Do you want to know how UCU senior management has responded to UCU branches calling on them to remove their threat of deductions? This is how. How would you react? uniteucu.wordpress.com/2025/09/12/u...

I feel like I post about this every year, but it would be useful if the media explained that it is not, in fact, easy to immigrate to this country, to get a national insurance number, to get indefinite leave to remain, to get citizenship. It is, in fact, already very difficult.

It would be good if the only political pushback against Nigel Farage's plans to mass deport hundreds of thousands of our neighbours, friends, family and colleagues didn't just come from a handful of backbench MPs and one regional mayor

£77,816 er annum. What an exciting post.

Well this must be the first time that I am positively surprised by a UK entry-level academic salary.

Quarter of UK university physics departments at risk of closing, survey finds

The message of this government, in every single aspect of life, is “we have to make sacrifices”, “we can’t have nice things”, “there will be pain”. Why? Who’s telling them that this is the idea they should be pushing? It’s completely exhausting.

"Oxford becomes first UK university to offer ChatGPT Edu to all staff and students" - imagining a lot of staff there pretty upset about, but also it says much about OpenAI's education strategy that it's targeted Oxford as its first institutional capture in the UK www.ox.ac.uk/news/2025-09...

I went to the West Bank, occupied Palestine. I found a people who are suffering a hideous injustice - but who have resilience and determination. New video 👇👇 youtu.be/2jHuCiB8s9A

Book Launch: ARTMargins on the Socialist Anthropocene 30 Sept 6–7:30pm Investigating transformation of nature in socialist art history, by discussing artworks that disclose environmental impacts of the system’s extractivist & terraforming interventions in natural world. www.ucl.ac.uk/institute-of...

That's a Labour government minister berating university students and staff by saying that 'too often people go to university to "explore research and knowledge"'. I'm very glad of our students who study history to explore research and knowledge.

Right. My students working two part time jobs and/or having an hour and a half commute to uni because they have to live at home due to the cost of student accommodation lack drive and vigour. Sure thing, Peter. The UK Govt still haven't a clue about the realities of universities today.

Very much enjoying the culture of trust and respect implicit in the installation of room usage monitoring devices on academics' office doors today. Imagine my shock on discovering that managers' doors remain unsullied…

do you work in a university/faculty/school in the UK that abolished “departments”? willing to share experiences (by DM if preferred)? RTs also appreciated

Applications are now open for the 2026 Summer Institute for the Study of East Central and Southeastern Europe! ACLS and the Centre for Advanced Study Sofia will convene leading scholars from Eastern Europe and North America for a residency in Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria June 3-19: bit.ly/3Ip2Mhz

VACANCY: we invite applications for a new job at the Society: Events and Academic Engagement Officer (0.6 FTE) bit.ly/3V8q5PC The post-holder will join our professional Office to help us support history and historians. £36,433 pro rata. Closing date: Sunday 5 October #Skystorians

they are so excited for universities to go under and are hastening the day

Great to see these translations of Maria Janion into English: "A queer woman and survivor of World War II, a leftist who resisted Soviet orthodoxy, Janion lends a uniquely disruptive voice to contemporary discussions of fascism, and her insights resonate far beyond her Eastern European roots."

…excuse me?

'The European Research Council (ERC) has announced changes to its grant eligibility criteria for the 2027 calls for proposals, with scholars able to apply for a starting grant directly after finishing their PhD.' 1/3

You know how I hate to harp on about this, but nothing is ever going to change until we address it: How can this have happened when all our loudest political commentators stridently agreed *for years* that the public were crying out for these Serious people and these Sensible policies?

Cats say a £22bn investment in Dreamies and new Catnip technologies will boost Britain's economy in the next few years

On the one hand yes; on the other this can feel like pulling the rug out from under ECRs. There should be enough academic jobs for all PhDs who want them; we need to fight for the future of humanities and resist defeatism. There is value in academic teaching and research.

I was incredibly lucky to eventually (i.e. 3 years post-PhD) get a 3-year research fellowship, but I’ve got to say, trying to plan maternity leave, and life after maternity leave, in the final year of a fixed-term contract is pretty scary. And I’m still one of the lucky ones.

'What’s particularly sad in such circumstances is how the future starts to lose any appeal of possibility, hope or excitement' Sounds about right.

