Just had the awful news I have to make a decision about having my dog put to sleep. Life just seems to want to pummel every last drop of strength & will to live out of me, all in one year. He is the goodest and best boy ever

“UK HE crisis risks irreversible damage”

Yesterday 142 academic staff at the University of Lincoln were put at risk of redundancy including the entire Politics and International Relations team. This follows cuts since 2024 which have already seen over 500 people leave the university. This is the 'University of No Regrets'.

Dr Claire Hines, from our School of Media, Language and Communication Studies, has published new research exploring Britain’s overlooked fantasy film boom of the early 1980s. Read more: https://bit.ly/4eHCqot #ResearchMatters #NewResearch #FantasyFilms

This, so much this. Those of us outside the RG have been drowning in redundancy & industrial action for years, and barely a single shit given

"Unfettered tech boosterism is a vote-loser".

This is appalling, but unsurprising. And it’s always staff that bear the brunt of any executive team’s incompetence & pocket-lining. These people are charlatans

A depressingly long list of universities who are implementing cuts and redundancies, as well as the petitions and actions against them (via @onslies.bsky.social) qmucu.org/qmul-transfo.... This is a national emergency that should be responded to with national policy.

'British art is full of wonder, mystery and humour. It is also so abundant that it gets taken for granted.' Also taken for granted is that that finding, piecing together, interpreting & showcasing knowledge of the past isn't free. It takes time, skill & money to understand & display the past. 1/2

The Principal blames declining international student numbers.

New in IA71: #archaeology in the AI Era: Demystifying powerful and problematic systems shaping the future of the past by Eric C. Kansa https://doi.org/10.11141/ia.71.15 This essay explores how Large Language Models (LLMs) and the generative "Artificial Intelligence" (#ai) services they power […]

AI and Academic Integrity - what is the sector saying? Find out in my latest blog, showcasing highlights from the AI & Academic Integrity Conference 2026 Link: bilt.online/key-insights... #academicintegrity #assessment #AI #artificialintelligence #highereducation #pedagogy #teachingandlearning

It exists as a physical thing. As manifestation. As a night remembered and a county found.

Voluntary severance schemes at University of Glasgow news.stv.tv/west-central...

I don’t know what the future will hold. I just know that it will be shiny and streamlined and new. Fusty old humanities and social sciences are insufficiently shiny. thesphinxblog.com/2026/06/24/t...

Mum’s on a ward next to the world’s most racist old lady. Given the staff profile, the staff tolerance & forbearance of this nonsense is incredible

We are 3 down the line from the 1st of our most recent rounds of redundancies/major restructure. These are the long term effects: Huge workloads. No time to catch a breath. No money for anything ‘extra’. Constant fear & anxiety among staff left. Regular ‘right sizing’ = tinkering at edges to save £

Ok, look, what's been particularly infuriating about the redundancies at Exeter (and Nottingham and Newcastle and and and) is this weird idea that it only affects those individuals and institutions. It harms us all because we are so closely interconnected.

Each uni has a consultancy in that tells them how to run a degree cheaply. They all simply say 'mega lectures' (LOL, infrastructure) & 'generic modules staff is interchangeable on'. It's pitched as rationalising, creating a 'sustainable' portfolio. But its destroying what university actually is.

£20 million and 200 jobs, 'saying it has to go further because of the “scale of the challenge” it faces'. Cuts across technical, professional and academic staff during academic 2026-27. 1/2

AI is built on a deep stratigraphy of exploitation, not just the exploitation of intellectual property

'University leaders have been urged to lobby firms to release environmental data connected to the use of artificial intelligence to help institutions get a handle on how increased reliance on the technology is impacting on climate goals.' 1/1

"They added that although staff across the academic body were impacted, the cuts were "disproportionately concentrated in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (HASS), where 85% of all staff placed at risk of redundancy (445 out of 523 FTE) are based"." www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Our digital cultural heritage is so fragile without ongoing resources. We're reaching a critical point where the whims of fascist politicians are dictating what digitised resources will survive. Who said culture and history wasn't political? www.theguardian.com/environment/...

