women next to me at the cafe discussing a European couple they know who moved to London and hired a schools consultant (?) who advised them on what neighbourhood to buy a house in so their kids could get into the best state school, so I reckon that we actually could tax high earners a bit more tbh

one can only hope!

was working on my final lecture for 'Regulating Innovation' last week and rediscovered Big Data and boy was that a thing for a while...

ditched the whole post apocalyptic angle too, going aggressively on optimism and hope, think I might make the point of departure the 2000 presidential election...

used to do a lot of creative writing but haven't done any since I started my PhD

Not sure if this is a good use of my strike time but have started writing a science fiction novel... no actual plans to publish it because I am aware of the state of the industry but am enjoying it so far... basically ripping off Star Trek but as a 'sociologically realistic' socialist UN in space

Yes VC-ship is fundamentally stewardship, you are there to maintain at the very least and improve if possible and yet they all have pretty much failed that for the last decade if not longer.

I still can't understand why "getting a sustainable HE funding system in place" isn't a/the KPI for all VCs.
Instead, we get constant shrugging of shoulders while saying "my pockets are so stuffed full of cash that I can barely raise my shoulders. So really, I'm the one who deserves some sympathy!"

just want the terms of employment that I was offered 2.5 years ago... just want to keep my pension without being punished...

Day 2

oh I agree completely, killing the BBC foreign service will be regarded as one of the biggest 'sel f owns' in modern history, why the hell have we just thrown that away!

I think the reality is empire papered over a lot of cracks and enabled Britain to present a grand facade and we cant do that any more - Connie Sachs lament in Tinker Tailor (?) sums it up pretty well, no one wants to admit were a middle income regional power so we fail at trying to be otherwise

all my life, i've heard about, and often believed, in institutions like the British civil service, but the cavalier manner in which the UK governing class behaves--in particular, their apparent belief that they are the champion league version of US politics--has sorely tested those beliefs

at times, looking at UK governance (especially regarding higher ed and cultural institutions), I feel like I'm watching a slightly downwardly mobile relative set heirlooms ablaze for warmth

The first Earth Day in 1970 had many inspirations – Rachel Carson’s compelling Silent Spring, antiwar student movements across the US, and the devastation of the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill – but one photo is often credited with the emergence of a new global environmental consciousness in the late 1960s. Earthrise was snapped by astronaut Bill Anders as the Apollo 8 spacecraft orbited the moon, and it depicts a blue and white planet floating in the blackness of space. While it highlights earth’s vulnerability to environmental destruction, the picture also showed us a different vision of ourselves. As Apollo 8 commander Frank Borman reflected, “We were the first humans to see the world in its majestic totality… this must be what God sees.” In this Earth Day keynote, Joanne Yao explores the abstracted view of earth from above as an integrated whole and the politics of a whole humanity that this God-like view engendered. From this position, the 1968 moment becomes the culmination of a longer quest to know the earth in its entirety through scientific exploration into the unknown, which was often entangled with histories of colonialism and racialized and gendered exclusions. The keynote will explore the utopian imaginaries this view of earth inspired in how humans could rise above parochial interests to unite as one against the cold nothingness of space, but it also traces the silences and erasures that enabled what Donna Haraway calls the “god trick of seeing everything from nowhere.”

The Earthrise photo

Tomorrow!! 'Earthrise' and the politics of seeing everything from nowhere, an Earth Day keynote from Joanne Yao (QMUL)

11am-12.30pm BST, online and free

Make sure you register!

www.bisa.ac.uk/members/work...

Screenshot of paper's title page. International law’s purgatory: Strategic uses of international law and the hollowing of the liberal international order Sophie Duroy, University of Essex Abstract This essay challenges accounts that locate the crisis of the liberal international order primarily in growing noncompliance or open defiance of international law. It argues instead that the present moment is the culmination of decades of strategic legal justification. In recent decades, states have increasingly engaged international law to reinterpret, proceduralise, and instrumentalise it in ways that expand the scope of permissible violence while preserving law’s authority as a legitimising discourse. Through practices ranging from expansive readings of self-defence and proportionality to the routinisation of targeted killing, mass surveillance, and selective third-party interventions before international courts, contested interpretations have gradually reshaped the content of legal norms without formal amendment. This process of informal legal change has hollowed out international law’s constraining function while entrenching its discursive centrality. Situating these dynamics within debates on double standards and transitional orders, the essay conceptualises international law as occupying a “purgatory”: normatively authoritative yet increasingly ineffective as a restraint on power.

New essay, forthcoming in the inaugural issue of the Armenian Journal of International Law and already available on SSRN: dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn...

Comments welcome!

We’re all precarious to some extent now: this should be unifying in terms of our fight back.

Begging folks with open ended academic jobs not to forget there’s a whole underclass of permanently casualised academics who’ve been facing redundancy as standard for years. 12+ in my case.

I get it’s awful facing redundancy ofc! Just…this isn’t unprecedented for us. It’s the norm.

It all comes back to 'you really do need to have a prime minister to run this thing'.

I mean I can still buy that given that everyone (except Keir Starmer apparently) knew Mandelson was dodgy as fuck that there was an assumption that the PM didnt want to know

Join your union. It’s not perfect but it’s all we’ve got. #UCU

and fair play to Starmer for taking responsibility, and sounds like he's got a right to be quite angry

So yeah sounds like an enquiry is fully required - the FCDO has got a lot to answer for

ohh, watch out

they do constantly underestimate the impact of demographic change, the further we get from the eurocrisis the less of an impact its going to have as a boogeyman - like during Brexit people used to invoke the ERM and 'Black Wednesday' but as a '91 baby it had little emotional resonance for me

history is in fact not merely 'a lie agreed upon'... there is in fact very little agreement

Students will be SHOCKED and OFFENDED when I DESTROY their favourite Voltaire quote by dedicating my full-year Early Modern history module to proving it was in fact HOLY, ROMAN, and—yes—an EMPIRE

And it wont stop with Northumbria theyll be coming for everyone on TPS

on strike again with @ucunorthumbria.bsky.social this week - Uni executive have walked out of talks and are going to go ahead and cut our pay and pensions, in whatll likely only be a first move in a 'post92' race to the bottom!

In the same manifesto, Palantir's owners argued that we need a national military draft, that soft power is over, and that we were too hard on Germany and Japan after World War II. I don't think that company should be allowed to exist anymore.

sorry mate youre PM you need to care