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Des Fitzgerald Profile
Des Fitzgerald

@Des_Fitzgerald

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Radical Humanities Laboratory @UCC // The City of Today is a Dying Thing @FaberBooks 2024 // The Living City @BasicBooks 2023.

Cork City, Ireland
Joined March 2011
Don't wanna be here? Send us removal request.
@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
1 month
This is why I can't get on board "let's teach students to use ChatGPT well/responsibly." Open AI is a horrible organisation and there is no good, ethical use of their (anyway terrible!) products.
@tsarnick
Tsarathustra
1 month
OpenAI's Mira Murati: "some creative jobs maybe will go away, but maybe they shouldn't have been there in the first place"
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
1 year
I actually can't get over the UK prime minister tweeting an image of a sledgehammer smashing the ground to announce his crackdown on universities - just the sheer violence and derangement of it.
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
4 months
There's an entire chapter in the new Judith Butler book on how weird the British are
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
4 months
Within this man's lifetime, the British government was running clandestine, shoot-to-kill death squads in Northern Ireland.
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
2 months
It's cool that this guy never misses a chance to burnish his credentials as a mindless authoritarian who holds the entire notion of civil protest in contempt.
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
4 months
unpopular take but 800k for <niche humanities project> looks bizarre because it *is* bizarre, and comes from treating hums like STEM, i.e. concentrating funds on a small % of research 'teams' to address narrow questions over multiple years, while most hums research gets /nothing/
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
4 months
I would like to read one (1) contemporary Irish novel where a central character's formative experience at Trinity College does not form a central theme
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
2 months
Guys, it's not 'humanities academics read their papers out loud' season yet. The order is: 'requesting an honorarium for a talk,' 'Judith Butler is not a good writer,' 'exams are functionally equivalent to prison,' and *then* 'humanities academics read their papers out loud' 👍
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
2 years
Academics on twitter will be like "worked for 54 hours straight, time for a little treat!" and the treat is a medium americano from costa.
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
9 months
I've also resigned from UKRI's Interdisciplinary Assessment College, following Laura's lead. I simply can't/won't give my review time an organisation operating in these conditions.
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
2 years
Yes, these are equivalent.
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
10 months
Probably the greatest pleasure of teaching this second-year anthropology theory seminar is the now-weekly section that I am alas forced to call "anthro beef."
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
4 months
Find someone who loves you like UK sociologists love Pierre Bourdieu (1977, 1984, 1990).
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
1 year
29k for a lectureship at one of the world's richest universities - absolutely shameful stuff.
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
1 month
I can't believe the institutional violence being leveled at sociology in Goldsmiths. Personal costs to colleagues are primary of course, but the collective attack on such a vital centre of the discipline is something to reckon with collectively too. Solidarity to all affected.
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
7 months
Please defend international students because they're human beings, not because they're cash cows for "research-intensive universities" jfc
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
4 months
the projects all look great to me, and obviously this person is bad faith/an idiot, but she's not making humanities funding looks ridiculous; the way it's funded, through large competitive grants given to a select group of winners, is, in fact, ridiculous
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
2 years
I genuinely think I might be the all-time worst research interviewer
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
7 months
we regret to inform that the data lads are doing history again
@jburnmurdoch
John Burn-Murdoch
7 months
The researchers analysed the contents of 173,031 books printed in England between 1500 and 1900, tracking how the frequency of different terms changed over time, which they use as a proxy for the cultural themes of the day.
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
2 years
"Research leave" is a weird concept. Like, after several years years doing your job, the reward is you can *apply* to do a different bit of your job.
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
4 months
Kent VC leaving just six weeks after announcing multiple course closures, with no succession plan in place, and acting like this is all normal. This is the leadership for which VCs are claiming hundreds of thousands of pounds in salary, is it? Shameful.
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
8 months
Every Saturday, before we take our kids to the library, we have to check there isn't a fascist, transphobic demo happening outside it that day. That this hasn't been considered a major crisis or morbid symptom - is barely talked about - has baffled me all year. And here we are.
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
2 years
How, in the name of God, is my USS defined contribution pot actually *lower* than the value of my contributions?? What rare investment genius is at play here?
