'This week, reports emerged that the Department for Education (DfE) intends to remove teaching grant support for creative and performing arts courses in English universities as part of a wider reprioritisation of the Strategic Priorities Grant (SPG).' 1/2

The kickback against MeToo shows how backward women’s safety has gone. When you show assault, the denials are as deafening as they are false. And it’s not a surprise - we said it would happen, it happened. We were called scaremongers. Now imagine their revenge for queer rights, for trans rights…

Tressie McMillan Cottom@tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 4w ago

i say again that I criminally underestimated how far men would go to avenge metoo carolinapublicpress.org/76059/names-...

Ok I'm following @tressiemcphd.bsky.social's rec and reading Applebaum's Autocracy, Inc. Mixing that with The Tyranny of Metrics by Muller and seeing what wild and crazy ideas I have.

Really excited that this is now out, in the latest issue of the Journal of British Cinema and Television: my new article, '‘Solidarity Forever’? Histories of Gender, Sexuality and Industrial Action in Made in Dagenham and Pride'. A 🧵 on the article. #filmsky #skystorians🗃️

‘Solidarity Forever’? Histories of Gender, Sexuality and Industrial Action in Made in Dagenham and Pride | Journal of British Cinema and Television

This article compares cinematic portrayals of British industrial relations history in Made in Dagenham (2010) and Pride (2014). It analyses the two films, and the metanarratives constructed around the...

euppublishing.com

“Adult-literacy scores have also dropped: Nearly 30 percent of American adults cannot paraphrase or make inferences from a multipage text. In 2017, that number was less than 20 percent.” www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

The End of Reading Is Here

Optimists once believed that universal literacy was inevitable. Now it seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history.

theatlantic.com

That includes so-called “non-research” or “teaching-intensive“ institution. Time for research and knowledge creation is important for everyone.

Re-upping this for the Wednesday crowd: My weekly roundup of reading and listening recommendations, taking in Britain's political economy, Northeast African politics, and Latin American politics, among other themes. All reposts (and subscriptions) much appreciated. x

Stop, Look, and Listen #61

A round-up of what I have been reading and listening to this past week.

academicbubble.substack.com

Thanks for boosting this! When I first posted it, we’d sold a grand total of 5 tickets. I’m hoping that’s climbed since… Anyway, here’s a picture of Spark at her book launch for Memento Mori in 1959. I promise to recreate this pose if my event goes ahead.

An open letter, to readers, about Charity and Sylvia. I am very pained to feel the need to write this. #queerhistory #pride

Hope Cleves’ work Unspeakable is a slow, recurring, incredible read for me. Popular history publishers want to advance a discovery narrative but never to pay for sustained slow archival work. They want to deny the academic and archival expertise it takes. And their authors are paid to cut corners.

Rachel Hope Cleves@rachelcleves.bsky.social · last mo.

An open letter, to readers, about Charity and Sylvia. I am very pained to feel the need to write this. #queerhistory #pride

These stories are piling up of "popular" writers "discovering" history that is "untold", but not mentioning that they found the history in a published historical monograph and/ or unpublished dissertation. It's beyond using "untold" loosely. It's dishonest.

Rachel Hope Cleves@rachelcleves.bsky.social · last mo.

An open letter, to readers, about Charity and Sylvia. I am very pained to feel the need to write this. #queerhistory #pride

We are dismayed to learn about further proposed HE cuts, this time at the University of Hertfordshire and the University of Exeter. In solidarity, please join us by signing and sharing the two urgent petitions below. 🚨🖊️ 1/3

Yes to this & also I'm reminded of Alice Wong's assertion in the Introduction to Disability Visibility: "Staying alive is a lot of work for a disabled person in an ableist society."

Lupita Nihongo@otsumamiboy.blacksky.app · last mo.

My other take that may get me grief is that even though I think the term is useful for class consciousness, focusing your Leftism solely around ‘workers’ when it comes to who deserves to have their needs addressed is a built-in concession that you’re willing to abandon the needy who can’t work.

Do you see how they talk about trans women on the front of national newspapers in the UK. These 'men' are trans women with GRCs. "NHS hospitals defy trans guidance "Men with gender recognition certificates to use female-only facilities despite court ruling" [Telegraph front page]

My students at Durham, my collaborators worldwide, anyone who reads my work... ALL of them have benefited from my time at Exeter, and the expertise of my colleagues at Exeter, because those colleagues improved my work so immeasurably. Job losses are losses for us all.

