A reminder of this brilliant practice-based research fellowship scheme - accepting applications until 30th Jan.

Pls share - a must for anyone interested in interdisciplinary working & material methods in the medical humanities! A truly innovative project by glass artist Matt Durran and the Royal Free Hospital. Weds 4th Feb (1-2pm, online, free). Register at shorturl.at/GpkG6 Full series: shorturl.at/T6WDE

Fancy a trip around the British Museum with a weird nerd lecturing you about Videogames?! This Friday I'm running an evening tour... it's the next closest experience to being locked in a lift with me for a couple of hours. Marketing is my passion... www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-videog...

Alice Murphy at st Andrews is looking for a 2 year postdoc on a super cool aesthetics-meets-values-in-science project, real quick turn around on applications so get in thar! #philsci www.vacancies.st-andrews.ac.uk/Vacancies/W/...

Pre-xmas lit request! Does anyone happen to know of any critical writing on the exec order Trump that issued in March this year to try to force the Smithsonian Museum to remove 'improper' ideology from its displays? It was entitled 'Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History'. Thanks!

International family limits on donor gametes are urgently needed - the psychosocial impact of multiple siblings or, as in this terrible case, the medical impact, can be huge www.bbc.co.uk/news/article... #donorconception

Excited to be launching this new series of online talks, running Feb-July 2026. We'll be talking to a bioengineer, an immersive reality specialist, a visual artist, a glass artist, and a speculative designer on how a whole range of visual & material practices can transform healthcare. Sign up below!

📣 Applications are open for our 2026-27 Medical Humanities in Practice Research Fellowship scheme! The scheme supports professionals and researchers from health or voluntary and community sectors to develop research within the medical humanities. Apply by 30 Jan:

📣 The Northern Network for Medical Humanities Research is pleased to present RETHINKING RIGOUR, a two-day symposium exploring creative-critical research in medical humanities. 📅 4-5 December 2025 Find out more about the event and book your free tickets 👇

Our new paper: Austerity as reproductive injustice: did local government spending cuts unequally impact births? led by Laura Sochas is out now OA in @sfjournal.bsky.social

This piece is so good. www.currentaffairs.org/news/ai-is-d...

This is great: 'When someone recovers outside of traditional parameters [...] the system is left with a problem: It has no script for what to do with someone who is well and no longer needs it—especially if it challenges the framework that initially defined them as ill.' Thank you Monica

The 2026 SSHM Conference will be @universityofleeds.bsky.social. The theme will be In/Out and we are inviting papers that consider experiences of being in and/or out of health or health care in any period or geographical location. #HistMed #HistSTM sshm.org/sshm-2026/

Someone's taken down the St George's flag by Brighton pier and replaced it with a BIPOC Trans Pride flag with 'Everyone is welcome here' on it. I wonder how much of this very localised stuff gets lost to history, but so many people will see and remember this - hooray!

"Since when did we become Big Tech's free PR department?" I'm really pleased to see an article like this pushing back on the uncritical adoption of (gen)AI by our universities. It hits all the major concerns.

This is how you blurb

In Part 4 of the @readingbodies.bsky.social takeover, @rocio.bsky.social discusses the colonial legacies of nineteenth-century medical metaphors and demonstrates their ongoing relevance for the present day. thepolyphony.org/2025/10/23/m...

I'm really excited to finally be able to share this after months of work - our new Project EPIC report on the epistemic determinants of health. With over 20 contributors, we make the case for incorporating this new framework into existing determinants of health models: bci-hub.org/documents/ep...

Cross posting this to alert colleagues in #scicomm #sts #envhums #scipol about alarming developments at the BBC Written Archive. So many fundamental studies in these areas have drawn on this resource; it would be disastrous to lose access to it.

I'm at the wonderful Norsk Teknisk Museum in Oslo for the annual ARTEFACTS meeting of science, technology and medicine museums. Beautiful surroundings and fascinating talks on the multiple meanings of care and repair in object collections.

More than 12K jobs going across UK universities so far this year, with more to come, says @ucu.org.uk www.timeshighereducation.com/news/cuts-eq... via @helenpacker.bsky.social

Join us on 6th November for our annual Research Cabaret! An evening of live music 🎶 poetry 💬 dance 🕺💃 and chaos 🎉 exploring what it means to live between the lines. Featuring Durham IMH researchers and local performers! Reserve your FREE ticket here 🎟️👇 www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/between-th...