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
1 year
Oh, it's another British university offering five year fellowships with an opaque & heavily contingent route to permanency - which nb they call "tenure," a form of employment protection has not existed in the UK for decades. 👌
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
7 months
Emerging from an essay marking cave only to say that ChatGPT is an absolute poison, and all the well meaning stuff about how to use it well, creatively, blah blah, is completely disastrous for students.
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
7 months
I truly can't stand this stuff. Obviously Sunak is appalling, but this kind of European smugness and absence of self-reflection - including in its Irish iteration - really needs to go in the bin too.
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
5 days
The best about reimbursement culture isn't loaning your own money, interest free, to wealthy institutions; it’s being regarded as a supplicant, or a figure of suspicion, when you’re just trying to get it back.
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
1 year
[CW suicide, childbirth] I think my essay in the current @GrantaMag is currently out from the paywall. It's about family inheritance, sibling loss, and assisted reproduction, and also my own (thank god) failed attempts to become an anthropologist..
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
1 year
I don't know which large, suburban university in Dublin needs to hear this, but if you can afford to offer people five year fellowships, you can afford to offer them permanent contracts.
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
1 month
Least surprising Tory reveal since Nick Cave honestly.
@AndrewmitchMP
Andrew Mitchell
1 month
As my #election campaign rolls on in #suttoncoldfield I am grateful to have received this… colourful… message of support from my good friend Bob Geldof!
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
2 years
It's surely a measure of how far infrastructural breakdown has gone in the UK that the country is currently unable to send post internationally, but this doesn't anywhere register as a major problem/crisis.
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
1 year
"but three nights a week, fellows are permitted to lick algae off the college soil pipe, so really it works out quite well"
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
1 year
It's weird that sociology is such a marginal discipline, while the cutting edge of so many other disciplines is basically people re-inventing sociological reasoning.
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
2 years
So larger, wealthier universities giving one-off payments (again) for CoL is the begining of the end of national pay bargaining, no? Odd to see people interpret it as generosity and not e.g. market positioning for a (very bad) future where unis "compete" on pay .
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
3 months
Just to say, for the sake of my mental health, I will no longer be co-authoring with people taught to put two spaces after a full stop.
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
7 months
The critics are calling it "curious but alluring" and "entertainingly catty" and it can be YOURS from Friday. UK: IRL:
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
10 months
I sincerely regret to inform, after teaching today, that the youths no longer know who Bjork is.
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
1 year
Just incredible Titanic energy coming from UK Higher Ed right now, as its leaders look directly at the iceberg, reassuring one another, "it's okay, we'll get through it."
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
8 months
This means btw that most postdocs and lecturers won't be eligible for visas. An unbelievably stupid act of self harm, even by UK standards!
@JackElsom
Jack Elsom
8 months
NEW: Migration package understood to include: - Care workers can't bring dependents - Salary threshold & family visas both raised to £38,700 - Health/Social care exempt - 20% shortage occupation list discount scrapped - Health Surcharge hiked to £1,035 - Review of grad route
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
2 years
What a thing for a professor of sociology at a major university to tweet. At some point, British sociology has to ask itself some hard questions about how, exactly, the discipline became such a reliable home for this stuff.
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
1 year
Not the British state rounding up and imprisoning republicans without any kind of legal process. That's so unlike them.
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
9 months
What a craven, shameful response, containing not a single word for the researchers so viciously and personally attacked. Appalling.
@UKRI_News
UK Research and Innovation
9 months
Yesterday, UKRI responded to a letter from Secretary of State, Michelle Donelan. Now we are publishing that response and the Terms of Reference for the review we are setting up.
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
2 years
Proofs in for this sexy beast, coming now I guess quite soon in the incomparable Cultural Politics.
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
4 months
it seems like a problem that 'the hist' is likely more familiar to international readers of Irish fiction than, say, Limerick
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
1 year
When you've been up since half five and you dgaf
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
1 year
Wow! Huge congrats @judegreen , @lindsayamclaren and colleagues: mass resignation of the Critical Public Heath board, to leave the "corporate control" of Taylor & Francis and start a new diamond OA journal! A truly game-changing move for our disciplines:
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
1 year
Fair play to the junior doctors for starting their strike with an astonishing amount of public goodwill, then pissing it all away on a tin-eared, supercilious campaign based largely on how much more they deserve to be paid than other people.
