Glad someone senior from the sector is pushing back. Labour MPs need to understand the serious real anger from graduates and the people who produce them. And the dangerous financial situation they have allowed to fester, or indeed worsened, in one of Britain’s leading sectors.

Labour has harmed universities as much as Trump, London School of Economics head says

LSE vice-chancellor Larry Kramer points to domestic student fees freeze, international student limits and rise in employers’ national insurance

ft.com

I had the pleasure of reviewing Nadine Attwell's wonderful Archives of Intimacy: Racial Mixing and Chinese Lives in the Colonial Port City, 1905–1949 (www.sup.org/books/histor...) and also writing about women seafarers. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Laleh Khalili · Canton Kitty: Seafaring

Seafaring is a bundle of contradictions. It is highly skilled labour, yet mostly invisible. Lower ratings of seafarers...

lrb.co.uk

The point isn't to produce essays, it's to teach students how to think for fuck's sake. The minute you automate that, it's over. You might as well close the course. Which they're also doing. This is an attack on learning, and everyone is just shrugging.

Arundhati Roy: “Just when hope seemed lost, they came. Young roaches riding in on the rain. The progeny of the unholy union between a judge and a joke.” m.thewire.in/article/righ...

Louis Althusser murdered his wife and “it took over 40 years for this murder to be recognised as a femicide, and only thanks to the work of feminists, researchers and activists who kept the story alive”.

Voxeurop – Independent European journalism@voxeurop.bsky.social · 2w ago

On the femicide of Hélène Rytmann-Legotien: how Louis #Althusser killed his wife and ‘invented’ #masculinism article by @francesca-b.bsky.social with #PulsEurope voxeurop.eu/en/femicide-...

Arundhati Roy: “Just when hope seemed lost, they came. Young roaches riding in on the rain. The progeny of the unholy union between a judge and a joke.” m.thewire.in/article/righ...

It’s taken a quarter of a century to arrive here and will probably take a few more years for criminal charges, warrants…justice.

Boyd van Dijk@boydvandijk.bsky.social · 2w ago

International court tells BBC of breakthrough in Sudan war crimes probe www.bbc.com/news/article...

Theory 101: “gender is a framework that’s been developed through the social sciences. A framework is not subjective. A framework is a way of framing knowledge and a mode of inquiry”. www.currentaffairs.org/news/judith-butler-explains-the-gender-panic

Judith Butler Explains the Gender Panic

The leading scholar and philosopher responds to critics of “gender ideology,” both from the right and left.

currentaffairs.org

Frantz Fanon born 20 July 1925. www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

Frantz Fanon’s Enduring Legacy

The post-colonial thinker’s seminal book, “The Wretched of the Earth,” described political oppression in psychological terms. What are its lessons for our current moment?

newyorker.com

Artists in the Shati refugee camp in Gaza City paint a mural of Lamine Yamal (Omar Al-Qattaa / AFP via Getty Images)

Zohran Mamdani is beauteous on solidarity as a ‘strategy’ for universal justice without exceptions. “But justice is not measured by where we stand after history has issued its verdict. It is measured by where we stand when the verdict is still being rendered”. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Nelson Mandela held a mirror to humanity – and showed us what solidarity means | Zohran Mamdani

In a speech given on Wednesday in honor of Nelson Mandela Day, New York’s mayor reflects on what Madiba can teach us in a fractured era

theguardian.com

Congratulations to the government on saving 2700 jobs by nationalising British Steel. Now, about the 18,000 university jobs lost in the last 18 months, with more coming…

Of course, I like to be cited but for the things I’ve actually written! In the last few months I’m noting hallucinatory citations attributed to me, which I’ve no memory of ever having written. Can I say, the article titles are pretty unimaginative and quite rubbish, too. Oh well…

Margot Finn@eicathomefinn.bsky.social · 3w ago

'There are...growing negative impacts of AI on research, such as its use to generate “more-or-less fraudulent or fake” publications to satisfy career demands....some people have warned...[of] a “tipping point” after which it will no longer be able to rely on research to provide useful evidence'. 2/3

Environmental nightmare for real. electricity, land and water. “By 2030, AI data centres could be using enough water to meet the basic needs of all 1.3bn sub-Saharan Africans”. Transparency and ethics…anyone?

The great AI data centre cover-up

Tech companies need to come clean about the mounting environmental fallout of their race to build more hubs

giftarticle.ft.com

The greatest singer of Cabo Verde was Cesoria Evora, and it is because she mixed with melancholy with joy. Sodade: youtu.be/ERYY8GJ-i0I?....

