It's been two months since I passed my viva. The experiences that I have accumulated in my side of academia have been such that I have had no excitement about the event or about sharing it, just a wish that all is over as soon as possible. It's so absurd it has to be like this for so many of us :(

“It is OK to feel uncomfortable. In fact, quite a lot of your life is uncomfortable as an adult, so removing uncomfortable feelings in childhood is unhelpful." Don't know where to start. www.thetimes.com/article/e636...

Six-year-old Mary Walker, who flies into inexplicable rages when everything in her immediate environment goes bleepy bloopy bleep blorp, has reportedly been called “a spoiled brat” by helpful well-wishers.

Horrific. And a reminder that access to decent housing is a public health issue www.theguardian.com/society/2026...

@jasonhickel.bsky.social Hola, Jason. :) Ayer escuché una entrevisa a un escritor que hace comentarios críticos hacia "los decrecentistas" en su último libro, a mi parecer usando falacias y una retórica cuestionable. Por si quieres escucharlo, a partir del min 45 y antes www.rtve.es/play/audios/...

Same for auraldiversity, for which some people may find it easier to see that actually not many people have what could be consider "typical hearing" or auditory perception. And yet, we keep mostly only considering that group in sound related products, environments, events, etc.

One of the stranger objections I see to the idea of neurodiversity (or neurodivergence) is that it implies most people are actually neurotypical. No! It started as a reaction against the idea that the majority are normal, while outliers are wrong and disordered. It's founded on rejecting that.

Question for AI haters who are also academics: How do you navigate co-authorship situations, where you don’t want to be involved in manuscripts where an author is using AI? Do you have explicit discussions with potential co-authors? How do these go?

3rd night without being able to sleep much at the "prestige" student accommodation I've paid in Edinburgh. If anyone knows of a place where to stay without constant loud noises all night and day, please let me know. 🙏

Edinburgh is looking gorgeous these days. Visiting for seminars and the viva! 🙂

Haven’t seen the Theroux documentary yet, but what’s described here of the approach sounds a lot like the clips of the Doge bros’ depositions that have been going around this week.

Yes, believe women. But men need to start speaking up about other men's bad behavior in ways that are startlingly unusual katemanne.substack.com/p/one-weird-...

Mood for 2026, (the artist is Ainsley Drew, on Instagram)

'The many impacts of inadequate acoustic environments on neurodivergent and noise sensitive people.' Please to share this guest post summarising part of the results of the studies done for my PhD thesis, focused on lived experiences and real everyday spaces. www.acousticbulletin.com/the-many-imp...

Paris is refurbishing car parks to create new social housing This site was consumed by a 3-storey concrete car park. This has been partially demolished, and partially converted, creating a new green courtyard and 80 social housing apartments. By NZI Architects

"I got my PhD by writing prompts instead of doing research, I'm winning" got some bad news, there still no jobs and now you also know nothing

Spring: when I finally have the energy to work, but the world gets too beautiful to work. :_)

He also says the future belongs to "the neurodivergent". Just not to neurodivergent women I guess. In fact, the future is looking quite hostile for us. :/

This feels like MORE WORK FOR MOTHER by Ruth Schwartz Cowan, which explored the irony that many of the technical advances in housework and the kitchen did nothing to ease the burden on women but instead increased it.

⭐ Fully-Funded ESRC PhD Opportunity ⭐ @katiecebula.bsky.social is recruiting for a PhD studentship: quant analysis of admin data to explore the social inequality & child/family factors which might be associated over time with neurodivergent young people’s school attendance. Deadline: 24th March

“Telling all these perpetually-anxious Lola Young fans to kick rocks is going to help us refocus research funding on my favourite kind of autistics: the ones I can talk over.” 👀

In one study of my PhD, 311 noise sensitive participants (32% over 45 y/o, 59% neurodivergent) replied to questions on lived experiences. 69% of autistic and all ND participants, and 61% of neurotypicals, reported that their sensitivity increased with age. www.researchgate.net/publication/...

On Uta Frith's comment re "little scientific grounding" for using ear protection/headphones: It's 2026 and the evidence missing is on them not helping with distress and performance, or increasing sound sensitivity, as many say too. I wrote about that here diffusefield.com/letter-habit...

None of them can talk coherently about strategy or goals but they are completely in sync in all their macho posturing because that is all they’re really focused on. Everything else is just whatever limply offered fiction is convenient to them at the time.

