Paul Kirby
@PaulCinnam0n
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International theory, critical war studies, “Women, Peace and Security”, pop cultures, statecraft, another university might still be possible. Gender detective.
Joined March 2016
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Work:
♠︎ Women/Peace/Security:
♠︎ Carceral humanitarianism:
♠︎ Body weapons:
♠︎ WPS futures:
♠︎ Gender 101:
♠︎ Pop culture:
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@BillEbrill
Not at all the point but 33 tons from Jordan alone.
Anyhow, maybe one day we’ll find out who controls land, air and sea access to Gaza and that will help us untangle this dense mystery.
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At least one Vice-Chancellor prepared to admit the obvious: “We’ve balanced the books by hugely increasing numbers of international students, by not investing in adequate repairs and maintenance and, as a system, systematically underpaying our staff”.
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So the USS valuation underlying the current crisis anticipates a yearly pay increase of RPI + 1% for academics.
I thought I'd check how that assumption fared against historic pay settlements since joint negotiations began.
You'll never believe what happened next.
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The LSE Precarity Strategy
TL;DR: The London School of Economics and Political Science has spent nearly a decade establishing a two-tier system: an ever-shrinking bastion of permanent faculty above an expanding cast of fixed-term and casualised teachers.
What? How? 🧵
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Journalists? Hamas.
UNRWA staff? Hamas.
Protestors in the west? Hamas.
78% of the UK public? Hamas.
UN Special Rapporteurs? Hamas.
UN Secretary-General? Hamas.
Poets? Hamas.
Palestinian children? Hamas.
Jews for a ceasefire? Hamas.
Octopuses? Hamas.
Watermelons? Hamas.
Staff at Birmingham Law School had permission withdrawn to host an event on the legal situation in Palestine on the basis that the advertising flier contained 'watermelon emojis'.
How is this act of censorship compliant with the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023?
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🚨Attention all current/former UKRI grant holders (PIs, researchers, PhDs receiving funds from any of the nine research councils).🚨
Please sign this letter objecting to UKRI's suspension of the Advisory Group on EDI and its public smearing of academics.
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Now available for preorder.
Also on the Bezos platform, not yet other outlets (but soon).
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@markeweisman
Destroyed by the occupying power, along with health, sanitation, engineering and cultural institutions, as well as 75% of the human habitation for over 2 million people.
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Things I have learned about UniTemps, "the university owned temporary staffing service" that in several places employs teaching staff (including PhD students acting as teaching assistants) who are barred from participating in strike action.
#UCUstrike
#UCUStrikesBack
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I’m at a university that missed the threshold for the
#UCUstrike
on pensions, pay, precarity and inequality, which starts today. So I started a list of other ways to extend some solidarity.
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Personal/Professional Bulletin:
Today I join
@QMPoliticsIR
, leaving
@LSE_WPS
after half a decade.
Office acquired, essential books disgorged, email functional.
I hoped to also announce a postdoc job on governing masculinities, but it’ll take a few more weeks. Watch this space!
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UKRI have acknowledged receipt of a letter from 533 grant-holders (118 Professors, 257 PhDs, and 158 doctoral students or partners) protesting the smearing of academics as extremists and the suspension of the EDI Advisory Group.
Full signatory list:
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Why your union vote actually counts, a short story: the University of Manchester, among the largest in the country, missed the threshold by one person - ONE PERSON - out of c. 2,100 members.
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Publication day!
From me and
@drljshepherd
a new history and theory of the fractured gender equality project that is the Women, Peace and Security agenda.
20% discount with the code CUP20:
Please also consider a copy for your library and/or students.
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Your reminder that a few months back a government minister publicly denounced an academic and then successfully lobbied a research council to suspend them and dissolve their advisory group for hinting at arguments now being presented before the International Court of Justice.
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MILLENNIUM is a very special journal, a historical wellspring of critical thinking on global politics/'International Relations', and dear to my own heart.
Big changes are afoot, and almost all London-based global politics PhD students should know about them.
Unapologetic 🧵
Calling all
@UoLondon
@SOAS
@QMUL
@ucl
@warstudies
@KingsCollegeLon
@BirkbeckUoL
@GoldsmithsUoL
PhD students who are interested in IR and International studies that Millennium is opening its editorial positions to them ahead of Millennium vol. 52.
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🚨Research job🚨
- to pursue your own project on the theme of governing masculinity
- for 12 months
- starting Jan 2023
- with a fieldwork/conference budget of at least £2,500
- working with me
- at
@QMPoliticsIR
funded by
@TheGenderHub
- apply by 4 Nov
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GOVERNING MASCULINITY
A call for contributions
Please join us for two days of critical thinking about contemporary masculinity interventions and what they do.
