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.
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.
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.
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/
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
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' 👍
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.
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."
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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. 👌
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.
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.
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.
[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..
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.
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!
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.
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.
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 .
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."
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
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.
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.
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:
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.
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!
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?
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
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
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
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.
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.
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?!
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 -
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
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
.
@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.
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.
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:
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.
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?
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 🫠
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.
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.
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.
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"?
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!
📢 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.
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.