CESARIA EVORA Sodade .wmv

YouTube video by SuperXavier30

youtu.be

OK I’ll say this: Theorists of all stripes from ‘most of the world’— political, feminist, social and cultural—have always theorised from the empirical realities of not only their own but also of ‘other’ worlds. They do because Eurocentred theories and concepts don’t ‘theorise’ ‘other’ worlds.

First they came for the languages. In the hope that no one would have the words to say what was happening. 1/9🧵

University of Aberdeen's plans to cut modern language degrees were 'rushed' - review

The University of Aberdeen says it accepts there were "missteps" in its process in 2023.

bbc.co.uk

These are the numbers being cut from Humanities and Social Sciences at Exeter:

This looks terrific. It’s now on my ‘to read and teach’ list. Congratulations, @galarexer.bsky.social

Gala Rexer@galarexer.bsky.social · 2mo ago

“Demographic Anxieties” can now be preordered (pub date June 30)! It shows how the Israeli settler-colonial state and its borders shape Palestinian women’s reproductive freedom, but it is also an ethnography working through what it means to research Palestine as 1/2 www.ucpress.edu/books/demogr...

Not so much surprised, I have to say.

Mel Andrews@bayesianboy.bsky.social · 2mo ago

When utilized in literature review, LLMs consistently 1. fail to mention female authors in female-led literatures, 2. insist that men are more influential or more heavily cited when this is contradicted by objective citation counts, and 3. attribute women’s work to hallucinated male scholars.

Yes. “We must stand firmly by our commitments under the 1951 refugee convention and the ECHR…”. No “performative cruelty”. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...

Remove home secretary Mahmood and rip up her asylum plans, says Alf Dubs

Exclusive: Labour peer who fled Nazis as a child says Andy Burnham has chance to ‘correct mistakes’ on refugees

theguardian.com

On my teaching and reading list. doi.org/10.1093/9780... Congratulations!

Easting the West: Theorizing the Postliberal Conjuncture from China

Abstract. This book intervenes in two interrelated conversations. First, it is concerned with the construction of ‘the West’ as a global discursive space a

doi.org

Chenchen Zhang 🤦🏻‍♀️@chenchenzhang.net · last mo.

I wrote a "casual" introduction to the book, starting with an anecdote about my mom and I getting into an argument about the use of antibiotics. chenchenzhang.net/2026/06/25/a... take a look and I hope the book could make it to your summer reading list!

Friends of Exeter, former students and alumni, can you please sign the petition below: www.change.org/p/stop-redun...

Sign the Petition

Stop Redundancies at the University of Exeter

change.org

With hardly any media coverage one of Britain’s few world-leading sectors is, right now, being decimated. The university funding model does not work and anti-immigrant hysteria has deprived the country of the means by which we met the shortfall: international students.

Margot Finn@eicathomefinn.bsky.social · last mo.

A grim day in a grim week in a grim month for UK higher education, with Dundee, Exeter and Hertfordshire all making major announcements of planned redundancies. Shrinkage of the research & teaching base by the invisible hand's visible fist is not an 'us' or 'them', SHAPE or STEM phenomenon. 1/2

World Refugee Day. The sublime Mahmoud Darwish ‘Think of Others’.

Anthropological research on subsistence is offered in the dangerous and authoritarian “report” on the humanities as a key example of supposed ideological weakening of scholarship. This critique begins to show how the key example cited actually proves the opposite. Let’s go into it in some depth 1/

Academic Authoritarianism in New Attack on Humanities Scholars

There is virtually no evidence offered in the report for its sweeping conclusions about the entirety of the humanities.

insidehighered.com

Maybe I’m in the minority, but it’s unfathomable to me and even somewhat shocking if I am absolutely honest, that academics are using AI to write their research manuscripts. A scholar’s work is attributable to someone. AI implies that there is no one behind the writing. It’s quite something, this.

Prof Lisa Schipper 🌍🍉💪@lisaschipper.bsky.social · 2mo ago

In my capacity as journal editor I want to say this: authors you are not doing yourself any favours by using AI to write your manuscript. I am finding convoluted arguments, bizarre language, weird expressions, and dull writing. Using AI to 'improve' your language may be a pathway to rejection.

chicagomaroon.com/52978/viewpo...

Welcoming Claude Into the Classroom Risks the Soul of Education

Faculty have a responsibility to protect classrooms as a training ground for thinking, and proliferating LLMs endanger this core mission of the University.

chicagomaroon.com

There are, in my view, 25 things everyone needs to understand in light of recent events: 1) Those out in our communities last night were not protestors, but organised far right extremists. 2) Their actions align with fascist ideologies. 3) So yes: these are fascist practices on our streets. 🧵

Thinking of Helen De Cruz suddenly today, and their guiding words for doing philosophy: "We should write philosophy with a sense of urgency, a sense of survival, a sense of horror and wonder at the world." ❤️‍🩹