the graduation of a cohort of gaza’s new medical professionals in front of the ruins of al shifa hospital. No words, really.

My friend the writer and geographer Clive Barnett died four years ago today. I am thinking of his daughters, his partner, all those dear to him, for whom 24 December is so painful. I miss you Clive. I tried to write about your early writings earlier this year eprints.gla.ac.uk/359789/2/359...

In the midst of the horror of what’s been done to the grad student, I’m struck by student’s use of “opinion”. I’m sure I’m not alone in spending most of every seminar trying to develop students’ understanding of difference btw opinion & argument and to install hesitation before the word “opinion”.

This is such an important paper by @gailfdavies.bsky.social on how functional neurological symptoms are produced. I hope it is very widely read by clinicians, clinical researchers, and medical humanities researchers — as well as geographers

Important to realise that one of Alice Sullivan's demands in her legal letter to University of Bristol is for the university to withdraw its Trans Inclusion Policy profalices.co.uk/wp-content/u... (the policy is already listed as under review by the university www.bristol.ac.uk/inclusion/lg...)

Important to realise that one of Alice Sullivan's demands in her legal letter to University of Bristol is for the university to withdraw its Trans Inclusion Policy profalices.co.uk/wp-content/u... (the policy is already listed as under review by the university www.bristol.ac.uk/inclusion/lg...)

Via Prisoners for Palestine… take action: linktr.ee/prisoners4pal #Palestine

This is becoming a very very shameful episode - and a tragedy for these young and courageous people and their friends and families filtonactionists.com

TJ Clark on a kouros! 30yrs ago, before I’d seen a kouros, my partner-to-be told me of standing transfixed as an adolescent by the eroticism & tautness of the Kroisos kouros in Athens. I fell in love with their love for that kouros & ever since have been fascinated by the power kouroi have over us

New paper outlining a spatial account of #FND and proposing an approach to the co-production of functional symptoms. It draws on my longstanding work on geographies of health knowledges, my recent health experiences, and emerging interdisciplinary conversations www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

After nearly half a century Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts has put its collection of Winslow Homer watercolours on display. Was determined to get there in the small crack of time I had between the New Hampshire bus dropping me off in Boston and the plane back home www.mfa.org/exhibition/o...

The reasons that have brought me to this state are painful but this was the view I gazed on in solitude yesterday and it was beautiful

Please join all those of us who have signed

Yep, I'm still not reading the novel Pan

Today, I did an interview on the picket line with a reporter from the the ‘Evening Standard’. I prefaced it with the fact that I left the ES (I worked in the cuttings archive and did research for the journos) 20 years ago to join the British Library: I *still* earn *much* less now than I did then.

Solidarity with British Library workers on the picket line!

I’ve summed up and contextualized all of these critical AI pieces & more in one place — “From AGI to Workslop: What I Read About AI in 2025.” mail.cyberneticforests.com/what-i-read-...

A frequent reaction to queer-trans animality that I touch on in this piece is the charge of anthropomorphism. Strategic anthropomorphism has many advantages, one of which is to show how misuse of cishet norms & constructs distorts science (courtship, anyone?) doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2025.2504375

I’ve been thinking about the intellectual and affective labor involved in reading AI Generated student papers. I’m forecasting a little of the proposal that @cnygren.bsky.social and I advance in a piece that’ll be out soon but here’s where I’ve personally landed (o speak for myself not for us both):

R.F. Kuang, the bestselling novelist behind Katabasis, Yellowface, and Babel, is taking a stand with the BDS movement. lithub.com/author-r-f-k...

We chat about two papers: 1) "Undoing Cultural Studies: Cultural Economy at the Open University (1979-1997)" - a part-history of "workshopping" at the OU, associated with Stuart Hall and Doreen Massey (who I refer to as Jamesonian "vanishing mediators"). www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Today I’m handing over to the Imperial War Museum materials from someone close to me who participated during his National Service in what Britain terms the “Cyprus Emergency”. Everything feels heavy. My eyes snag on every use of the word terrorist

I said yesterday at the Social Pathologies of Contemporary Civilization conference at UCC that it was almost impossible in Britain to discuss sociological literature and debates on the concept of “over-diagnosis” given the ongoing and intensifying attacks on what remains of the welfare state

My favourite image of our excellent @radhumslab.bsky.social roundtable this week, "The medical humanities in a new biological age" - with @ciarab.bsky.social, @felicitycallard.bsky.social and @dyutic.bsky.social (Thanks @egeertsphd.bsky.social for taking it!!)

