, Marxism and Form (1974):

CHAPTER FIVE
TOWARDS DIALECTICAL
CRITICISM
A PHENOMENOLOGICAL, description of dialectical criticism?
The contradiction is not so great as it might at first glance appear. The peculiar difficulty of dialectical writing lies indeed in its holistic, "totalizing" character: as though you could not say any one thing until you had first said every-thing; as though with each new idea you were bound to recapitulate the entire system. So it is that the attempt to do

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Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 3d

Wait which reading group???

Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 3d

(2)

inner leverage one floor higher, in which the mind, in a kind of shifting of gears, now finds itself willing to take what had been a question for an answer, standing outside its previous exertions in such a way that it reckons itself into the prob-lem, understanding the dilemma not as a resistance of the object alone, but also as the result of a subject-pole deployed and disposed against it in a strategic fashion-in short, as the function of a determinate subject-object rela-tionship.
There is a breathlessness about this shift from the normal object-oriented activity of the mind to such dialectical self-consciousness-something of the sickening shudder we feel in an elevator's fall or in the sudden dip in an airliner. That recalls us to our bodies much as this recalls us to our mental positions as thinkers and observers. The shock indeed is basic, and constitutive of the dialectic as such: without this transformational moment, without this initial conscious transcendence of an older, more naïve position, there can be no question of any genuinely dialectical coming to consciousness.

Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 3d

What is dialectical thinking?

(1)

It is, of course, thought to the second power: an intensification of the normal thought processes such that a renewal of light washes over the object of their exasperation, as though in the midst of its immediate perplexities the mind had attempted, by willpower, by fat, to lift itself mightily up by its own bootstraps. Faced with the operative procedures of the nonreflective thinking mind (whether grappling with philosophical or artistic, political or scientific problems and objects), dialectical thought tries not so much to complete and perfect the application of such procedures as to widen its own attention to include them in its awareness as well: it aims, in other words, not so much at solving the particular dilemmas in question, as at converting those problems into their own solutions on a higher level, and making the fact and the existence of the problem itself the starting point for new research. This is indeed the most sensitive moment in the dialectical process: that in which an entire complex of thought is hoisted through a kind of…

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Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 3d

Just saw that you can read this for free online and — well, if you haven’t read it before, you should

ctheory.indiana.edu/resources/fa...

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Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 3d

full spectrum capture. pls everyone try to get your parents, relatives, and friends to seek out reliable sources of information beyond the functionally propagandist mainstream press

Jon Passantino @passantino.bsky.social · 3d

CNN is now using the Trump preferred “Department of War” name in its official statements

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Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 4d

We could hear them laughing

Jack Jenkins @jackjenkins.me · 4d

Gonna be thinking about this lede for a minute.

(RNS) — Last month, the Rev. David Black stood in front of a Chicago-area U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility and spread his arms wide. Adorned in all black and wearing a clerical collar, the pastor looked up at a group of masked, heavily armed ICE agents on the roof and began to pray.

“I invited them to repentance,” Black, a minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA), said in an interview. “I basically offered an altar call. I invited them to come and receive that salvation, and be part of the kingdom that is coming.”

But when Black began to lower his arms a few seconds later, the agents responded to his spiritual plea by firing pepper balls, or chemical agents that cause eye irritation and respiratory distress, video footage shows. One struck Black in the head, exploding into a puff of white pepper smoke and forcing him to his knees. Fellow demonstrators rushed to his aid, and as the pastor rubbed his face in pain, the agents continued to fire.

“We could hear them laughing,” Black said.

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Reposted by Nathan K. Hensley

Miriam Posner @miriamposner.com · 5d

Obviously signing Trump’s compact is the death knell for a university, but the fact that any of them are even *considering* it exposes something deeply rotten at the heart of their leadership. It should disqualify them forever.

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