good morning @maxrushden.bsky.social, long time @footballweekly.bsky.social listener here. i don’t “skeet” often, but i just came here to gloat. your boat rowers took one hell of a beating yesterday. i fear that Ryan Loft may need some of Mrs Holloway’s sage if you are to reach your lofty ambitions

well, football never really went away did it? a dog darn shame about the result though

Next Thursday (6-7pm) I’ll be chairing an important discussion between Esme Garlake and Dr John Paul Stonard on art history and climate activism. The event is being hosted by @anthropoceneucl.bsky.social and promises to be a fascinating discussion.

On 10 January 2024, Pope Francis received a private audience with a delegation of people who had been participating for several years in a dialogue between Marxists and Christians. Michael Löwy, who was in attendance, recounts the experience in detail.

the securitisation of waste… a reality in Lagos, Accra, Dar es Salaam, and now Birmingham solidarity with striking bin workers www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

very grateful for the wonderful contributions to “Burning Matters” @forarthistory.org.uk, papers addressing contemporary Canadian art and indigenous rituals of fire, Piero di Cosimo’s wildfire paintings, Steve McQueen and the Grenfell Fire disaster, and photography and forged wildfire narratives

if you’re coming to the @forarthistory.org.uk conference in York this week do join Elsa Perryman Owens and I for “Burning Matters: The Limits of the Image in a World on Fire” (9 April) where we’ll be discussing the role of art history in grappling with present day and historical fire disasters

wrote this short essay on sanitation, urban space, and state violence in Accra for The Polyphony, a really neat platform for research in the critical medical humanities based out of @durhamimh.bsky.social. check it out 👇🏻

Jacob Badcock elucidates the parallels between 19th century colonial notions of sanitation and urban space and the recent demolition of an e-waste scrapyard in Accra (Ghana). thepolyphony.org/2025/04/03/a...

You think the arbitrary arrest of political dissenters cannot happen in the UK? It already does. www.quaker.org.uk/news-and-eve...

well, this was great! learned so much from the audience. it was great to hear from grass roots activists, people who run electronics repair/reuse workshops, and other climate concerned residents with all kinds of other knowledge and expertise (from plastics, to mining, to water quality)

a case of what could have been these past few weeks…

Next week I am speaking as part of the Highworth Climate Talks. Do come along if you’re local! (www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/e-waste-th...)

What a fascinating talk by @michellehenning.bsky.social, linking photography to chemical warfare via Benjamin's aura & Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia. Really looking forward to Henning's forthcoming book A Dirty History of Photography: Chemistry, Fog, and Empire press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...

About a month ago, I presented my lecture, Conserving ‘Sodom and Gomorrah’: Nature, Urbanism, Technology, at Bern Academy of the Arts for the inaugural Natureculture Lab For anyone interested, you can now watch my lecture (from 42:00) on the link below ⬇️ youtu.be/u4kyl5lExC0

computers are made from rocks.

didn’t see a single fan in an Aussie hat today. “Morfini” out

people in academia often snigger or seem bemused when i tell them that i live in swindon and travel into london for work… despite the fact that this would make sense in basically any job that you rarely have to be in the office for

so this was very cool! met so many wonderful people in Bern working at the interaction of natural and cultural heritage conservation (+obligatory “i gave a paper” snap)

guten abend from Bern, i see the paul glatzel fan club has set up a branch here

the fog followed me from the venetian lagoon to the streets of swindon town quite literally one of the most unwatchable games of football i’ve ever seen

greetings from Venezia 👋🏻

took a splendid december social media break to return and find, to my disappointment, that there is very little transfer window silliness on bsky

and again, fair play Ollie. only a tin pot cup but i was impressed with the pressing and energy levels tonight

feel very privileged to be invited to deliver a talk at HKB and @utrechtuniversity.bsky.social’s “Natureculture Lab” which is taking in Bern, Switzerland, from January 27-29 any interested/conveniently located colleagues can register here: www.eventbrite.com/e/naturecult...

have done my fair share of swindon town related moaning on here already. so i suppose that i ought to say that Holloway got his team selection spot on yesterday and that we were much better for it. long may it continue

was a nice surprise to wander in on Peter Kennard giving a talk to art students at Whitechapel Gallery on his exhibition “Archive of Dissent”

swindon town are bottom of the football league. this is it folks. our time is up.

a visualisation of temperature changes in swindon, england, since 1850 #showyourstripes (showyourstripes.info)

we all know university leaders are happy to hollow out higher education to protect their profits. but the silence and inaction of the labour government on cuts and redundancies really is a disgrace

Here's the thing. Given its resource demands (hardware, power, data, data processing) "AI" (meaning the big models everyone loves these days) isn't doable without corporations and their exploitative practices. That's why I don't believe in AI as a liberating or publicly beneficial force.

If you think Direct Air Capture (DAC) is going to save us, please read this. This is isn’t some left-wing fringe environmental group saying this. It’s MIT. news.mit.edu/2024/reality...

my light Elizabeth Line reading this morning half the problem with the easiness of decolonial sloganeering is that anthropologists, art historians, comparative lit people etc. just don’t engage meaningfully with economics and political economy

the richest part of my family lore is that my mother dated Mark Lamarr of Buzzcocks fame, but now basically nobody knows who he is and the lore is meaningless

@davidsquires.bsky.social is a national treasure

i’ll be there. #clemitstime

fantastic to the see the Spirit of ‘69 fan group taking shape on X. fair play to the town fans putting their weight behind it - yet another embarrassment for the Trust

legitimately the first thing i woke up and read this morning. wishing you all a very merry holy terror

another Morfuni patsy gone. seemed like a decent enough bloke, hope he manages to patch his reputation back together at Salford down to the bare bones now, a skeleton crew aboard this sinking ghost ship of a football club

90th out of 92 in the entire Football League, level on points with and having been beaten at home by the two teams below us. Jesus wept.

Free-to-read tonight, because I think this one needs it. #stfc

this is shitty and all, but my main takeaway was that i would KILL for the gbp equivalent of a $45,000 phd stipend

taught a seminar today on contemporary art and planetarity and the blank expressions on the faces of my students brought home that concepts like this really don’t resonate for most people, even those with a professional or vocational imperative to understand them

is this god awful monolith, squeezed between a set of bicycle racks, the worst public sculpture in the UK? (swindon, england)

“What are we saving the world for? If the solution involves abandoning our humanities, are we imagining a future for humanity?” 🗃️ williamgpooley.wordpress.com/2024/11/18/d...

currently thinking about terminal landscapes, international shipping, and maritime space under industrial capitalism. art historians, historians of photography, environmental humanities people, etc. - where to look beyond Sekula? #academicsky

Made the leap to Bluesky after months of “X”ile, chuffed to see @leftofphilosophy.bsky.social beat me here… so I ought to tell them that “Free Time” had me chortling so hard that everyone around me in the British Library upped and left. No free time, but at least I have some free space. Thanks Teddy