Deadline for abstracts: 4 Sept 2023.
Some travel, accommodation and visa support available.
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Updated career goals post-
#Receptiogate
- edit journal mainly publishing me
- take open access funds but forbid downloads
- titular Prof who sneers at mere Drs
- start Paul Kirby Academy
- lead volunteer-only research centre w/ offices in 3 countries and an Xmas email secretary
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Colleagues resigning external examiner posts, when no contract for said post has been issued, for a job they already do, but asked to respect the notice period nevertheless.
A symptom of the goodwill universities run on, and how ill-equipped they are to have it withdrawn.
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If managers intend to withhold an entire summer of pay on grounds that anyone participating in the marking and assessment boycott is doing any other work 'voluntarily', doesn't it follow that any research done in that period shouldn't contribute to the university's REF portfolio?
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Arguing that trans people are a groomer contagion doesn't plausibly encourage violence, but arguing that arguing that trans people are a groomer contagion plausibly encourages violence plausibly encourages violence.
Meanwhile these ghouls are now pretending their critics are threatening *them,* despite the blood from the murdered trans people’s bodies not having yet dried on the floor
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“the piece was solicited, commissioned, contracted, submitted, edited, fact checked, copy edited, and approved by the relevant editors. Yet it will never be published with the Harvard Law Review. [It] would have been the first from a Palestinian scholar.”
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@JosephineCumbo
We were accused of ‘ideological fixation’ for predicting what is now a fact. University heads and fund managers ignored pleas to acknowledge scheme strengths for which they now take credit, having meanwhile decimated our retirement income and needlessly disadvantaged students.
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Several people have picked up on this expert comment from Chatham House, which rather casually disputes that women and girls are disproportionately affected by sexual violence in conflict, calling that consensus an “unsubstantiated assumption”.
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More than one interviewee reporting this experience. A researcher is entitled to change their mind as they go, but not to exclude evidence they find inconvenient. And it’s a very bad sign about the declared even-handedness of any study if some informants end up feeling like this.
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The European Union has one of the better policies on protection from sexual violence in conflict and the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda, yet fuels the mass incarceration of migrants in conditions where sexual violence is rampant.
How? A thread.
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This is a fantastic paper, dealing with such a basic concept of international theory - sovereignty - that I don't see any way for you not to have to read it. And then reorient your thinking in light of it.
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10 years at the best uni in the world and still confuses anecdote with data.
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If you are a PhD student working on climate change and gender, based at a UK institution, and need a small grant to complete primary research, assist with writing up, enable dissemination, or similar, THEN THIS IS THE GRANT FOR YOU.
(or someone you know)
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The special shitshow of UK academia: just as real pay for lecturers (and other staff!) has tumbled, parents and students will have experienced the cost of university *increasing*, and can likely point to worsening indicators on class size to boot.
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LSE peeps. A letter is circulating for those within 15 years of PhD on the impact of the pension cuts for us. Currently in the range of 25-49% loss of *total pension income as assessed by the official USS modeller*. Let me know if you haven’t seen it; please sign if you have.
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I assume the Germans have a word for the feeling of seeing someone praised for their inspirational mentorship when you know they’ve treated students as personal assistants.
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Please also find time to enjoy conference bingo at
#ISA2017
, courtesy of
@lgbtqa_isa
, and needing only slight modifications since 2013.
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A work of heart wrenching genius, on the day we found out that Adam Tickell is negotiating on behalf of the neoliberal beast. All praise to
@sussexucu
,
@sussex4ussevent
and all involved.
#USSstrike
#strikeforUSS
#ucustrike
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A decade on and
@isanet
bingo remains strikingly reusable. All credit to
@lgbtqa_isa
. Stay safe out there folks.
#ISA2023
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Full ceasefire always unlikely (as far as int. law folk said). Israel would have ignored one anyway. But the measures leave in tatters claims of major allies that the 🇿🇦 case was meritless. Findings on risks plus measures *should* immediately change arms and diplomatic practice.
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Demands:
- divestment
- academic boycott of Israeli unis
- disclose all investments
- no spin-offs for surveillance or war
- Jerusalem Declaration definition of antisemitism to replace IHRA
- scholarships for Palestinians
- support Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian and alumni in Gaza
Queen Mary Students have just set up an encampment in solidarity with Palestine.
More details to follow...
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Working on a letter from current and former UKRI grant holders. If anyone wants to be involved before it goes public DM me.
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If you’re a Women, Peace and Security and
#UNSCR1325
scholar, activist, practitioner or student, and you haven’t yet read
@Jamiejhagen
’s piece on queering WPS, take note:
1. It is generating a lot of interest.
2. It is free to download.
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Now with endorsements.
