Ben Delo is currently an Honorary Fellow of Worcester College, University of Oxford @ox.ac.uk. Luke Turner’s thread documents how Delo privately funded the failed libel action brought against him by neo-Nazi conspiracy theorists Nina Power and Daniel Miller www.worc.ox.ac.uk/about/our-pe...

Ben Delo is currently an Honorary Fellow of Worcester College, University of Oxford @ox.ac.uk. Luke Turner’s thread documents how Delo privately funded the failed libel action brought against him by neo-Nazi conspiracy theorists Nina Power and Daniel Miller www.worc.ox.ac.uk/about/our-pe...

Earlier this month, Ben Delo was the subject of a joint investigation by @theguardian.com and @hopenothate.org.uk, detailing his funding of various right-wing causes in the name of purported free speech, including Toby Young’s Free Speech Union.

I can now reveal that crypto billionaire Ben Delo—pardoned by Trump after a conviction for anti-money-laundering violations—privately funded the failed libel action brought against me by neo-Nazi conspiracy theorists Nina Power and Daniel Miller to the tune of at least £300,000.

“Where are the critical scholars when we need them?” Jay Todd on what this moment demands of critical geographers as the grave threats to trans and gender diverse people (including, of course, scholars) continue to intensify

Alex Colston is great here on the difficulty of doing justice to what he calls “the structural and epistemological causes of … turbulent feelings” when’s one’s account is driven by an economic determinism of affective life that can’t escape beyond the horizon of our existing political arrangements

Started listening to this, exhausted and on a long journey back home after our undergrad field trip, and was gripped and stirred from my lassitude in the first few minutes

Ghassan Abu Sittah and Mary Turfah on the centrality of the clinic to Palestinian society’s resistance in @proteanmag.com proteanmag.com/2026/04/02/h...

It’s undergrad field trip week. Time to make my annual pilgrimage to my namesake, Felicity the Puma* *Arguably the most famous holding in the Inverness museum as well as most famous big cat capture in the UK www.highlifehighland.com/attractions/...

A state has comprehensively failed when it is unable to stop such ongoing fascist frenzy. There is no way for it to find a way out of/back from this from within itself

No fun was had today as I explained to someone why it might not have been such a good idea to cite Grokipedia references as authoritative sources in a bibliography

I searched under 'geography' when first exploring the site, and Wiesam Essa appeared alongside Abdel Nasser Mustafa Salim al-Saqqa, Ali Taysir al-Rantisi and Naim Salman Mohammed Baroud: 4 Palestinian geographers killed by Israel since 7 October 2023 rememberinggazascholars.org/the-scholars...

Includes our UoM-CARA fellow colleague Wiesam Essa. We’d often joke about the Manchester weather. Colleagues had found another post for him when his university and apartment was bombed in Jan 2024.

Efforts to narrow the definition of womanhood, police people’s gender expression, and reduce people to their biology don't protect women - they harm us. Attacks on trans rights should never be done in our name. We must stand in solidarity with our trans siblings.

REMEMBERING GAZA SCHOLARS A group of academics have spent the past 18 months creating an archive that commemorates the lives of Palestinian scholars killed by Israel. 83 of our colleagues, so far, have bios; the group's work continues rememberinggazascholars.org

If this is a conjuncture marked by escalating crises, provoking growing interest in conjunctural thinking across the critical social sciences and humanities, now's the time to ask... What's the point of conjunctural analysis? New article out in Dialogues in Urban Research: doi.org/10.1177/2754...

My throat cracked when I reached the last paragraph. And then the last sentence.

This week’s horror is our introductory module, which examines the literature, art, music, dialect, film and TV from the region 1500-2025 being forcibly replaced by an entire ‘success in HE’ module featuring two weeks on how to use AI. I designed my module to incorporate proper study skills…

So in this essay on 'after Gaza', Franco 'Bifo' Berardi describes Hamas' actions on 7 Oct as 'a pogrom, similar to those that the Jewish people have suffered over the centuries in many European countries...'

Taught my students about 'fascist affects' today & as I was preparing, I came across a cluster of essays in Tank I'd missed from 2025. Ed. Stefanos Geroulanos; featuring Dagmar Herzog, Zahid Choudhary, Carlo Invernizzi Accetti @provokedeconomy.bsky.social @alfatau.bsky.social tank.tv/magazine/iss...

My employer keeps sending me emails like this

We’re at nearly 20% of our target, but there’s still a long way to go! Start your weekend off right by donating to the Books From Below crowdfunder: www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/booksfrombelow Or share this post as widely as you can!