You’re not going to believe this, but the thieving prejudice machines are also sexist.

You’re not going to believe this, but the thieving prejudice machines are also racist.

You’re not going to believe this, but the thieving prejudice machines are also ableist.

This is a must read thread if you’re concerned about what AI (or the perception of AI) is able to do to intellectual labour & academic work

Name-checked by the likely future far-right PM of the United Kingdom promising to sink the island once he gets elected.

Spent my day at A&E with my mum, who is still in the back of an ambulance waiting for a bed. Almost exactly a year ago I was waiting with my dad for the exact same reason. Fuck Parkinson’s

Anyone campaigning to clamp down on dangerous AI generated Boomerslop hate on Facebook because of the effects of these social media on the gullible and miserable over 55s? No? Oh

Rupert Lowe says Restore not far right but "he won't have woke creeps telling us we're racist" Restore Britain has a conscious "no boundaries" policy that invites + defends the most openly racist people in Britain to be party members + champions + donors Unprecedented for a party with an MP.

@seethingmead.bsky.social lovely to meet you albeit briefly yesterday, and thank you for excellent chairing! Sorry I didn’t get a chance for a longer chat but had to get back for mum

Researchers sampled 20,000 total stories from ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, using five prompts and found that the same 11 words—names like Elias and occupations like lighthouse keeper and clockmaker—appear in more than 88% of generated stories. @samleecole.bsky.social www.404media.co/elias-thorne...

In our first blog post we present a model of how the far right appropriates archaeology and how we can fight it! We use the recent 'looksmaxxing' trend as a case study to explore this. Give it a read and feed back what you think! 🏺 #AntiExtremistResearch

I found one of this group's flyers in my local supermarket (it's in the bin now). I hadn't heard of them before but a friend sent me this piece (which is too sympathetic in my view). Be warned. www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk-...

We are in a perpetual cycle of “right-sizing” and ‘building efficiencies’, like do many others. HE is quicksand

Grief, sadness, anger - I’m currently experiencing ain’t eh things Glen O’Hara describes, as my department find waits to find out who of us will be sacked (60%) and who retained. isrf.org/blog/what-do...

Giving a short paper this after to our Democracy and Activism Research Group about the connections between the extreme Right/Restore/Reform’s “white indigenous English” rhetoric & archaeology/ancient DNA. This paper practically wrote itself over the past few weeks

Anti-Muslim hate & anti-Semitism deemed fine by Reform UK. That’s the true headline. Reform councillor back in party after suspension

Rupert Lowe here, MP for multi-cultural Great Yarmouth, calling for mass deportations of immigrants & return of the death penalty

“Digital radicalisation” in platforms that refuse to monitor content appropriately has emboldened the extreme right, normalised seeing, sharing & encouraging inflammatory content

Being an academic today apparently means being a generalist rather than a specialist & working trans-globally. I’m sure some consultancy somewhere is in the process of building an app for the delivery of this kind of education. Much like ordering from Temu but less plastic

Expert on extremism here: In 2025, there were 1798 right-wing extremism referrals to Prevent, the UK counter-extremism programme. This is *double* the amount of Islamic extremism referrals (870). And yet, the government is incapable of seeing far-right extremism as a threat. Why? 1/

Fever pitch on various Restore Britain et al Facebook pages this morning, calling for death mass deportation of all asylum seekers dating back decades, the death penalty and organ harvesting. Absolutely fucking terrifying levels of violent speech & incitement & nothing done to stop it

What are the Government, police and security services doing about the people who are quite clearly in the pay of a hostile foreign state, and using their platforms to whip up actual pogroms on our streets? This is a major national security issue and absolutely nothing seems to be happening about it

This is what a pogrom looks like: men in masks coming to drive you from your home. This is a collective failure of our political and media class because we did not have the courage to say no, and because too many were allowed to embrace this without shame

More with even less then. Cool, cool