Now available for preorder.
Also on the Bezos platform, not yet other outlets (but soon).
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We conferenced.
Masculinity was dissected and reformed, reified and performed, killed off and reborn.
Thanks to all who came and made it so good.
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When social scientists attack.
Astounding work from anti-casualisation folk at my former branch, meticulously documenting an absolute scandal. To not just swell casualised labour but cut permanent staff at somewhere as wealthy and (non-)performatively progressive as LSE. Gross.
There's a crisis of academic casualisation and precarity at the LSE. Insecure and short-term contracts are rife. We're social scientists, so we decided to research how serious the problem is. Here's a thread with our key findings, 28-page report + code repository.
@ucu
#ucuRISING
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Disappointing that so many branches missed the 50% turnout threshold (a threshold designed to sabotage workplace organising) by so little. But huge and surprising results, including at LSE, meeting the threshold for the first time and with nearly 90% in favour of strike action.
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A call for papers on ‘The Women, Peace and Security Agenda: History, Politics, and Practice’ for THE JOURNAL OF ALTERNATIVE POLITICS.
A December deadline but interested parties can try out abstracts with the editors beforehand.
#UNSCR1325
#WPSagenda
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A decade ago I started my first lecturer job. The same post, at the same university, now pays £8,833 *less* than in the alternate reality where pay had kept pace with RPI inflation. The person occupying it also has a much degraded pension, a higher workload, and likely more debt.
Since 2009, the average wage in the HE sector has been cut by 25.5% relative to RPI. Unpaid labour reduces your salary in real terms even further
Use the
@ucu
pay modeller to see how much your pay has been cut👉
Come along on Thurs👉
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When I was a PhD student,
@GeorgeLawsonIR
and
@kirstenainley
did more than anyone to create a welcoming culture for critical, heterodox, non-doctrinaire work on global politics. I know several of us who were misfits remain in their debt.
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Further notes on the pension crisis.
Sussex VC Adam Tickell has caught flak for his failure to oppose the devastation of our future income, despite his being a renowned critic of neoliberalism who once wrote against the financialisation of pensions.
#USSStrike
#StrikeforUSS
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If a critical IR group blog was to host a series of virtual teach-ins on aspects of the current crisis, what would you most like to see covered?
Obviously politics of global health, something on the biopolitics of the pandemic, intellectual histories of 'crisis', and what more?
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🚨🚨Though some people apparently don’t realise it, days on strike are days without pay, and in my experience strike funds are often not claimed in full. Sacrifice for the cause is good, but so is getting paid before Christmas. Precarious and early career folk take note.🚨🚨
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Co-edited a book on this increasingly fractured and vexing thing called the Women, Peace and Security agenda, or "WPS" for short.
Sales pitch up front: it's in paperback already, and costs £20 at the BUP website:
#WPS
#WPSagenda
#UNSCR1325
#FemSecSt
🚨Announcing a new book in the world today! 🚨
New Directions in Women, Peace and Security, edited by Soumita Basu,
@PaulCinnam0n
&
@drljshepherd
.
Thread about our fabulous contributors and their wise words below... 🧵(1/)
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2. Remind people, especially if precarious or first-time strikers, of support available:
Up to £75 a day from the second day of striking on if you earn less than £30k
Up to £50 a day from the third day of striking on if you earn over £30k
#UCUstrike
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A different kind of edited volume.
A call for critical engagements with the Women, Peace and Security agenda in all of its complex, contested, and pluralising forms.
Edited with Soumita Basu and
@drljshepherd
.
Outlines of contributions by Monday 28 May.
#FemSecSt
#UNSCR1325
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🚨 Job klaxon 🚨
Research officer (because LSE doesn’t do ‘post-doc’) on contemporary development, security and/or legal efforts to govern masculinity.
18 months full time or up to 24 months part time (exact term flexible).
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5. If your branch is not on strike, obviously don’t cross actual pickets elsewhere, but also observe the ‘digital picket’ and don’t tweet as if it was business as usual in UK HE. Especially don’t do unpaid promotional work for universities by celebrating league table scores etc.
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Copies spotted in the wild!
Not at
#ISA2024
but GOVERNING THE FEMINIST PEACE is.
Positioned just between Jervis and Waltz.
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“Cecil Rhodes *was* a man of his time, but *his time* included Lobengula Khumalo, Roger Casement, Harriet Tubman and Vladimir Lenin”.
-
@huwlemmey
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Corbyn did better on vote share than Brown or Miliband and wasn’t far off Blair (2005). It’s no succour because the outcomes are so perverse.
Here’s another: Labour lost more votes to LDs than to Tories, but it was the Tories that flipped all the seats.