My extra radical far loony left position is that no one should ever be allowed to make a profit from academic publishing. It is a public good. See also: education, healthcare (on a good day, public transport…)

New conference poster 🙂 Submit your abstracts for the Neurodivergent Music Studies Conference here: theneurodivergentmusicnetwork.weebly.com/2026-virtual... #AutRes #MusicResearch #CallForPapers #AcademicSky #Neurodivergent #Music

Remembering my dear, radical mother Dinah on #internationalwomensday. She took @fergus.oolong.co.uk & I to Greenham Common when we were tiny to support the women there, where my first memory of the police was watching them drag a peacefully-resisting woman across the road by her hair

A pioneer, in the sense of someone who did seminal (but questionable) work several decades ago, is asking us to ignore most of the work that's been done since she was last relevant. Autistic people are asking you to think critically about this.

Autismitietoisuusaika lähestyy, oletko valmis? "Awareness efforts present us as a problem to be solved, and yesterday. Awareness operates in stereotypes and soundbites, not real people. Awareness has no substance; it is but a tool to earn more money to fix us and to promote yet more awareness."

In case someone needs to see this right now (I know I do)

I highly recommend giving this short article a read. By framing fascism as a psychological or cognitive aberration, not only do we uphold neuronormative structures, but we also fail to see how fascism is a response to challenges to ruling class power in a state of crisis and decay.

perplexity doing this also manages to erase human women computers yet again LMAO what fucking clowns if you need to see what and why, see: olivia.science/ai/#pygmalion; full pdf here: doi.org/10.31235/osf...

And we're off! My most favourite telescope, the Vera Rubin Observatory, has turned on its public alert stream and boy, were there a lot of changes in the Universe last night. More coming: ~7 million a night 😮: exploding stars, belching black holes, asteroids cruising through the solar system. 🤗🔭🧪

"Long COVID represents an unprecedented case of patient-led illness definition [with patients] collectively naming, documenting, and legitimizing their condition before medical institutions recognized it." An analysis of 2.8M tweets with #LongCovid Ammari 2026 www.arxiv.org/abs/2602.14528

Interessante isso aqui

Used to know comp sci colleague here that taught the sole ethics course for their students. Colleagues in her (of course) department constantly bad mouthed it & encouraged students to get out of it however they could because “waste of time” This was 1 3-credit course out of 130+ credit curriculum

Too many people are just pretending this whole perverse industry apparatus created by Ghislaine Maxwells dad is fine when there should be a collective effort to forge an alternative.

Ghislaine Maxwell's father made a fucktonne of money off academic publishing. He owned Pergamon Press, profiting off decades of dizzying growth and profit margins before selling to Elsevier for 100s of millions and falling off his yacht. I think this should be way more common knowledge than it is.

women in science know epstein & co stuff has been brewing for ages with explicit direct experience (basically all of us) & just other related hard facts, I mean... publishing was under the same capture and is also highly abusive to women as well as everybody www.theguardian.com/science/2017... 1/n

I mean, it's no coincidence that a lot of these academic circles tend to turn into boys clubs that are so hostile to women, it becomes impossible to actually work. We just have proof that they've been gaslighting us this whole time.

The Epstein files document what many women researchers have long experienced but rarely seen laid bare so starkly: exclusion operating behind closed doors, shaping who gets funded, invited, mentored, and taken seriously. How many of these networks, norms, and gatekeepers remain in place?

“astrology for men” was too generous

“Hunger Games it out” is a great phrase

Love that my colleagues are reading and sharing the most important papers of our time @lborogeog.bsky.social @olivia.science and co. thank you for writing this one! 🙏🏽

This is the most *insane* story! Ealing Council is set to demolish 105 nearly-finished affordable homes after concluding it’s cheaper to demolish and rebuild rather than finish the buildings after the contractor went bust.

One of the things that makes me the most angry about this is that it risks completely erasing the recent innovations that have made distance-learning actually good and useful and capable of massively broadening access to quality education

Trying to find a place to sleep well during the couple of weeks I'll be in Edinburgh for my Viva and others. Affordability and no noises from other guests, boilers, etc. seem to be incompatible, which would be funny considering the topic of my research if it wasn't for the stress it's giving me.

The drunk uncle theory. You don’t argue with the casually homophobic uncle at Thanksgiving dinner to change his mind; you argue so that the closeted cousin at the kids table knows there’s safe people and better possibilities out there