I really appreciate how the ancient Egyptians didn’t take cats for granted.
Julie Spray
@juliespray.bsky.social
Childhood & medical anthropologist, child health researcher, Lecturer at University of Galway Ireland, Pākehā New Zealander, she/her, never enough cats. I study people because they fascinate & confuse me. Children make most sense though. We like to draw.
To balance my perspective: what is something that has improved under late capitalism?
Illustrating how far US research norms are diverging - all Research Ireland grant applications require a statement on how sex and gender issues are being addressed in the research.
I tried organising my feedback comments bank into tabs in Google docs and feel quite pleased with this system innovation (yes I will spend hours designing ways to optimise marking to procrastinate actually marking)
ACYIG 2024-2025 BOOK PRIZE ANNOUNCEMENT The 2024-2025 ACYIG Book Prize Committee has chosen Dr. Shannon Ward’s book Amdo Lullaby: An Ethnography of Childhood and Language Shift on the Tibetan Plateau (University of Toronto Press) as our Book Prize Winner. 1/3
Proud to share this article by our @uniofgalway.bsky.social Children's Studies student Leanne Keohane! "The gap between media panic and the lived reality of children on Roblox is striking." www.irishexaminer.com/opinion/comm...
The real risk of online harm is not Roblox — it's our fear of children's agency
Children are humans capable of navigating the world, as long as we give them the right supports
irishexaminer.com
If you can set aside the category violation, I reckon this actually sounds amazing
Discontinued Foods!@discontinuedfoods.bsky.social · 5mo agoProgresso Soup Drops (2025-2025): Savory hard candy drops, made to taste like canned chicken noodle soup, complete with notes of salty broth, vegetables, chicken, egg noodles, and parsley. For $2.49, you'd get a soup can-shaped package with 20 drops, bundled along with a can of real soup
Sharing some delicious student comics from my course "Comics, Childhood and the Alternative." This one is about the experience of ADHD, by the creative phenom Ellie Bradley.
"We are not unemployed because we are unemployable. We are unemployed because we are the first to buckle under exploitation."
The Hidden Reason So Many Autistic Adults Can’t Stay Employed
The Cost of Asking One Person to Do the Work of Five
kaiblackwood.substack.com
Pluribus is an intense ontological experience for Christmas break
Win for political enfranchisement of the young! I teach university students and they don’t know this stuff because our society’s ideologies of childhood and youth prevent us from making the political system universally accessible
Tressie McMillan Cottom@tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 7mo agoThanks to one of my mutuals, a preteen girl got a legit Mamdani t-shirt and campaign buttons for Christmas. “Now he’s like us, right?” That meant someone got to draw this and do an impromptu lecture to an actually interested child. I don’t know who is happier, man or child.
It’s hard for many people to learn that things aren’t real. It’s a big worldview shift that can be really triggering and destabilising, overturn identities, undermine cultural sources of moral authority and advice. You can see the barriers preventing that one small epistemic step for man.
Nathan Kalman-Lamb@nkalamb.bsky.social · 7mo agoThis is a real tweet.
“The longer I live, the more convinced I am that this planet is used by other planets as a lunatic asylum.” - George Bernard Shaw
Is it just me realising like humanity is way way worse than I was led to believe
White men, imagine you go for a job. The interview panel is three black women. The board of directors is all black women and has been, without exception, forever. You notice that all supervisors are black women and the only white man you see is cleaning. The company insists they appoint on merit /1
“Anyone who’s ever found a blunt “no” scrawled in the margin of an essay knows that universities force humility upon us.… you realise how much of yourself is inherited or assumed and how freeing it is to rebuild that self from first principles.” thespinoff.co.nz/society/10-1...
We’ve forgotten what universities are for
With New Zealand universities facing not only a funding crisis but a philosophical challenge to their role, the soul of tertiary education is at stake.
thespinoff.co.nz
Frustrating example of #epistemicmirecognition: rejection (after 2 rounds of review and reviewers recommending acceptance) from journal editor because this autoethnographic paper sounds like a story retrospectively told from my experiences (and so cannot be "academically rigorous inquiry"). Sigh.
“In the Kalahari, one little boy who would almost certainly be diagnosed with autism in an American doctor’s office is highly valued for his abilities… the boy, his father told me, “is great herding goats. He always knows where they are in the day or night.”” www.nytimes.com/2025/09/24/o...
Opinion | Autism Has Always Existed. We Haven’t Always Called It Autism.
nytimes.com
This is a super helpful and interesting window into the editorial process - I learned a lot! I found the explanation of the relationship between editor and reviewer reports in final decision-making especially helpful to understand.
American Ethnological Society // American Ethnologist (journal)@amethno.bsky.social · 12mo ago📢📢📢 New Editorial Alert 📢📢📢 American Ethnologist editors lift the lid on the ‘black box’ of journal submission... An Editorial Insight: Be wary of making ungrounded “what I call” assertions of novelty. A much better strategy is to trace where your ideas have come from.
I was a grad student when Trump got elected in 2016, and the next day a very senior professor commented: "just goes to show the dangers of an uneducated populace." I have always remembered that remark over the last few years of social and political regression. Lest we forget what education is for.
A valuable checklist. Thanks Julie. And for those seeking to explore further and challenge adultism in research, can I offer some additional resources from my own back catalogue: www.harryshier.net/docs/Shier-A... www.harryshier.net/docs/Shier-W...
harryshier.net
Julie Spray@juliespray.bsky.social · last yr.It's hard to see what we're not seeing when working from the dominant or majority (normative) social position. As researchers, we share a normative but rarely critically considered position as ADULTS. This means our research has likely been shaped by adult-centrism. I made a resource.
It's hard to see what we're not seeing when working from the dominant or majority (normative) social position. As researchers, we share a normative but rarely critically considered position as ADULTS. This means our research has likely been shaped by adult-centrism. I made a resource.
Why do people keep trying to fo this? www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Sample sizes for saturation in qualitative research: A systematic review of empirical tests
To review empirical studies that assess saturation in qualitative research in order to identify sample sizes for saturation, strategies used to assess…
sciencedirect.com
When I was little, the U.S. military came to our home at gunpoint and took me and my family away. We were imprisoned for years in barbed wire camps simply because we were Japanese American. I have spent my life telling that story, hoping it would never be repeated.