Crustacean Saturday 😍

Kneecap barred from Canada and Sally Rooney under threat of arrest if she enters the UK in the same week. Seems bad!

Imagine having all the cultural and financial security of *the university of oxford* and being this pathetically weak. Extraordinary really.

They all count, but sometimes citation feels like being tagged into someone else's mad/dreadful conversation.

When the dust settles, I hope we remember that on the precise evening Trump (a) pulled his cultural critics off TV and (b) designated his political enemies as terrorists, the UK was giving him every honour imaginable, and glorying in its "special relationship" with his regime.

The lads rolling around randomly while I do the Paul Rudd "Look at us! Look at us!" meme with myself.

In this editorial, we've taken the opportunity of being 3 years in - amidst the "flow or tide" of submissions - to ask how the field's energies are being distributed, + reflect on the concepts and theories that are so central to new STS work that they almost form a canon or infrastructure...

Is the British sociological association okay

This is how I find out that shite song is actually about a real place?! #speirgorm

University of Calgary is hiring for four (4) professors in Sociology! #AcademicSky #SociologySky #AcademicJobs universityaffairs.ca/search-job/?...

Obviously one expects no less from the university rankings industrial complex, but this is absolutely dire, willfully-naive AI boosterism. www.theguardian.com/education/20...

I quite like this photo I took of Rachel Lavelle playing with @crashensemble.bsky.social at the Pavilion, part of the Sounds from a Safe Harbour festival.

Seems kind of incredible to write this article and not wonder whether the largest lake in Ireland being owned by some rando English aristocrat is maybe part of the assemblage that sustains this ecological disaster. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

New job alert - Criminology lectureship (3 years) - University College Cork, Department of Sociology and Criminology - all specialisations and interests welcome my.corehr.com/pls/uccrecru...

Lads, what are we doing here.

The relentless contempt, disgust, even hate that successive UK governments exhibit for the country's (hitherto) wildly successful HE sector remains one of the most baffling sub-plots of a generally insane age.

Why does the AI render of my lecture look like someone earnestly transcribing Tom Waits lyrics

Reading "x" today offers a sincere reminder that the concepts we need for understanding the present are as likely - or more likely! - to lie in the realm of the psyche than in economic, political etc analyses.

Ireland will not take part in 2026 Eurovision Song Contest if participation of Israel goes ahead, RTÉ Director-General says

Incredible - Ireland football manager says the team can't win a game because they're traumatized from being so shit for so long. www.irishtimes.com/sport/soccer...

I spoke to the Irish Times for this very good and rounded piece on the real-world effects of C***GPT in the humanities classroom: www.irishtimes.com/ireland/educ...

Hallgrimsson out jfc #ARMIRL

There's lots that's extraordinary about the british labour government obviously, but a foreign policy guided by a desire to humiliatingly abase their nation before genocidaires and fascists feels like it should generate more heat?! www.theguardian.com/world/2025/s...

A boring question for #speirgorm but are An Post right to charge a customs (and admin!) fee on a magazine/paper sent to Ireland from the UK via subscription, and/or is there anything that the UK sender could or should be doing on their end to prevent this? (Otherwise you'd never subscribe, no??)

Not my circus anymore, but the bsky consensus that industrial action on pay is unpragmatic/unrealistic, thus bad, seems oddly hopeful that conditions in the self-immolating UK sector will at some point stabilise. Maybe they won't though! It's not obvious to me there's actually much to lose.

Slightly diminish a book Corkonians

Solidarity with everyone at the university of Edinburgh, and a reminder that the largest structural problem facing the UK university sector isn't funding, it's the sector's almost uniformly dire senior management class.

Morning, losers.

It's the Sunday evening before term starts, so let's finally open what is - at 64% abv - apparently the strongest Irish whiskey on the market 👍

My extremely unpopular (in IRL) opinion is that this is super cringe, and also that the general cultic stuff around mdh is not unrelated to the absolute clownshow we're seeing around the current pres. election #speirgorm

It's notable that humanities and social sciences once again make up 50% of ERC starting awards in Ireland (a notably higher proportion than in other countries) despite the weak financial support for research in these disciplines nationally. We should fund what we're good at!

SAI Conference Queen’s University Belfast 7th – 8th May 2026 **Call for Papers** Conflict, Change, Solidarity Proposals (max 250 words) and short bios (max 100 words) should be sent by 15th October 2025 to: [email protected]. Decisions on abstracts will be emailed by 31st October 2025.

I almost forgot, happy Cromwell death day, for those who celebrate (ie everyone in Ireland)!

Using the word *crackdown* about international students is a pretty strong indicator of how far gone the UK is. www.theguardian.com/education/20...

Our Sonic Practices Symposium is this Friday! Please come along but remember that there is a blanket ban on questions starting: "This is more of a comment than a question really but..." There will be a buzzer, and a security guard. You will be escorted out.

Someone's going to write a really solid book one day about the consistent anti-Irishness of the British left, and one of its beefiest chapters is going to be about the NLR. #speirgorm

The Proustian rush of junior infants Irish: mála scoile, halla, small lón.

Begging the english liberals to realise the policy exchange/ECHR document isn't actually making a legal argument about how the treaty works, it's making a political argument that treaties made with Ireland don't count, and any effects of UK policy on Irish people should be discounted.

Let's go.

Does anyone have an account of why all the "alt" US public institution accounts are so uniformly bad/ridiculous?

“It is time to STRIKE GERMANY now more than ever” strikegermany.org

The "my children will share everything nicely" to legislating whose crumbs are whose pipeline.

As much as it is baffling that people are going to conferences in the US, it is also honestly baffling that people are hosting - and attending! - conferences in *Germany,* a country in the midst of an extraordinarily violent police crackdown on intellectual freedom.

Okay, okay. We'll take Bertie. m.independent.ie/irish-news/a...

This is probably bluesky-inappropriate snark, but anyway, here's an excellent example of how the encrusting of academic jargon into the dullest of mainstream cultural institutions can usefully signal the (long ago!) voiding of any critical force from the same term. designmuseum.org/exhibitions/...

I'm going to need you all to stop referring to articles from 2011 as "recent literature."

I mean, lmao, but is there really no one at **Nature** who might intervene editorially and save them from printing this obvious bollocks?

Extremely not here for "it could happen here too!" takes about the UK, a state that, within my lifetime, has openly murdered its own citizens in the street, and granted total impunity to the murderers.

Hagai El-Ad: "As far as Gaza is concerned, the public in Israel can stomach dead medics, slaughtered journalists and starving children. What the public cannot stomach is Israeli officials or soldiers being held to account." www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2025...

Newnham College, Cambridge. Horrifying. We have to stop this happening in other British universities