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
8 months
Actually unironically happy that my piece about my brother, Reproducing Paul, is one of Granta's ten most read essays in 2023.
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
4 months
Hello! We at @UCCRadicalLab are having an event, Radical Futures, in Cork on May 8th and 9th. We've got about 100 participants, 5 plenaries, create & digital performance, a film programme and more - it's free to attend!
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
1 year
This one turned 1 today - here pictured with her two totemic objects, Llightning McQueen and a tub of sudocrem
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
3 months
Can we stop with this nonsense? Literally no one thinks this.
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
2 months
There's nothing quite so bleak as the "father's day" table in a bookshop .
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
5 months
Please kill me
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
11 months
I really wish an architecture critic reviewing a building would also see this managerialist nonsense as part of the thing to be critiqued.
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
1 year
I'm not saying he's dramatic, I'm just noting there was no actual fall here.
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
5 months
A predictable end to a disgraceful incident. Senior people at @UKRI_News should be deeply ashamed at their part in it.
@michelledonelan
Michelle Donelan
5 months
My statement on recent correspondence relating to Research England’s Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Expert Advisory Group.
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
1 year
Not to do Discourse but "uncontrolled" is an interesting word I think. What does it mean to control kids? What do people imagine that looks like?
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
1 year
Is leaving cert history still like that exam from star trek where it's impossible finish and marks are basically awarded for how valiant your failure was?
@SeanDefoe
Seán Defoe
1 year
What's your Leaving Cert disaster story? Will never forget the look of shock and panic on faces during the English paper when Seamus Heaney didn't come up
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
2 years
I’m very saddened and even a bit shocked to hear that Bruno Latour has died; sincere condolences to all who knew him well.
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
2 years
Surely the most subtly passive-aggressive leaving gift I've ever received. I love it.
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
5 months
Very keen to hear about modernization from a country where the state church holds seats in parliament.
@guardiannews
Guardian news
5 months
Early vote counts suggest attempt to modernise Irish constitution has failed
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
4 months
REALLY hoping to see some critical medical humanities & STS responses to the #CassReview given its weirdly ignorant account of evidence based medicine, its dismissal of participatory research, its reliance on evolutionary psychology, its interest in ideas from pop neuroscience &c
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
25 days
UCC's liberal approach to all-staff email is currently meeting its Waterloo in the search for All Ireland final tickets, alas.
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
2 months
The UK is like one giant counter-argument to the concept of electoral democracy
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
25 days
I actually pity England fans because they'll never know the intense pleasure of cheering a team playing against England, which is not at all an act of spite, but an experience of rapture, a jouissance beyond the elementary gratifications of supporting your own team. In this essay
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
4 months
"adult colouring" 💀
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
2 months
If you were wondering whether or not to bring your slightly neurotic but very funny 3yo to another country to watch you speak, my advice would be: yes, they'll cry during your talk - but maybe that's an appropriate reaction.
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
1 year
An example of the desperately poor leadership that has become characteristic of Cardiff Uni. I spent some of the best years of my working life at Cardiff. Its brilliant staff deserve so much better than this.
@cardiffuni
Cardiff University
1 year
Message from the Vice-Chancellor to all staff ➡️
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
7 months
Like, (a) the german university system (like most European systems) is not exactly famous for its friendliness to outsiders; but also (b) maybe we could swap this register of preening self regard for an expression of solidarity with colleagues & students under attack in the UK?!
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
1 year
I've gone full wanker
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
1 year
I took the world's grumpiest 1yo to Venice and you'll never believe what happened next.
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
1 year
I'm really pleased to see The Urban Brain on the shortlist for the Foundation for the Sociology of Health & Illness book prize, among a collection of really brilliant monographs. Get your (by academic standards) reasonably priced copy here -
@BSAMedsoc
BSA Medsoc AKA @[email protected]
1 year
Wishing all of the FSHI book prize candidates the best of luck. The winner will be announced at the conference dinner at the BSA Medical Sociology Annual Conference in September. @SHI_Foundation
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
2 years
This is... quite a corrigendum in @TheSocReview
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
2 years
It's been a _stressful_ few weeks but... this is the view from our back yard now. 😍
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
9 months
actual books 😍
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
11 months
And yet they think they can attract academic staff just fine with the worst pay and conditions in Europe. Curious.
