We are thrilled to announce our next event! 25 Sept 2024 (4:30-6:00pm BST) Academic Freedom and the Politics of Free Speech with Jana Bacevic (Jana Bacevic ([email protected])) Discussant: Naomi Waltham-Smith (Naomi Waltham-Smith) Online [free] Register britsoc.co.uk/events/key-bsa… #SocialTheory #Sociology

"Compulsory gender testing was instituted as result of Western athletes outperformed by Eastern bloc competitors during the Cold War.. Since collapse of USSR, all athletes restricted from competing internationally as women have been from the Global South." lrb.co.uk/blog/2024/augu…

We’ve read almost every devastating account of each Palestinian martyr assembled with such love and care by ‏Martyrs of Gaza. Each insists on mourning every life by refusing the dehumanisation of brute numbers. We have not deserved this account. Please read lithub.com/the-social-med…

Sending love out to everyone getting their results today, as well as to staff working on admissions and clearing.

One of the reasons to go to university is learn how to challenge these instrumentalizing assumptions about the value of going to university. It’s part of an insidious—and sadly, highly effective—ideology designed to eat away at the grounds for class consciousness.

As it's most likely to be a uni with a high proportion of lower income background students, and in a town where the uni likely keeps hundreds of businesses going, this is....

"The police took all the devices inside my home, a protest sign that had 'Palestine' written in Arabic, any notebook with 'foreign writing' and my powder eyeliner to test it in the lab because they thought it was gun powder." ⁦Amira 🇵🇸⁩ middleeasteye.net/news/uk-drops-…

nationalise universities and make them free to attend

Cathy Newman: Are you willing to see a university go bust? Jacqui Smith (HE minister): Yes. If it were necessary. "Necessary"? How the fuck can the closure of a university be necessary, unless it's pour encourager les autres?

This debate has been going on for <checks notes> centuries. If only people engaged with the sociological histories of knowledge production. Objectivity isn't a real thing, it's a foil for taken-for-granted and thus implicit (often Eurocentric) bias.

The 'golden age of English universities'? WTF? The last 20 years have seen a deterioration in working and study conditions - it's only really been golden for managers, paying themselves over the odds while squeezing resources and overinvesting in estates. theguardian.com/education/arti…

This. We have an established, known and trusted form of education which broadly works. Microcredentials make sense as CPD, but atomising degrees into tiny pieces risks losing coherence and cumulative value. That living costs are high and grad salaries low is what needs fixing.

Send them in to 'help' manage Tesla, News Corp, Amazon, Daily Mail and News General Trust, the Trump Foundation... Who else?

Exceptionally good spot here. If, like me, you've been wondering where the absurdly Queen-Anne-is-dead formula "The golden age of HE is over" came from all of a sudden, I don't think we need to seek any further:

Just a thought: What if VC's maximum salaries were set according to a multiplier (e.g. 4) of their HEI's average Black women's pay, and this was only enabled if their staff and domestic student diversity matched that of the UK population?

Curious to think about how unis might engage with a four-day working week when most staff workloads don't even fit into a six days, often seven. news.sky.com/story/employer…

A thread of where neurodivergent people were hiding before we "had all this autism and adhd that we never had in my day." 🧵 Feel free to add your own. Academic - oh you know what they're like, no common sense, experts in their subject but can't boil an egg 1/4

Israel’s scholasticide committed to turning Al-Azhar University and the Islamic University to dust

Leicester is *Daily Mail* University of the Year. This is somehow...perfect.

Whispers quietly: the social contribution of HE is FAR more important than the £££, even if you can't measure it*. Playing the economists' game means that universities are increasingly imagined and valued only in those terms. *easily