The constant vigilance & fear of yet another round has made a palpable sense of disengagement with academia. There’s a fading sense of solidarity & greater sense of self protection. Everyone thinks this is just a job, which for many, is a newish realisation

Ok, look, what's been particularly infuriating about the redundancies at Exeter (and Nottingham and Newcastle and and and) is this weird idea that it only affects those individuals and institutions. It harms us all because we are so closely interconnected.

Each uni has a consultancy in that tells them how to run a degree cheaply. They all simply say 'mega lectures' (LOL, infrastructure) & 'generic modules staff is interchangeable on'. It's pitched as rationalising, creating a 'sustainable' portfolio. But its destroying what university actually is.

Jo Wolff@jowolff.bsky.social · last mo.

I don’t know the details but they may well targeting modules with lower registration, where a world expert gets to teach their research to a relatively small number of the keenest students. You know. Those modules that stick in the students’ minds for the rest of their lives.

Always interesting to see the politics of age used to prevent a democratic alternative: forcing companies making money from a service to abide to basic rules that would undoubtedly limit but not destroy their profitability.

The BMJ@bmj.com · last mo.

Little evidence that Australia’s under-16 social media restrictions have curbed use among adolescents, finds new BMJ Research. Longer term evaluation needed, but current age verification checks are “suboptimal” and being bypassed, warn researchers https://bit.ly/4agUnHL

Almost 4 in 5 asylum decisions made on inadequate evidence. The Home Office is a motorway pileup.

Colin Yeo@colinyeo.bsky.social · last mo.

I don’t really know what to say to this.

I know this is not the biggest concern going these days, but it stresses me out that basically every artist/writer/critic is now expected to create their own tiny empire instead of getting paid by any existing entity to perform a job they've worked to get good at!!!!

What does any of this even mean. The austerity economics of the mind is grim. My research needs MORE regional local universities with research time and international ties. I want historians of Gloucester, of Rotherham, who aren’t just seen as voluntary local historians, but paid for their craft.

Natalia Cecire @ncecire.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Academic departments deserve to be saved, supported, resourced, allowed to grow even if they're not "best in the country," "first in the REF," "top-ranked," "at a Russell Group uni," or whatever other austerity-brained nonsense senior managers have been using to flimflam you out of solidarity

Academic departments deserve to be saved, supported, resourced, allowed to grow even if they're not "best in the country," "first in the REF," "top-ranked," "at a Russell Group uni," or whatever other austerity-brained nonsense senior managers have been using to flimflam you out of solidarity

UK-based early career historian in need of up to £2,000 to complete a project? Deadline for the Royal Historical Society's scheme is 4 September: royalhistorical.smapply.io/prog/early_c...

Increasingly predictable pattern that transphobia just rots the brain into being a social reactionary in just about every sphere: Bindel now pushing classic "gay men are all pedophiles" homophobia.

Mike Stabile@mikestabile.bsky.social · last mo.

"LGB-no-T" campaigner Julie Bindel says she'd BAN pride if she could, in order to protect children from predatory gay men. Absolutely fucking appalling. A whole column — "A Pride of Perverts" — going on like this. TERFing really cooks the brain.

Does anyone else ever have the feeling that literally nothing about popular discourses of sex and gender has changed in the last century? Daily Mirror, 2 May 1934:

The Starmer government has done wicked things. We must not let it go into the night pretending that its primary fault was being boring. It chose to persecute minorities in pursuit of the votes of people it thought would like that. The Starmer premiership was utterly morally bankrupt.

Toby Buckle@polphilpod.bsky.social · last mo.

the write ups of the pm's fall never mention his biggest reforms—those that made the uk far, far worse for minorities my latest for @liberalcurrents.com www.liberalcurrents.com/starmer-out/

Hi #IndigiSky I need your help! The gov't of Newfoundland is censoring a cultural heritage exhibit by Innu Nation in Nitassinan/Labrador. All details in this article. We're furious and up for a fight. I need advice and tips on the best way to do so. theindependent.ca/news/provinc...

Province shocks Innu, disputes their history in Labrador  – The Independent

Innu Nation cancels cultural exhibit, alleging executives of The Rooms provincial museum told them to remove reference to Innu presence in Labrador prior to 1700s

theindependent.ca

That is simply not possible. They have lost all sense of what work is and how humans function. (Without wanting to give you more work: HSE complaint?) I’m so so so very sorry, nobody should be facing such stress and such disrespect, and I really hoped for some respite for you.