Mine should be out in an article next year, but it's a connection between disparate sources which I was only able to make because of my lived experiences as well as my historical training. A small piece of knowledge in a larger study, but only generated through that embodied, situated perspective.

What historians (and other scholars do) is create knowledge. We should use that phrase more and talk about what it means. I think we don't, and it's part of why AI enthusiasts are confused when we don't readily agree that our work can be replicated/replaced by their products.

I am beyond excited for this book: Sick Work: Exhaustion, Labor, and Invisible Illness, an original historiography and ethnography on ME. Out in Sept. 2026 www.dukeupress.edu/sick-work

Reminder for more robust people, please keep boosting when you can! (And if you're seeing your crook friends, please check in with what their testing needs are -- truly, it's a wonderful gift to have people just be chill about it 💜)

LinkedIn gave me a year in review but it didn't list the main metric, number of panic attacks caused by trying to use that platform to secure contract work

“But it’s also that this land, this beautiful Aboriginal land, was not made to hold such grief. It can, and it does, but it shouldn’t have this burden thrust upon itself.” @jordanas.bsky.social on the logic of violence that permeates Australia.

This is the way #Meanjin ends — not with a bang but a whimper. New FOI story from me for @crikey.com.au: www.crikey.com.au/2025/12/17/m...

"Disability organisations reiterate the call for the Government to stop all Centrelink payment penalties and end the Targeted Compliance Framework following another alarming report from the Commonwealth Ombudsman about the harms within the mutual obligations system" dana.org.au/call-to-end-...

👇This response to #dishist in #highered & the experiences of disabled, chronically ill, D/deaf, & #ND #skystorians is a must-read, w/ recommendations relevant across the Humanities & #academicsky. Thank you, Sarah Holland, @disabledarchaeo.bsky.social, Sarah Hayward, & @tillyguthrie.bsky.social! 🗃️

"It was court rulings, the threat of mass compensations and deaths which made the Morrison government act on robodebt... ongoing reports from advocates, legal experts and those caught in the system prove beyond a doubt the fire isn’t just burning, it’s burning out of control." Ty Amy for reporting

In the wake of Wes Streeting’s announcement of a review of mental health ‘over-diagnosis’ we have published this new policy paper by Prof Lucy Delap arguing that the government’s priority should be to address the historic stigma against sick & disabled people. historyandpolicy.org/policy-paper...

As someone who has always chosen alternative phrasing just to spite predictive text, I fully endorse a headlong rush into your idiosyncrasies as a way to stake out your intellectual autonomy and voice, which is simultaneously healing, fun, and petty

#BREAKING: The Commonwealth Ombudsman has published their investigation into the Targeted Compliance Framework & Mutual Obligations system Their findings on the Department's administration of many parts of the system are incredibly damning 👇

Significant statement from the Ombudsman on payment suspensions - the system is unfairly and unlawfully punishing people who are "below the poverty line" and are "unlikely to find ongoing employment no matter how hard they try to comply with the requirements placed upon them"

This piece is really beautiful, and speaks to close reading as a fundamental orientation of the soul towards the wider world

The more that comes out about the fabricated crisis at Macquarie University, the worse it gets. Wanton destructive ideologically driven managerialism targetting scholars at the peak of their careers, robbing students of choice & expertise, destroying disciplines vital to the whole sector.

... temptation to become one of those two-PhD people is incredibly strong

From WHAT'S LEFT IS TENDER: a poem in honor of my former partner who passed from AIDS-related opportunistic infectons and in gratitude of the AIDS poets who shaped so much of my formation as a gay man and poet. Monette taught me about the power of queer anger, and it has suffused my work.

WHAT SORTS OF THING ARE GOING WRONG? CAN I HELP?

"you'll be visited by three spirits" The three spirits

TFW your body doesn't regulate adrenaline properly and you submit a huge multi-org grant application with under an hour to deadline

Useful thing for Aussie people juggling jobs: the Fair Work Ombudsman has an app called Record My Hours which doesn't store your data (unlike all the other freelancer type apps/programs out there) and lets you track actual hours worked in a way that is lowkey and doesn't add too much cognitive load.

I empathise with my nervous system for using stress-induced narcolepsy to try to nope me out of things; it's like putting a blanket over a parrot's cage to trick them into going to sleep. Except, there's this thing called a deadline, which as far as I know is not a significant feature of parrot life

I got to do a tiny bit of editing on this book and it was genuinely such an absolute treat to do because it's a wonderful collection -- people with really fascinating activist experiences that interweave with their scholarly work, and unlike some collections it hangs together as a coherent read!

