I know there’s a lot going on but has anyone seen an update on the hunger strikers? Are they all still alive? Does anyone in power care?

Establishing a new habit is difficult. A Meeting With Your Writing provides support for you to time-block 2 hours *every week* for writing. Prompts to begin and end the session, 90 minutes of writing time, the host will help if you are stuck. Try it! academicwritingstudio.co.uk/register/fre...

current poster interation

In this Year of Reading, a gentle reminder: The best way to get your kids reading is to let them see *you* reading. The way to *stop* your kids reading is to criticize their choices, or to make reading a competition, or a punishment, or a race, or a learning tool. Let it be fun. Let them read.

Are you lucky enough to be on sabbatical or research leave this term? The Out of Office Gang still has room! Weekly check-ins on Monday mornings help you stay focused on YOUR goals, whatever those may be. We plan, we problem-solve, we cheer each other on. What can YOU achieve this term?

Cover reveal. It's about how & why colonies/states controlled international & domestic migration until 1888, why in the late 19th c the feds took over, & what it was like for politically disfavored groups to live under that arrangement of power. You can't understand voluntary migration history 1/

Austerity approaches to programs and services are NOT fiscally responsible. They promote the very government waste that they are purported to solve. And that's the point. to make government less effective and undermine public support in public governance

Friction is very often a good thing. It can feel frustrating when you're a muscular interventionist who just wants to Get Things Done™️ but that doesn't mean it doesn't have an important role in enabling some anticipatory governance measures and, frankly, stopping people from doing stupid things

This makes me feel a lot better about my aim to publish one episode a quarter. I know I’m chatty. even with editing my episodes are long. Editing takes time but seems essential.

What's needed is a genuinely progressive asylum policy which focuses on protection over penalisation. We need genuinely safer options for people to be able to seek asylum in UK, coupled with policies here to ensure people can live safely and securely. You know the opposite of Labour's policies. 3/

I’d put it differently. It gets drowned out by the truly awful policies They are actively pursuing to make immigration more difficult, and to make immigrants who are already here feel less welcome

@fevered.bsky.social 👋 nice to see you here

My wish for 2026 is that we build a movement fuelled by joy as much as rage. We won't recruit allies unless we build welcoming spaces and we won't keep people unless we give them something to fight for. Seeking joy is neither naive nor intellectually weak. It's the point of being alive!

Good way to put it.

I want to print YOU DON'T GET GOOD AT A THING BY NOT DOING IT onto little cards and just hand them out in conversation sometimes

An author asked for guidance on how to write a response to reader reports. My answer was pretty quick and dirty for practical reasons, but here's what I said. It ends with a link to much more thorough, helpful advice: Responses can take the form of a letter to the editor/press . . . 1/?

We should all be asking ourselves why it is that university leaders and even some members of the professoriate have been happy to jettison entire fields of humanistic scholarship on the grounds that "no one cares about the Middle Ages", when it is very clear that many members of the public DO care.

Pomodoros don’t work for everyone. 🍅 A Meeting With Your Writing does not force you to break the 90 minute session into 3 pomodoros. You can if you want. Or you can divide it unequally. Or get into flow and write for up to 90 minutes. Try it for free! academicwritingstudio.co.uk/register/fre...

I am distressed at how little attention the hunger strikes are getting. These people are being held without trial. Will we only get news when one of them dies? Will MPs laugh then?

Eyes on the hunger strikers, please. I know there’s a lot going on. But this is happening in the UK right now.

I love that I have to reassure my phone that I am not, in fact, driving this train.

Just watched the new Knives Out and I think it's really important you know that the scene in the Seminary's Gym is filmed in the same place Rick Astley filmed the music video for Never Gonna Give You Up. I saw the window tracery and immediately made my friends pause the film so I could tell them.

Did you get something really *nice* for Christmas? Are you saving it? STOP Eat it. Slather yourself in it. Spray it on a random wfh Tuesday. Use it next time you have a meal. Make up an occasion and use it. Whatever it is don't hoard it until it's near its use by date or too precious.