I heard Sinan present this wonderful paper at UCC this week. Read, read, read

“I read Fornari’s book against the backdrop of Israel’s ongoing genocidal war in Gaza” This by Ramsey McGlazer is very much worth reading in @parapraxismag.bsky.social www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/the...

Nous Group strikes again

What a swimming pool

What a church

“The path between a fascist or decolonial future runs directly through Palestine”

This week I spoke to a research student who told me, her voice exploding with disgust, that the academic teaching one of the courses she was taking had powered up his teaching presentation while saying, proudly, “AI made my slides” [she clarified he meant content not just layout]

Not sure where things go from here. Now common for only 1-2 out of every 20 submissions to the journal I edit to be in scope. The rest are out-of-scope and/or probably AI-generated, and take a lot of time to go over and process. And what meaning do journal acceptance rates have in such a context?

"Runctitiononal features"? "Medical fymblal"? "1 Tol Line storee"? This gets worse the longer you look at it. But it's got to be good, because it was published in Nature Scientific Reports last week: www.nature.com/articles/s41... h/t @asa.tsbalans.se

DIVEST Walking past one of the main university buildings on my way to lecture this morning

“Meeting the demands made by people of conscience across the world in the case of Gaza – suspending the sale of arms and imposing economic sanctions – remains the only way to prevent the true worst-case scenario from reaching every Palestinian village, town, and city in the West Bank”

“exiting the market”

Let me get up early to remind myself of the debates over how to construe Marx on the fetishism of commodities before I teach the first year geography students <3 hours later still in the thickets never coming back out>

everyone is talking about getting copies of University Keywords (or other JHU Press books) for all their friends, students, and comrades for the holidays, especially when it is 40% off with the code HHOL25.

This is not the way, and @cnygren.bsky.social and I lay out in detail why it isn’t in this essay here. static1.squarespace.com/static/55577...

Images of the first amputee football tournament in Gaza by photojournalist Rizek Abdel Jawad. nbmediacoop.org/2025/11/21/p...

In "Occupied Refuge," @hannobrankamp.bsky.social challenges the view of refugee camps as indispensable safe havens, showing that humanitarian missions often function as militarized occupations that treat camp inhabitants as colonized subjects. Read the intro for free now: buff.ly/IwyWW8p

23k lives could have been saved if lockdown had been 1wk earlier. My mind turns away from those weeks of Feb/March 2020: the memories are too painful. Desperately trying to push universities to close. All of us who fell so ill **infected before Johnson finally locked down**. All those of us who died

I'm glad to have signed this statement in support of queer and trans staff at the National Library of Scotland, who by the sounds of it are going through an awful time at the moment: docs.google.com/document/d/e...

Going great with universities in Britain on.ft.com/4oVmSQw

Recovery and rehabilitation in mental health: Historical perspectives Hannah Blythe @hanblythe.bsky.social and Sarah Marks @sarahvmarks.bsky.social’s introduction to their special issue journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Post a book you love from the 80s. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. #BookSky #bookchallenge #readingchallenge #readingcommunity #booktok #bookish #books

"[admin]...who regard the...students of their own universities with such contempt as to be undeserving of the education that in many cases those administrators themselves, or their parents, or their children received...are an enemy of the educational enterprise" 🎁 link www.wsj.com/opinion/mont...

Each of these sentences is devastating to read. Worlds upon worlds being destroyed

I know that at this point it's a subplot in the Epstein files drama, but I feel compelled to point out, once again, that Larry Summers HAS NO BUSINESS teaching students at ANY university ever again! My latest cries into the abyss, in @thenation.com www.thenation.com/article/soci...