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
3 months
Welcome moves here include a process of divestment, a commitment to opening up scholarships to displaced Palestinian students, & commitment to a new human-rights based framework to guide international relationships. Thanks to concerted action by @UCCSU .
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
2 years
Baby's first time in a snug ♥️
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
5 months
Mary rejects your kitsch festival of reactionary nostalgia
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
4 months
Remarkable how much sociology - especially British sociology - is basically "we studied this phenomenon in both countries [the UK and the US]."
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
2 months
@simongerman600 @viola__alba Honestly it's extremely weird for a geographer to think "geography" is something that just happens, and that the colonial history of carving up/naming the world is something we simply have to accept.
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
2 years
New gobshite just dropped 👍
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
1 year
We all like to shit on outlook - but clicking a little thumbs up to acknowledge an email? That's improved my life, maybe by 500%.
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
1 month
This excellent piece by Will Davies on the UK university crisis also reads as an account of how the wider moral & psychic collapse in British political life is rooted in a collision between reactionary fantasy and economic reality.
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
9 months
👀
@BasicBooks
Basic Books
9 months
THE LIVING CITY is “an incendiary repudiation of the resurgent fantasy that nature can cure the maladies of contemporary cities and societies. @Des_Fitzgerald is a sharp critic and a stone-cold realist. " — @EricKlinenberg Available November 21:
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
1 year
Some contrasting feelings about cycling in the rain. 🌧️🚴
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
2 years
Update: they let the bonsai through, but having x-rayed it twice, informed me - not unsympathetically - that the x-ray will certainly have killed it. We're having a last meal in silence.
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
11 months
I really wish people would stop writing about 'academics,' when they mean, like, 'the English department.'
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
1 year
Me: so I assume you've all now had many warnings about not using ChatGPT. Students: never heard of it. Me: oh that's weird, because it's a programme that can write essays. Students: it's a programme that can what?
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
2 years
If you were thinking of doing a tweet about presentation styles, can I extremely recommend that you don't do that.
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
3 months
made a joke at the nursery door about how it's a long weekend for them but not for the parents and got an earnest chat about spending quality time with your child in response 🫠
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
23 days
Who are these people reviewing manuscripts, recommending revisions, than refusing to review the revision? Jail for one thousand years.
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
5 months
Trinity putting new assistant profs on a 5 year fixed-term initial contract, and calling it tenure track, is an amazingly on-brand piece of cringe, as well as a terrible employment practice.
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
1 year
The failure of leadership here is so huge, it's actually hard to process. Thousands of students won't get their degrees, thousands of academics are effectively locked out, because VCs insist on another real term's pay cut, in the middle of a CoL crisis. It's incredible.
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
2 years
Can't believe it's only three weeks before I leave Normal Island! Excited to to live again on an island that is *also* very strange, but where that strangeness tends less towards ressentiment, fascism, &c.
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
9 months
This is a disgraceful response to a blatant attack on academic freedom by a secretary of state.
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
2 months
I don't know dude, do you think maybe the underpopulation of the island on the left map is at all related to why people don't like the term "British isles"?
@simongerman600
Simon Kuestenmacher
2 months
Lovely population density map of the British Isles (yes, I know some of you don’t like the name but that’s geography for you…) by @viola__alba . Give her a follow if you like maps - she is great!
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
2 years
📢 AMAZING JOB ALERT📢 Associate Professor of Sociology at Exeter (permanent) who can extend the vision of the amazing @WCCEH . This (kind of) replaces me, which is obviously impossible but what a thrill to try! Closes November 2nd.
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
9 months
I think what these takes (which I actually get) miss is that researchers aren't super interested in bureaucratic realism. They're looking from the POV of academic colleagues subjected to an appalling, public attack by a *secretary of state.* This is why they're (rightly) livid.
Looks like Ottoline Leyser at UKRI is going to cop for 24 hours of online criticism for (*checks notes*) insisting on due process, avoiding knee jerk reactions, and reiterating the importance of EDI work in the face of ministerial criticism.
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@Des_Fitzgerald
Des Fitzgerald
3 months
Disgraceful from TCD leadership. And what a self own to basically depict their own institution as a souvenir stall with an education wing.
@Trinity_News
Trinity News
3 months
College hits students’ union with €214k fine for disruptive protests
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