One of the great things about attending A Meeting With Your Writing on a Monday is that, no matter what happens later in the week, you have already written. That’s big. If you’d like to join us you can try it for free for 30 days.

This post is tongue in. Geek but makes an important point.

Anyway, if you want to understand more about citizenship stripping, instead of falling for authoritarian knee-jerk responses I recommend a recent report from @runnymedetrust.bsky.social & @reprievehq.bsky.social that argues powerfully against this racist trend #r4today reprieve.org/uk/2025/12/1...

Have you resolved to write regularly in 2026? Would you benefit from support? Did you know there is a 30 day free trial of A Meeting With Your Writing, the hosted co-writing sessions I run? academicwritingstudio.co.uk/register/fre...

My SIL made knitting Xmas tree ornaments!! @docsteph.bsky.social

whatever is going on in higher ed in terms of theories of reading and selection, an enthusiastic teacher discussing and writing about an old book with kids at taxpayer expense remains a good idea

I suspect this thread will be useful for some if my followers

UK counterterrorism is strategy is, and has always been, repackaged colonial counterinsurgency strategy deployed to control minorities and quell dissent, and Palestine has always been at the centre of it. Hi, I'm a terrorism scholar, let's have a look at how we've got here: 1/

Linguistics nerds assemble

Do you anticipate needing an editor or indexer next year? I'm currently booking for most months in 2026. I work with cookbooks and the academic social sciences and humanities--history, anthropology, gender studies, ethnic studies, polisci/IR, LIS, communications/media studies, religion, etc.

Saw Goodbye June with my offspring tonight. If you like that kind of thing, it is a very good film if that type. We cried. But I also laughed in several places. Recommend

Great place specific ad seen on the back if a city bus

My latest for @thebookseller.com Thanks to everyone who helped with this one! www.thebookseller.com/news/authors...

Apart from the main point she’s making (which I agree with), this thread is worth a read because this is just a fascinating topic. This is why I do what I do. Because people are doing such amazing the and struggling to find the time to work in them.

If anyone knows where, or whether, Caesarius of Arles uses a metaphor of kidnappers (mangones) tempting victims with flattery and then enslaving them, I'd love to hear about it. Supposed to be in a sermon.

9 - Insofar as AI obeys rules, it plays by Wikipedia rules - it doesn't do original research. All it can do is tell you what researchers have already said on the subject. My job, as a researcher, is to say something new, and give my carefully checked reasons for thinking that new thing.

The immigration hostile environment encourages overzealous over enforcement because there is no penalty in that direction. But there are severe penalties for under enforcement.

As if I needed another thing to be enraged at this government about.

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.

So when the AHA says it's OK to use AI to summarize scholarship, the greatest risk this guideline poses isn't simply to the quality or accuracy of research; the hazard it poses is to the communal nature of the knowledge production. A pursuit that puts people across time & space into conversation 4/n

Agree - this goes for everything from academic historians to software engineers. If you don't know how to recognise the errors, how will you know there are any errors in the first place? And, ergo, how will you ever know how to fix the issue?

Great day out in Sale watching the Sharks women’s rugby. They played well against Saracens. The crowd was great. And that’s the highest quality pint of beer I’ve ever had at a sports ground.

I have my students write three-sentence summaries of articles and then read them aloud in class, to see how different summaries are depending on the things that most interest you. We map overlaps and differences to help them understand why trusting a supposed summary machine short-circuits thinking.

And yet bursaries for trainee nurses were cut, wages stagnate, routes for immigrant nurses are closed (by salary requirements), universities are closing nursing programs, and NHS funding is increasingly inadequate 🤬

The monthly review prompts I send to my newsletter will be useful for helping you ease back into work after the break. They are scheduled for 29 December so they will be in your inbox whenever you start back.

That highest grossing movie when you were 10 meme got me curious. I hope it’s not predictive because the top movies in North America that year were Blazing Saddles and Towering Inferno. id rather 2026 was not that