PSA, BISA and UACES joint letter in support of my own discipline at Exeter, currently facing decimation.

Cuts are currently planned at the University of Exeter, including deep cuts at the Institute of Cornish studies which will do great harm to #Kernewek - the Cornish language. Please sign the open letter and petition. docs.google.com/document/d/1... www.change.org/p/stop-redun...

📣📣Calling all Falmouth and Exeter UCU members! Our Fal-Ex trade union day of action is tomorrow! Members and colleagues in the morning in the Woodlane campus, and all interested members of the public in the afternoon. Let’s fight for jobs and universities in Cornwall!

🚨 PLEASE SHARE WIDELY 🚨 If you are an Exeter alumnus, and wish to express your horror at the proposed cuts to the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, please sign the Google Doc petition below. Not an alumnus? You can still help by signing the Exeter UCU petition at c.org/msXfsb2g5b 🗃️

An exhilarating few days of exchange of ideas & research at the Exeter Fudan Global Thought Network symposium, exploring how ideas & materiality spread across contexts, acquiring new meanings in the process. The network is going from strength to strength! @exeter.ac.uk @uniofexeterhass.bsky.social

This is nearly *everything* - humanities and social sciences AND applied fields. Uni Chicago is suspending PhD admissions in: English, classics, art history, linguistics + Crown School of Social Work, Harris School of Public Policy + Social Sciences, including anthropology and political economy.

Good news! Ministers have finally given green light to new #NaturalHistory GCSE. We’ve campaigned so long for this! Big hats off to tireless advocate Mary Colwell 🙌 Now our young people will have a chance to get to know & love the natural world, to feel awe & wonder, & gain skills to protect it 🌷🌳🦡

My partner, working in the private sector, just received a surprise cream tea through th post as part of his company's wellbeing week, encouraging him to take time to enjoy it today! Mind = blown. What a difference compared to HE where wellbeing basically involves signing up to another online course

I'm a trustee of this wonderful charity, having volunteered with them in 2011. They do essential work training English teachers & facilitating cultural exchange for rural communities & disadvantaged children in Kyrgyzstan. If you can donate to help sustain their future, please do erayim-aid-trust.uk

Interesting article on Area Studies in China. While there surely are plenty of mediocre outputs resulting from this Party-driven push, colleagues across China I've met working on post-Soviet region are deeply knowledgeable, providing a fresh, non-Eurocentric perspective jamestown.org/beijings-reg...

Absolutely this.

The situation for the political theorists at Essex in a travesty. Please read and share.

What to do when you see the sector you devoted your career to dying by a thousand cuts? www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Looks like we've passed peak academia. www.ft.com/content/8097... via @data.ft.com

The seagull nesting on the roof opposite our house is really struggling in the heatwave. She looks like she’s panting 😮‍💨 I’m thinking of scaling the building and positioning a small parasol over her till her chicks arrive.

Just installed '10 Blue Links' Google Chrome extension and it has removed all the AI junk at the top of the page that had been obscuring my search results. Hooray! Recommend💯

If you want to know how and why we've ended up in a situation where tens of thousands of people rally in support of a far-right influencer, backed by wealthy North American fascists, I just wrote a book about it. uk.bookshop.org/p/books/if-w...

A very good afternoon to the absolute hero who organised and parked this beauty in the middle of little Tommy’s far-right hate march. ❤️

Stumbled upon these stunning fossils at Kilve beach in north Somerset at the weekend. Like delicate fragments of golden lace. What a find!! 🤩

Very happy to have my latest research with my excellent co-author and dear friend, Xuan Qin at Fudan University, into the lasting effects of China's zero-COVID policy on its grassroots governance published in the China Journal!

A South West Coast Path scratch off map - a fantastic idea! Only downside is that you have to walk it in the stretches they suggest, and it’s virtually impossible to backfill with the bits you’ve already done. Still, a super cool idea in principle 👍

after a long wait, our forum article on the uses and abuses of the anticolonial in global reactionary politics is finally online! academic.oup.com/ips/article/... for the IPS @20 special issue

Wildfires are a global phenomenon. Speakers: Rayanne Vitali, from wildFIRE lab, University of Exeter, with colleagues Romy Franz Bodenham, Alastair Crawford, Tara Jeffery Further information wildfire-lab.com For Zoom link email [email protected] #wildfires #onlineevent

I'm in @theobserveruk.bsky.social today looking at why so many unis are in financial trouble and what the government needs to do to save HE. observer.co.uk/news/columni...