"Maybe the intelligence we most need is the capacity to see beyond the hierarchies that determine which knowledge counts. Without that foundation, regardless of the hundreds of billions we pour into developing superintelligence, we’ll keep erasing knowledge systems that took generations to develop."

gonna get this framed to hang next to my unreasonable number of Blake prints 💜

In which I articulate the case that AGI is impossible and machines just plain cannot think. www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/on-inco...

Know anyone who would want to come work with me? 1 year position for someone with a HASS background (don’t need to be a programmer), working on a tool to search historical documents like colonial Hansard. unimelb.wd105.myworkdayjobs.com/en-GB/UoM_Ex...

Beset by impossible crushing deadlines, the postie chose to interrupt my panic attack to give me a treat ... Though now I need to not actually read any of it until the weekend/after Sisyphean tasks are somehow complete

Our book comes out this week!!!

Alice is the gold standard of what Twitter was when it was great - how you could just find these brilliant, remarkable people with the kind of voices that rarely get platformed or taken seriously, and hear about their lives in their own words without intruding on them or demanding emotional labor

In disability communities, grief isn’t episodic. It’s cumulative. It layers. It reverberates. We lose people who should’ve had decades more time—because the world is engineered to wear us down. And yet, in that same world, disabled people keep building life with one another anyway.

Alice Wong taught us that disabled people don’t just leave memories behind—they leave infrastructure. Lineages of care. Methods of collectivity, survival. She named the connective tissue that holds our communities together, even across death, even across the losses that come too fast and too often.

"As disabled oracles, we continue to build and create on the knowledge and dreams of our ancestors. They left their mark on the planet as will we. After we’re long gone, we will show up in other ways." Alice in 2020 at the Assembly of the Future disabilityvisibilityproject.com/2020/08/14/m...

When I had to get regular infusions a couple of years ago, I brought Alice's memoir as a kind of companion since I couldn't bring anyone with me in person. I dipped in and out whenever I needed to help ease the passing hours. I don't think I ever told her I did that.

For those not on Instagram, here is the statement from Alice Wong’s family:

Alice Wong was one of the most effective people challenging the Whiteness of disability communities and its many flaws, but who believed fiercely in us as a community, in disabled people as oracles. Alice brought so much to so many of us, it’s hard to measure the kind of gratitude I have for that.

“Don’t let the bastards grind you down. I love you all.”

This is genuinely so devastating. I'm so grateful to Alice for her sharing of wisdom and support and insight all while fighting for and with us all. It's an incalculable loss to the world. Love and solidarity to those also grappling with this. 💜

I spent years researching how 1970s Britain was essentially constant cultural panic attacks about supposed terminal decline, due to things like *checks notes* inexpensive concrete public art Is it worse to cultivate imperial nostalgic declinist nonsense for a decade, or to forget doing it?

If you’re interested in the history of the far right in Australia, as well as those who have opposed it, our book ‘Histories of Fascism and Anti-Fascism in Australia’ is now on sale with a 20% discount. @drjpersian.bsky.social www.routledge.com/Histories-of...

Lost to time when I nuked my Twitter feed: a thread of highly emotional reflective letters between Gough Whitlam and Tom Uren. Someone's gotta do a history of emotions / masculinity PhD on that correspondence

Some of you may be interested in this symposium on 'truth-telling' (in its many guises) being held at the University of Melbourne this week. Students and mob can attend for free, Unimelb staff get a 20% discount, and unwaged scholars get a 75% discount. I will be there for some of Friday's sessions!

I just remembered I submitted *two* chapters for collections last year, and I have no idea what's happening to them (if anything) 😑 The vagaries of publishing are rough enough for humans, but for us snails it's additionally brutal 🐌

And while you’re stocking up on Lauren’s book, you can also get mine!

While you're stocking up on Evan's work, technically you can also still get my book www.routledge.com/Milton-Keyne... And also, a great book I got to edit early this year: www.routledge.com/The-Liberal-...

Anne Twomey is turning into a YouTube machine with her series on the dismissal of the Whitlam government—and now she's promising "a special video in a unique location" for the 50th anniversary on Tuesday. Constitutional and political history fans lesssgoooooo

The phase immediately after recovering from the worst of a migraine is when I write the most nonsense; I know this, and yet every time my optimism emerges out of a sea of delirium

🚨 Closing today! Are you passionate about intersectional disability justice, inclusion, and accessibility? Do you love having conversations driven by curiosity and care that build rapport with potential clients? If that’s you, we’d love to hear from you. Apply now!