Steven Paul Judd’s “STOP the DAPL” graphic is not merely a clever appropriation of Benjamin Franklin’s “JOIN, or Die.” Rather, Judd “indigenizes” both Franklin’s original etching and the later anti-British “radical appropriation” of the image to present the intertribal, intergenerational, inter-ethnic solidarity around #NoDAPL as both analogous and counter to the colonial notion of “union.”

Marking Time is an abolitionist text, arriving during the recent international surge of the Black Lives Matter movement with a picture of mass incarceration as the less visible, but always present counterpart to police brutality. Nicole Fleetwood framed her appeal as a long-overdue reassessment of prison art and the people who make it.

Fronteristxs launched #NMERBdivest last week with a digital billboard on East I-40 in Albuquerque near Carlisle Boulevard and continued with projections of images and text on the former county jail in downtown Albuquerque. The campaign is part of the collective's larger efforts to abolish prisons, made urgent by the rapid spread of COVID-19 in prisons, using visual and performance techniques to reach a digital media audience during the pandemic.

Sports, entertainment, gaming, and hunting are industries. That is, they are “adult” because they participate in the economy. They generate capital and reinforce heteropatriarchal values through scripted forms of performance and participation. Furries, on the other hand, make their own narratives. They have sex. They miss their cues. Between the longing to be recognized and threat they pose to social, political, and economic norms, they fail. They sit literally and figuratively outside the castle, like Atmus.

Becoming Mary Sully: Toward an American Indian Abstract by Philip Deloria is a significant contribution to a growing body of literature recognizing the roles of women in creating an Indigenous futurity rooted in self-representation and self-determination. The cultural work of women like Mary Sully challenges narratives that place Indigenous people outside of, and in opposition to, the modern world.

Puerto Rico: Defying Darkness collects paintings, installations, videos, photographs, and multimedia works by sixteen Puerto Rican artists from the island and locations across the US mainland, including Albuquerque. Curator Josie Lopez uses Naomi Klein’s book The Battle for Paradise: Puerto Rico Takes on the Disaster Capitalists as a frame for the exhibition, illustrating the tension between outside corporate investment and local sustainability initiatives. However, the museum itself also frames the exhibition in a colonial perspective.

Dan Gilbert’s deal to build a new detention center for Wayne County in exchange for prime real estate is not merely his latest attempt to conceal his downtown annexation project under the pall of benevolent progress. Rather, the project, which falls under Gilbert’s Rock Ventures banner, signals a material and rhetorical expansion of racialized redevelop ment in Detroit.

Despite its echoes of Donald Trump, the image is nothing new. It echoes a centuries-long undercurrent in US immigration policy, beginning with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

As an example of landscape representation, Jim Jarmush’s vampire movie Only Lovers Left Alive is a process and a discourse that constructs Detroit as a landscape of monstrosity to mark its availability to settlers.

#AbolishTheEntrada is a demand to end the Entrada, an annual costumed reenactment of the colonial reconquest of Santa Fe by General Don Diego de Vargas in 1692. It also explicitly connects the Entrada to the battle over Confederate memorials that erupted in Charlottesville, Virginia last August.

Local activists and pundits have, rightfully, ridiculed Detroit’s new downtown streetcar, the QLINE, for going over budge and excluding Detroiters who most need public transportation. Less prevalent in local debate is what lies beneath the QLINE—namely, the intention to develop Detroit as a Third Coast Silicon Valley by Detroit’s very own white savior, Dan Gilbert.

For three days in early October 2015, the art collective Postcommodity launched a temporary art installation that reached fifty feet above the desert and two miles across the U.S.-Mexico border. I watched that weekend as they anchored twenty-six helium-filled balloons to the desert floor and let them ascend to create a visual and conceptual link between Douglas, Arizona and Agua Prieta, Sonora.

Initiated in April 2016, #AbolishtheRacistSeal — led by the Kiva Club, a student group, and the Red Nation, an activist group — calls for the removal of images that celebrate European conquest of the Americas or otherwise represent ongoing violence against Native Americans. The campaign includes a list of 11 demands to improve Native visibility and viability on campus.

Antonio Cosme and fellow Raiz Up artist and activist William Lucka, 22, are facing up to $75,000 in fines and four years in prison for allegedly painting “Free the Water” in large block letters up the side of a water tower in Highland Park.

Social justice is an apt theme for science fiction, so we’re not surprised when the apocalypse is also a social commentary on conditions that exist today. However, to ignore the particular ways in which social justice moves through these stories would be to deny that sci-fi has also participated in regimes of oppression. In Octavia’s Brood, editors Walida Imarisha and adrienne marie brown hope also hope to use sci-fi not merely to describe social conditions, but to instigate social change.