"The (anti)microbial gaze" Fab paper from the visualisations in science people on how representations of antimicrobial resistance shape and constrain our response to it. journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1...

Durham!

They're going to try to overturn Obergefell and end marriage equality. Eyes wide open, folks. www.usatoday.com/story/news/p...

*medical objects researcher starts jumping on the spot with horror and glee*

Cambridge service station nailing it

'Feeling blue: Colour and the modern British hospital' is out! And it's free online (or a relatively affordable £25 hardback if you prefer print)! Thanks so much to everyone who helped with the research for this, from supporting site visits to reading drafts. www.manchesterhive.com/display/9781...

The Society's AGM followed immediately by The SSHM Lecture 2025 with Jeremy Greene (all welcome). 'Wasted medicines and medical wastes: Notes from the trash-heap of medical history' 📅Monday 6 October [Online] 🕰️4:00-5:30pm (UK time) Register via the link on the webpage #histmed #histSTM

So excited to be joining this team!

Fantastic #openaccess article 📄 by @dralanagharris.bsky.social & Laura Mitchison in Transactions @royalhistsoc.org on disability, ethics, public history, photography & oral history: Essential read for any of us doing public engagement work on sensitive histories. 🌟 www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

CfP for an online workshop on Object Stories in Health and Medicine, 1700-1900 @annafranjam.bsky.social and I can't wait to hear about your objects!

Happy Skyscraper Day! (architects dressed as their NYC buildings, 1931)

Each day you should wake up thinking "how can I spend more time in TEAMS?" and "can the TEAMS app open up any faster when I start my computer??" or "is there a way TEAMS can be connected to every surface of my life? My food? Air? And love-making?????"

Those wonderful sheep-counting words from the North of England. #language #dialect

The next sign for my office to be put next to “It’s an archive, not a corpus”: “Quantitative data and math does not make your analysis objective”

Wtf

"many ... wrongly believe there would be one clear unambiguous moment where we go from 'democracy' to 'authoritarianism.' Instead, this is exactly how it happens — a blurring here, a norm destroyed there, a presidential diktat unchallenged. Then you wake up one morning and our country is different."

Fellowship from Bloomsbury for early career academics who are Black, Asian or Ethnically Diverse: www.bloomsbury.com/uk/discover/...

🙌Call for Papers🙌 We are excited to invite abstracts for an interdisciplinary conference on The Hand: Emotions, Embodiment, Identity, at @unioftheartslondon.bsky.social on 8-9 Jan 2026 Send abstracts of 300 words to [email protected] by 22 Sep - please circulate among your networks!

The RCN Library and Museum is looking for objects, photographs and personal stories to feature in our upcoming exhibition on migration and nursing. Find out more and get in touch: buff.ly/nxxvo9Q (Image: International School Students outside the Royal College of Nursing, 1957, RCN Archive)

Applications for SHAPE Involve and Engage 2026-27 will open on 1 September. This innovative public engagement programme requires UK researchers to work in partnership with a gallery, archive, library or museum (GLAM organisation). Find out more: buff.ly/efUOSoL

Showing the endangered leader of an invaded country my hats

A beautiful and thoughtful essay from @lernerbarron.bsky.social on our new book out with @hopkinspress.bsky.social now! www.thehastingscenter.org/lets-not-era...

AI is robbing our students of the experience they are paying for, namely thinking hard & learning to be articulate. Even if they'll "inevitably" have to use it in a job one day, they'll only use it well if they can already think. Here's the AI statement I added to syllabi this year. It's staying.

I find this such a strange twisting of logic: presumably extreme anti-vaxxers think their violence is ultimately in the service of care and protection - a means to an end by which time their 'truth' will have been demonstrated? Or are they just waiting for any excuse and target?

To argue that science is non-political at a time when climate change, vaccines, evolution, and countless other forms of scientific research are all under intense assault seems ludicrous. The only way to understand these controversies about science is through the humanities.

"If you're a historian, your job is to help people understand not just what they want to remember, but what they need to remember." @SmithsonianSec quoting Princy Jenkins, caretaker at Friendfield in SC (lived w grandmother who had been enslaved there)....