CfP Alert! 🔥🔥 @wesleygrafwald.bsky.social and I are putting together a special issue for Dance Research Journal on Early Twentieth-Century Dance Photography. Please share widely and don't hesitate to be in touch when you are interested or have questions! Find the CfP below, or DM us for the PDF.

Really, really shocking viewing. www.theguardian.com/world/video/...

I’m an AI sceptic but what I learned from this as an art historian is just how reliant the field is on visual imagery and, at the same time, how poor its understanding of visual culture appears to be. Fascinating. www.theguardian.com/news/ng-inte...

And this is why the Forde report and Labour’s efforts to ensure nothing was ever done about it should have been a massive scandal in the first place.

www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty... The free speech crusade will continue until complete conformity and submission are achieved.

A Israeli soldier who was attached to the GHF "relief" operation, and was ordered to shoot at the crowd: "The officers would shout at me: take them down, take them down. I shot 50-60 bullets per day, I stopped counting the kills. I have no idea how many people I killed, lots. Children". Haaretz.

Surely the question to ask here, when people deny racist motivations, is “and how do you define racism?” Is being scared of people who live in asylum seeker hotels racism? Is believing in the great replacement theory racism? I’m pretty sure they would answer “no”. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/s...

Surely the question to ask here, when people deny racist motivations, is “and how do you define racism?” Is being scared of people who live in asylum seeker hotels racism? Is believing in the great replacement theory racism? I’m pretty sure they would answer “no”. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/s...

I passed the Life in the UK test yesterday aka the day of Tommy R’s march. What a feeling.

I wrote a thing. As someone who survived the 1970s and kept the receipts.

We want robust, enormous research that is SUCH good research, you already know how important and right and insightful it is before you even start it. We want research so predeterminedly world-changing that there is hardly any point actually doing the research at all.

"Hobbyist" is a truly breathtaking choice of phrase. It encapsulates a profound sense of contempt for the labour of academics in the UK, who already have to navigate an underfunded system dominated by precarity and overwork. "Knows the price of everything but the value of nothing" springs to mind

A polite reminder that some of the most fundamental and field-shaping research is UNfunded—or rather core-funded through institutional research leave—precisely because it doesn’t have to abide by the fickle trends and tickboxes that govern UKRI & Co. Frankly, this is an insult to the profession.

Very good article by @bratskoff.bsky.social on how Holocaust exceptionalism is gaining an upper hand over Holocaust universalism within mainstream Jewish context, a topic I’m writing about with Nira Yuval-Davis, building on the piece by Amos Goldberg quoted here. www.latimes.com/opinion/stor...

Sometimes solutions are easy @drjogrady.bsky.social & @ucu.org.uk Let’s sit down and talk without conditions or threats that damage everyone. It’s time to resolve this dispute. Our statement, with support from the following branch committees:

Problematic (to put it kindly) on so many levels. 1) there isn't really 'unfunded' research. The REF is there to allocate resources so that research is possible without a grant.

I hope everyone on Twitter who joined the far-right in screaming “Judith Butler is an antisemite!!!” is proud of themselves.

More here on video calls for lonely parrots: www.gla.ac.uk/news/archive...

'Analysis of almost 45,000 courses in Times Higher Education’s Courses 360 databases found that roughly 3,900 had shut down between 2024-25 and the upcoming academic year.' 1/2

🚨 We’re hiring! 🚨 Seeking an Associate Lecturer (Teaching) in the MSc Conservation of Contemporary Art & Media to join our team at UCL East. 🕒 Working Pattern: Part-time, on site 💷 Salary: £43,981–£52,586 📄 Contract: Fixed-term (12 months) ⏰ Closing date: 12/10/25 👉 Apply now: shorturl.at/57NCS

When you publish a website that posts the names and photos of scholars who have written or said things you disagree with and encourage people to surveil and harass them, you are not, in fact, a “free speech” organization.

Sharing some recipes in today’s @vittles.bsky.social 😈 If you were horrified by Iga Świątek’s strawberry pasta, you’re not ready for this one. www.vittlesmagazine.com/p/cooking-fr...

Sharing some recipes in today’s @vittles.bsky.social 😈 If you were horrified by Iga Świątek’s strawberry pasta, you’re not ready for this one. www.vittlesmagazine.com/p/cooking-fr...

A GoFundMe for the instructor who was fired at Texas A&M!