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This article is an assemblage of thematically inter-relatable quotations promoting critically oriented, non-linear complexity of thought. The quotes concern: recent derailments and safety protocols; what trains carry; ideas about linearity, sequence, and simultaneity; environmental issues; trains used in genocide, race-based segregation and exploitation, and immigration; trains communicating art, symbols, and meaning; and quotes from literary figures, artists, and social theory. A central question emerges: Do the contents and arrangements of our (ever longer) cause-and-effect chains together constitute globally indeterminate, unanticipated consequences and both random and systemic interconnectivity, bridging industrial and post industrial eras, networks, and concerns? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Responding to the U.S. Supreme Court's 2022 reversal of Roe v. Wade, I produced the following conceptual writing. I took alternating lines from works by two well-known 19th-century British authors, one an anti-feminist woman and the other a pro-feminist man, pasting them line-by-line into one document. The resulting mashup text presents a contradictory, destabilizing view of women's rights and responsibilities. The back-and-forth of each author's strong opinion from over 130 years ago takes on strange contemporary relevance reflective of women's ongoing second-class status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Criminology has historically promoted positivism, a disciplinary orientation producing reward structures for some researchers committed to deductive work rooted in developing concepts, hypothesizing relationships, and empirical testing. Its is useful, then, to review where such tendencies were initially conceived and promoted. Havelock Ellis' 1890 book The Criminal, a then-seminal review of literature in criminal anthropology, concerns many topics involving criminals and criminality. In the following conceptual writing, I present here, verbatim, all instances where Ellis uses the exact phrase "the criminal" in his book, along with any words following the phrase in the sentence. The resulting text then deconstructs and re-imagines the true object of Ellis' work: the creation of the supposed object of his study as self-evidently Real, existing outside of linguistic and discursive parameters. Ellis as detective (searching for the criminal everywhere but right under his writing nose) could never fully apprehend his ever-escaping subject. Yet, through discourse, Ellis and his fellow criminal anthropologists laid claim as those best qualified for establishing the criminal's essential identity, an ideal type still pursued through government funded criminological research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The manuscript, postmodern in content and form, presents a fragmented, looping narrative of the author's experience watching 2001: A Space Odyssey contrasted against his, his university's, and his students' responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Separate discussions of the film, eras, ideas, and experiences grow to mutually inform. As the film presents several scenes without contextualization or even dialogue, the structure of writing here jumps, repeats, and overlaps, inviting (and evading) individual interpretation by readers. Readers might consider: parallels between the film and the author's experience as cyclical; a repetition of central issues or themes understood as both eternal and era-specific; and texts informing each era (and those anxiously living through them) differently. The narrative represents contemporary, fragmented spaces of interpretation, discourse, movement, flow, breath, and masks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Here I present conceptual writing as/within autoethnography. As a conceptual writing project, I took the third line of every email I sent from my work account in 2021 (January 1 to December 31) and present each as a single, stand-alone line. As autoethnography, the work reaffirms Raymond Williams' idea that individuals live in eras that each have a 'structure of feeling.' These decontextualised statements, questions, signature lines and auto-generated advertisements cumulatively help reframe my everyday written communication, lived experience, professional self and quotidian bureaucratic life as indicators of emergent culture in an unusual year. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Here, the author presents a critical, rhyzomatic collage of previously published writing. Foucault argues dominant discourses have specific bodily effects, that such discourses shape-shift in reaffirming the status quo, and that resistance requires continual critical engagement. This textual assemblage suggests affinities with and comparisons between: conservative political discourses; legal frameworks for claiming self-defense; justifications for war; replacement theory; the re-framing of Critical Race Theory as itself racist; and variations of social support for racism and White supremacy in the United States. The text becomes a performance designed to meet the moment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]