Tressie McMillan Cottom

Feminist blog cohorts: a (semi-) authoritative remapping using AI

🎵: Let’s Dance - David Bowie

I’ve spent the last few months annoyed with the incomplete retrospectives around writers and writing online and how we all got here. At work, I use a portfolio perspective to understand working groups, and used a couple of AI approaches to build out a highly contextual, and likely contested, interactive map charting some of the major players and influences around the feminist blog years, the major platforms, their cultural impacts and major publications. These are case studies and cohorts based on my personal angles mixed with authoritative resources, including a highly annotated bibliography.

Does this feel slimy? I concede it may. But it demonstrates the value of personal writing and thoughtful design in digital spaces despite its many gaps and flaws.

Enjoy and tinker. Feedback is welcome. I’ll have some notes on my approach and why many of these findings remain heavily qualified in the coming weeks.

Two steps forward, one step back

While I still go back to Haraway’s “Situated Knowledges” for the argument that every view comes from somewhere, these days, the writer I read most closely on technology is Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom.

Haraway asks where a knowledge claim is standing, while Dr. Tressie asks who pays for it. Lower Ed traced how for-profit colleges sold credentials to audiences the rest of higher education had shut out. In a TikTok mini-lecture on AI, politics, and inequality, she carried that analysis forward using Daniel Greene’s “access doctrine,” which holds that the answer to economic inequality is more skills rather than more support, and which universities facing their own precarity have leaned into. Audrey Watters and Ed & Class both wrote it up.

Her March 2025 Times column argued that the fantasy appeals to risk-averse organizations because it promises control and oversight. Neil Selwyn’s notes on the column apply it directly to educational AI.

Her question fits my work life better right now while AI begins to show up in procurement, policy and training decks, and her ongoing attention to pedagogy keeps the conversation tied to what happens between a teacher and a student. I read Haraway for the epistemology and Dr. Tressie for the current evidence of how it plays out in real classrooms.

In honor of Dolly (rest in power), some links:

Reaching back to 2025 to put this article on the pile of AI commentary: Cottom’s argument here is that AI, for all the breathless hype around it, is a “mid” technology, one that makes modest augmentations to existing processes while its loudest boosters use it to justify employing fewer people and delegitimizing expertise. Around the time the article was published, she supplemented with some additional video commentary worth watching.

She draws on Acemoglu and Restrepo’s concept of “so-so” technologies and traces a pattern from MOOCs to DOGE, where each iteration promises transformation but delivers incremental improvements at best and labor displacement at worst. The real danger, she argues, is that AI’s most compelling use case in the current political environment is threatening, demoralizing workers and justifying cuts, not revolutionizing how work gets done.

Cottom has been one of the writers I keep returning to because she is not dismissing the technology or retreating into reactionary nostalgia. She looks past the product announcements to the political economy underneath them. Who benefits from the hype cycle? What happens to the institutional infrastructure (education, research, public expertise) that AI claims to augment and simultaneously threatens to starve? She’s also very active on Instagram (and promoting a new documentary) and tracing the news around AI and higher ed in real time.