Mayssoun Sukarieh on Israel’s war on Beirut: “what drives home the perception of omnipotent wrath is that the same source of the leaflets also metes out death and destruction from the sky, passing judgment on who lives and who dies”

As one of the authors of this thought I’d share a bit about how we got here and how you can do what we’ve done at you institution. Over the two years I’ve been at the University of Edinburgh I’ve grown increasingly concerned by fellow academics uncritically using LLMs, especially OpenAIs’s ChatGPT.

Berger’s G and left politics’ relations to the libidinal

Much looking forward to reading this having had glimpses of its arguments at a colloquium co-organized by Eugene last year

They’ve brought to visibility a 6th unrecognised COVID death for every 5 that were by training an algorithm to recognise hospital COVID deaths & then finding similar deaths in other settings—at home; amidst poorer ppl; racialised ppl. I’m wondering if this study cd be described as a work of mourning

After days of odd, disorienting silence, the clunk clunk rhythm muffled through the window glass of the place where I live: the trains pulling into Glasgow Central have returned, so close, so familiar. A few minutes pass and then soft bumps of the next. Time is resettling. In bed my limbs lengthen

Mark Watkins of the Chronicle of Higher Ed says faculty should spend 90 mins a week to teach ourselves about AI & unis are now sending out emails w his recommendation. I write here about the gift of having someone admit that automation intensifies labor sonja-drimmer.squarespace.com/blog-1/2026/...

Oh Beirut oh Beirut

Today fewer than 1 in 6 students registered for my honours course got to the week’s lecture and then my colleague talked over lunch about their conviction that students are feeding our recorded lectures into LLMs to help write coursework - the uni having given them sessions on using AI effectively

Solidarity with our colleagues at Aberdeen @ucuaberdeen.bsky.social , Dundee @ducuuo.bsky.social , Heriot-Watt UCU @hwucu.bsky.social , and Strathclyde who are out on strike today and tomorrow! No to job cuts! #WeAreTheUniversity

The book is finally finished. It comes out 25th April 2026. It’s about historians’ “personal experiences”, how these might relate (critically and analytically) to their histories. It is called _The Politics of Personal Experience: Writing a History of Munchausen Syndromes_

I can’t wait to read this, having heard @chrismillard83.bsky.social give snippets from it in different disciplinary spaces

AI companies are paying screenwriters, lawyers, and other white-collar professionals to produce the training data needed to automate their jobs. I spoke with more than 30 workers about conditions inside this fast-growing and extremely secretive new gig economy.

I've been thinking for the last few days about Omid Mehrgan's complex essay in @parapraxismag.bsky.social which moves between Tehran, Gaza, resistance – and the task of the translator www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/ren...

For those wanting to know more about Iran and voices from inside the country (rather than the fash-y monarchists outside), Naghmeh Sohrabi has been translating pieces from folks inside on her blog: truethings.naghmehs.com

crucial coverage from The Guardian that features our collaborative, movement-building website against-a-i.com

My flat’s a few mins’ walk away and sounds of trains rolling into Glasgow Central come every few minutes. Today their absence I am noticing repeatedly. I can’t yet face walking to see the burnt building. One burnt building; no injuries. Elsewhere US and Israel pound urban landscapes to oblivion

Sally Rooney: "By standing in solidarity with Palestine, we are learning how to fight for life on earth"

Sally Rooney: "I would like to ask my fellow writers & artists.. not to dwell too exclusively on what we stand to lose. There is another more important side to the story. To join in something greater than ourselves, to participate in.. a struggle for human liberation"

I’m lecturing on mourning and melancholia to my honours’ students this week and in the midst of writing my lecture I read Haley Mlotek’s essay in @thenation.com on Duras and on grief www.thenation.com/article/cult...

'Why do people resist?...staying with where pain refuses to soften. Keeping vigil with the unbearable, enduring the night where all the cows are black' Always read Nadia Bou Ali communispress.com/dispatches-f...

Just declined this invitation my university just sent me for a full-day workshop. Push back against the relentless reduction of socially necessary labour time

A rare thing: *four* three-year hums/soc-sci posts in animal studies, on the Multispecies Mutualisms project at UoSheffield - with @rosaleenduffy.bsky.social, me, Robert McKay and Alasdair Cochrane; see here for a video explainer: digitalmedia.sheffield.ac.uk/media/Multis...

And just look at how Adam Tickell, economic geographer and vice-chancellor, has chosen to word his attack here: 'getting access to the student loan book', 'investing money in people who are not really capable of graduating'

“What began as an attempt to alter the regional balance may instead hasten the erosion of the order that presumed it could interfere with impunity”

Teaching Mark Fisher this morning and making sure the students also read @callumsutherland.bsky.social on Fisher’s spatial imaginaries in @dialogueshg.bsky.social journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...