circulating amongst the gay millennials

Marking boycott looms at Goldsmiths over £20m of cuts to staff Staff at Goldsmiths, University of London, have overwhelmingly voted for industrial action in a fight to protect jobs, UCU announced today.

🚨 1 in 4 staff at Goldsmiths to be axed.

All while senior management get eye-watering pay rises and £16m is spent on consultants and lawyers.

This is the reality of Higher Education in the UK.

Our members have voted for industrial action, support them.

www.ucu.org.uk/article/1447...

“They Say it’s a Very Lonely Kind of Life“: Queer Loneliness in Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers (2023) and Francis Lee’s God’s Own Country (2017) This article considers the relationship between loneliness and queerness suggested by the quotation in its title, taken from Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers (2023). Throughout, I trace the cause...

Very excited to share my first ever published article exploring the presentation of queer loneliness in Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers and Francis Lee’s God’s Own Country! Available to read open access at the link: doi.org/10.1080/0091...

One librarian also charmingly said I was ‘speaking as someone who’s never been to or taught at university’ and to ‘stay in your lane.’ He didn’t clarify what he thought my lane was and said leading seminars wasn’t ‘real teaching.’ He didn’t explain what qualified him to speak from such lofty heights

I made the mistake of commenting on an instagram reel about local communities being unable to access universities. What was interesting is how many people (including students and librarians) think unis exist solely for paying students and their gates should be shut tight for anyone who doesn’t pay

Oh my god!!!

Dear Shabana, I notice today that you referred to me in your speech on immigration at the IPPR think tank. You said: “A party leader should not be on the beaches of France encouraging people to make a perilous crossing on small boats.” I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised especially after the hateful Labour campaign in Gorton and Denton, but this is just the latest in a string of lies peddled by a discredited Government who intentionally fan the flames of racism and division. When I went to Calais, I was not there to encourage people to travel to the UK. I was there to see at first hand the suffering your Government and successive Governments have done in demonising migrants in a pathetic bid to pander to the base instincts of Reform and the flawed strategy of Morgan McSweeney. As you will know, if you even bothered to research my visit instead of taking Reform talking points, I was there to witness the brutality of families living in tents in freezing temperatures. I filled water tanks and picked up litter. What that visit did do is confirm my belief that if we are to smash the boat gangs and stop the boats, we need to offer safer and managed routes for migrants to come to this country. Showing compassion as a politician is not a crime. In fact, we need to see much more of it. It reminded me of a young MP who in October 2015 spent three days in Lesbos helping migrants fleeing war-torn Syria. She posted videos on X, talked about handing out water and croissants to refugees and food parcels. When she returned to the UK, she wrote a very moving piece in the New Statesman. She said “we have to work with our European partners and create new, safe, and legal routes for refugees to get to Europe. We cannot abandon them to their fate, left as prey for smugglers whilst risking death on the seas.” She said “maybe we can make ourselves feel better by saying no-one is making them get on the boats. And again, the Home Secretary is not entirely wrong when …

Dear Shabana,

Let's clear some things up around migration and remember we're talking about people's lives.

Humble brag about receiving some really positive peer review comments for an article I wrote!

And if you haven’t watched the brits this makes no sense

One thing about me is, I could spot the top of Bjork’s head from a mile away

Screenshot reads: She and other publishing specialists question whether LeapSpace’s limited reach is worth the cost. Users will need either an institutional subscription (based in part on the institution’s size and amount of research) or an individual one, which costs $32 a month. Many libraries are already struggling to afford existing subscriptions. And if users want to read the cited content, they will need a separate subscription to that content’s publisher—akin to paying for multiple video-streaming services.

The inevitable next stage of academic publishers profiting from academics' work is here - scraping it for AI then charging subscriptions for access to the AI summaries, and then again for the citations. Academic content assetization as we called it in a recent paper. www.science.org/content/arti...

The thesis has been handed in, the existential crisis has begun

What if I just submitted my thesis this week?

Okay everybody! Please help me with this! Universities everywhere are increasingly awful, so let's put together some New Year's Resolutions to help them get better! I'll start!

1) Stand up for the importance of good education for good lives for people, society, and planet.

#modwrite Having finished my christmas job- I’m finally getting round to submitting my proposal for BAMS/ MSA Weird Modernisms, and correcting typos in my thesis manuscript.

Christmas reading

This averages out at a violation roughly every four hours, around the clock, continuously since 10 October. At what point do we stop calling it a ceasefire when Israel has just literally not ceased firing

The Absolute Units art. Three giant sheep hover over the English countryside.

🐏 New Absolute Units 🐏

Same-sex relationships have always been part of rural England, but they've been underrepresented in our collections.

In the first of 2 episodes, @timjerrome.bsky.social shares his work tracing queer rural lives in The MERL archives.

merl.reading.ac.uk/explore/abso...

Anyone know of any journals accepting poems (preferably queer leaning but I’m amenable)? all my usual spots are closed ☹️

Library day- finishing up the final chapter of the thesis on queer objects in Orlando!

UK faces ‘battle for the soul’ of the country, says Starmer amid Reform threat In a rallying cry to progressives around the world, the Prime Minister said allies must stop the ‘politics of predatory grievance’.

“Let’s call it for what it is: bullshit. The truth is, politicians have talked about little else but immigration for decades and in the most dehumanising ways.

Polanski added: “Stop the boats’ is all we hear. Well, today I'm saying ‘stop the bullshit’.”

www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home...

Gen AI has been trained and developed in ways that no university research ethics committee would approve. And yet as academics we supposedly need training in how to use it ‘ethically’…

While the training did the job that was intended, I see it as part of the pernicious normalisation of the use of gen AI in higher education. The case studies imply that the best way to e.g. update course materials is to use gen AI. Why not just use your knowledge and experience? Major ethical issues are passed over e.g. gen AI's training on stolen data and its reliance on exploitative labour practices. Gen AI has many negatives and few positives. It is antithetical to the critical thinking that should be central to working and studying at university. It is inherently unsafe, unethical, and irresponsible. We should be discouraging its use.

Did some mandatory gen AI training. Unfortunately, I was given an opportunity to provide feedback.

Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, says UN inquiry Commission’s 72-page legal analysis cites examples including scale of killings, aid blockages and forced displacement * Middle East crisis – live updates A UN commission of inquiry concluded on Tuesday that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza and that top Israeli officials including the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, had incited these acts. It cited examples of the scale of the killings, aid blockages, forced displacement and the destruction of a fertility clinic to back up its genocide finding, adding its voice to rights groups and others that have reached the same conclusion. Continue reading...

Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, says UN inquiry

Goodbye #woolf2025 My first Woolf conference. Leaving with a ton of ideas of things to read and consider in my thesis.

Pre #Woolf2025 visit to charleston

Just in time for the end of pride, a poem of mine in queerlings issue 9 www.queerlings.co.uk/issues

Labour’s great nature sellout is the worst attack on England’s ecosystems I’ve seen in my lifetime | George Monbiot The horrifying planning bill, which rips up environmental protections, was drafted with CEOs in mind. We know because Keir Starmer told us, says Guardian columnist George Monbiot

1. Because this issue is critical, but has received remarkably little coverage, here's a thread pulling out the key themes from my article yesterday, on the Planning and Infrastructure Bill, which puts decades of environmental protections to the torch. 🧵 www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Finally starting work on a ‘new’ thesis chapter (new in the sense that it was the first chapter I thought of but, two years later, am only just drafting) which means spending the day re-reading Orlando!