Bude Sea Pool, created 1930. While the surfers ride the Atlantic waves, swimmers enjoy calm waters. Still cold though 🥶

Peter Magyar has offered a template which can be used, without too much alteration, in defeating populists worldwide open.substack.com/pub/iandunt/...

Leaving beautiful Innsbruck after an intense and exhilarating week at the #ecprjs26, critically discussing the concept of “regime” and how best to study it, with an incredible group of scholars. So many new ideas, collaborations and friendships to take forward! Unforgettable.

Absolutely thrilled to learn that my article with Licia Cianetti and Giannia Del Panta, "What is a Regime", has been awarded the Frank Cass Prize for the best article in @democratization.bsky.social in 2025! Thank you so much to the editors for this recognition of our work - we're all over the moon!

China Book Review's shortlist for the 2025 Award for Outstanding Nonfiction Book on China. chinabooksreview.com/2026/04/02/s...

♨️New #OpenAccess Brief report! . Ibrahim Bornoma, Nick Kirsop-Taylor & David Benson argue that administrative traditions in the majority world must be understood through both colonial and pre-colonial institutional legacies. 🔗 doi.org/10.1002/pad....

Happy to see my awesome co-author, Licia Cianetti, quoted in this Atlantic blog on whether to refer to "the Trump regime" and linking to our review article "What is a Regime?" www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/...

Whenever I have any kind of professional interview, I’m always reminded of the 90s sitcom Spaced, when Daisy is imagining her upcoming interview with a women’s magazine: “What do you think about current affairs, Daisy?” “What do I think about current affairs? Well I like them, I think they’re good…”

‘By 1990 surveys showed that a majority of Russians gave some credence to astrology, telepathy, “supernatural forces” and faith healing via the TV screen.’ Sheila Fitzpatrick on spiritualism during the collapse of the USSR. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Just received the most amazing present from my sister: a bootleg copy of Fantasy Top Trumps!🤩 Oh the hours we spent playing this game when we were small, with these haunting images etched on my brain forever!

happy to update that I managed to find funding to make the book open access. it's too late in the production now to covert to OA right away, but the publisher can do delayed OA after one year. still good!

Reading "The Regime Question" by Amel Ahmed. She shows how the timing of the introduction of parliaments and mass suffrage shaped regime stability in early European democracies. Facinating stuff, with ramification for regime studies today. Recommend💯 press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...

Attacks leave dead vs killed

US House Speaker Mike Johnson: “We're not at war right now. “We're four days in to a very specific, clear mission, an operation, Operation Epic Fury.” A Special Military Operation, say, just like your pals in the Kremlin.

US leadership of "th ‘international rules-based order’[is] deformed beyond recognition by th Gaza genocide but no alternative architecture has cohered in [its]place. Instead there is a politics of gangster imperialism that has neither international nor domestic consent" www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/ma...

It’s insane this is legal. People around Trump are profiting off war and death. I’m introducing legislation ASAP to ban this.

Today's the last day of our @komex.bsky.social course, "Doing Fieldwork in Challenging Contexts" with @xiananj.bsky.social and @surajtelange.bsky.social. What a week of thoughtful and emotional discussions we've had! Our participants are doing inspirational work - its been a privilege to teach them!

The Cornish coast path just west of Portreath. What a way to reset the brain after a week staring at a computer screen! Awesome.

A court has ruled that the government's authoritarian ban on Palestine Action was unlawful. Time to stop criminalising the people protesting a genocide - and start ending the UK's complicity.

Please spread this far and wide, as stories don't get much bigger than this. When the government blocks even the intelligence services from telling us we're heading for environmental catastrophe, you know we have a problem. A very big problem. Thank you. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

“We conclude that a major legacy of pandemic governance in China is a more powerful system of grassroots bureaucracy capable of the microgovernance of citizens’ private lives.”

My latest article with Xuan Qin at Fudan Uni is online at The China Journal! Our research evidences the lasting transformations in China's grassroots bureaucracy wrought by 3 years of zero-COVID, in which biosecurity enhanced & deepened political security. www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

Listen to my awesome colleague @xiananj.bsky.social talk about our up-coming @komex.bsky.social methods course - one week left to register for the early bird fee!!!

We will either end fossil fuel dependency and the predatory extractivist basis of global production, or they will end us through wars and ecological collapse - all at the same time.

Relatable. And increasingly difficult to avoid with the proliferation of photogaphers at conferences and requests from journals to make short videos of one’s recently published articles. No thanks!

Pre-Christian pagan traditions in West Cornwall, UK. Penzance celebrates “Montol”, the shortest day of the year. From tomorrow, the light starts creeping back in! The future is bright, at least in some respects..