Drafts of all chapters for Affect, Emotion and Feeling in Science Communication are now complete. They still need quite a bit of work but here’s an overview of where things currently stand (a thread):

Same girl lol

Everything about this headline is so potently cringey. Like a frickin Brass Eye sketch.

Great paper by @felicitycallard.bsky.social ‬& Stan Papoulias which reasserts that the value of psychoanalysis is its confrontation of our capacity for creativity AND destruction and the inescapable role that fantasy plays in navigating that conflict - mh-bmj-com.libproxy.ucl.ac.uk/content/45/2...

I just donated, and encourage you to do so too.

The number of air and water monitoring bots relentlessly screaming their data out into the Twitter void tells us a lot about contemporary visions of science communication

My NYT op-ed this morning I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/15/o...

Our department newsletter now has two editions, thanks to the brilliant @stephenhues.bsky.social. Which makes it A Going Concern. Have a look at what we've been up to www.ucl.ac.uk/sts/sts-news...

Without access to playful creativity in our reflection, discourses of responsibility / ethics can easily descend into organised nonsense and chaos [quote here from Winnicott].

It's weird that the Giddens-Beck-Wynne axis of STS's sociology (e.g., reflexivity, minimal role of the subject) has recieved such little direct theoretical critique within the discipline.

"The sky is the limit" - reassuring guardrails in place 👍🏻 www.bbc.com/news/article...

Promoted to Associate Professor! Pleased x 1000 🥳🥳🥳

Better to have all the fire alarms for the building in the one place

Can't get over how bad NCAD's homepage is. Looks like a local classified ads website.

Nobody: Not a single person on planet E: The Central line:

🔔 Reminder! Hype Studies Conference (10-12th Sept in Barcelona/online) is accepting abstracts until 10th May! You can submit your contribution here: hypestudies.org/conference/a... The event is free and open to academics and practitioners alike. We hope to hear from many of you soon 🫵 💜

Loving how ultra-modern Gen AI is pushing so many colleagues back to Victorian exam-only model 🙃

How do scientists build trust with the public at a time when they seem to prefer authoritarians over technocrats? By funding studies that sound like an actual conspiracy theory! Also love the ominous tense-work here: “local communities will have been consulted”. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

I can't wait until social science methods gives up on "codes" and admits that we all actually only work with misshapen bulging collections of code-themes. Also the "code" and "theme" distinction is a nightmare for anyone even mildly neurodiverse.

'“The plan will include, among other things, the conquest of the Gaza Strip and the holding of the territories, moving the Gaza population south for their protection”'. www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/5/...

Why did we become convinced that the answer was always “disruption”, when experience tells us that the achievement of civilisation is the opposite? The move from chaos to organisation. The move from vulnerability to stability. Move carefully and fix things.

The scientists get electron microscopes, supercomputers, and particle accelerators while we get fucking NVIVO that can barely open a document without crashing itself into oblivion. Social science isn’t launching a serious challenge to epistemic hegemony any time soon with this bullshit.

Freud's fetish for footnotes is now my fetish for footnotes. Apologies in advance to all editors who will need to work with me in the future.

Worth reminding everyone that almost 80% of people in Ireland voted to end birth right citizenship in 2004 - news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/e...

Imagine, aged 3, you innocently draw a giraffe penis for your dad only for it to end up in the hands of Freud where it becomes a central brick in the edifice of psychoanalysis.

Just finished @boddice.bsky.social and Mark Smith's excellent Emotion, Sense, Experience. Wonderfully illuminates how densely collapsed concepts of emotions are in historiography & neuroscience. Powerfully indicates how we might unpack the vast expanses of meaning in human affective experience.

Welcome @hscottfordsmand.bsky.social!

Nature have picked up our survey. We think it's the largest survey of AI researchers ever conducted. Here's a quick thread on some of the headlines @nature.com www.nature.com/articles/d41...

The UK does have it's own public culture. Shouting commands and prohibitions at you.

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025... Glad I have no US travel planned for the foreseeable - "the scientist was traveling to Houston for a conference when his phone was searched"

i've been doing some research into AI services — what tools are on offer beyond the big chatbots, image generators, and PDF analyzers like notebookLM — and i would say about 80% of startups are just trying to automate marketing and SEO slop. it's quite amazing how narrow the actual utility is

Neuroscience: We can make sense of the brain! Also Neuroscience:

Does a greater loyalty exist than academics' commitment to using acronyms to name research projects?

On Signage... Signs like this are a good example of the way in which much institutional communication with the public exists to fulfil administrative/bureaucratic commitments or obligations rather than representing a genuine attempt to communicate. original photo © @feljin.ie

Yes. So obvious and yet still has to be argued. Particularly in STS where this is an absolutely gaping hole where a concept of the self/subjectivity should be (and not in the Lacanian sense of a lack, an absence, a fissure lol lol lol).

If you thought science communication was bad wait until you hear about "humanities communication". Infantilisation of humanities research? ✅ Family-friendly entertainment ✅ No payment in sight for your professional expertise ✅ "No talks! Two-way engagement" ✅ www.beinghumanfestival.org/get-involved

New pub out from @davidthewid.bsky.social and me. We suggest that computer science should learn from anthropology’s critical examination of its colonial roots. AI for good projects like low resource NLP resemble early salvage anthropology projects, where anthros tried to preserve “dying” languages

Sometimes the conspiracy theories are very inventive and creative: "flying syringes"

Wow - DSIT survey on public attitudes to AI (December '24) found that "negative associations dominate, reflecting concern felt by large segments of the UK public". Three of the four most mentioned words are explicitly negative - "scary", "worried", "unsure", "concerned". www.gov.uk/government/p...

if you're trying to understand Microsoft's latest quantum headline grab, I would recommend skimming Nature's peer review docs. opinion was split to say the least, with 2 of the 4 referees recommending that the paper not be published at all static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10...

Say what you want about academia but at least people don't just PUT meetings in your calendar without consent or agreement.

James Hurley is the absolute worst my god

This paper is so baffling to me. The central insight is that "trust in scientists is moderately high (grand mean, 3.62)". What concept of trust is this that can be both complex enough to encompass 71,922 respondents across 68 countries and can also be reduced to 3.62? www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I think Freud is still popular for non-scientists (artists, literary critics, sociologists) because he tries to understand the mind through intuitive human MEANING (language, symbolisation, clinical examination) and doesn't work exclusively from electrochemical axioms (except for some commitments).

Goodbye to this incredible view 💔

even leaving aside the absurd AI stuff here, it betrays such a phenomenal level of historical illiteracy or a willful misunderstanding of the basic dynamics of capital to pretend that productivity gains automatically entail better living conditions. we should already live in your utopia Marc you ass

What is the best qualitative data analysis software? I'm familiar with NVivo but I can't continue with it - it's just so shite. I used to like Atlas.ti but it now seems to brand itself as using "the power of AI" which is a red flag. Is MAXQDA any use (sounds like a kids TV show super hero?).

Reminder that this talk is this afternoon at 3pm! I the seminar, I will be attempting to smash together psychoanalysis and science and technology studies 💥 It's free and online - www.eventbrite.com/e/disruptive...