General Election vote share w/ 641 of 650 seats declared, 2019:
Conservatives: 43.5% (+1.2%)
Labour: 32.5% (-7.8%)
Lib Dem: 11.4% (+4.2%)
SNP: 3.9% (+0.9%)
Brexit: 2% (+2%)
Other: 6.7% (-0.4%)
Turnout: 67.2%
Source:
@BBCNews
/
@SkyNews
/
@itvnews
Changes: GE2017
#GeneralElection19
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The Disorder Of Things now has over twenty book symposia on topics from sanctions to sex work, Turkish foreign policy to film method, accelerationism to Eurocentrism, military technology to queer theory.
(I've heard tell they can be useful for teaching.)
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1. Donate to the
@ucu
strike fund, especially if your branch didn’t make the threshold and/or you hold a senior and secure position with many benefits already accrued.
You can do that here:
#UCUstrike
#UCUStrikesBack
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An introduction to a new forum, on 'Revisiting Gendered States', by
@swatipash
, J. Ann Tickner and
@JacquiTrue
.
More to follow - on post-sovereignty, proto-states and paleo-masculinism; and on billiard balls, stilettos and silences - over the next week.
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A difficult academic year, balancing two precarious contracts, one of which will likely expire in March. Striking will hurt. And yet there is no choice. Chronic pay suppression, growing precarity, decimated pensions.
Order another ballot if the first is astray.
Please vote yes.
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“The UK higher education sector as a whole now relies on student fees for half its £40bn annual income. Universities have become landlords, event managers and caterers in a bid to secure their finances and fund expansion”.
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What’s it like to have Scrooge as a boss?
Even as someone who was very close to all this - keeping track of who was being robbed of what - some of this *still* shocked me.
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Demoting a Māori dean, and firing one of the most celebrated scholars in their field, following protests over racism at your campus. Hard to see what else is going on here other than blatant retaliation, and intimidation of those without global name recognition.
Please read:
In the wake of systemic racism claims, Waikato U
@waikato
VC Neil Quigley has not renewed the contacts of world renowned Maori scholars:
↔️ Prof Linda Tuhiwai Smith, the “mother of Indigenous Studies”.
↔️ Prof Brendan Hokowhitu, Dean of Maori & Indigenous Studies.
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Morning: Read email from management bemoaning the impact on students and warning that an isolated bunch of boycotters are only hurting themselves.
Afternoon: open twitter.
“It would not be right to stand here and not acknowledge staff who have been fighting for not more than the bare minimum”. How can we thank you enough for this brave and moving oration at Edinburgh Graduation today.
@ucuedinburgh
@ucu
@sssn_edi
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A privilege to talk with some chumrades about this rich and entangling book at
#Millennium2020
in the same month that our little blog project turned ten years old.
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Latest Royal Statistical Society intervention blistering on systematic issues with the Teaching Excellence Framework:
"there are many serious statistical problems with the TEF... Some of these invalidate TEF".
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Several researchers on the
@GCRFGenderHub
- my literal colleagues - remain trapped in Kabul. A donation will help ensure their safety.
Please consider giving, and RT'ing.
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@ucu
It also seems that outsourcing precarity to organisations like UniTemps will serve to obscure the scale of casualisation, because universities may not report these workers in statistics on how many staff are casualised, since technically they are employees of UniTemps'.
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Ned Lebow - who professes his earnest dedication to real feminism and anti-racist activism - spills all in an exclusive with famed mouthpiece of real feminism and anti-racism The Daily Mail.
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Almost 22 years into the “Women, Peace and Security” agenda, how has one of its leading state champions interpreted gender equality in war- and peace-making, and what could it plausibly do differently?
A thread on the UK’s efforts as it drafts a fifth National Action Plan (NAP).
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Two morning panels this Friday at
#ISA2023
and no fewer than *four* scholars absent thanks to the petty operation of the border: visas denied, motives questioned, perspectives lost. Our claim to the international is hollow.
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7. Remind yourself and others that this is not just a ‘lecturer’ strike, but affects all kinds of folk who work in universities, where the culture of precarity and inequality also affects people not even eligible to join
@ucu
.
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For anyone still on this hellsite, re-upping the notice of our 2024 conference on 'Governing Masculinity'. Abstracts and other proposal due in just over a month. Circulate to your networks, &c.
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You may have thought The Disorder Of Things was dead. Not yet!
Today we're back with a symposium on
@JoanneYao55
's THE IDEAL RIVER, curated by
@IDanewid
and launched with this post by
@GeorgeLawsonIR
. Commentaries to flow all this week. Get swimming.
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A Dan Nexon thread on academic self-promotion. An addendum: if you read great work by others, shout about it.
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The Case Against Woodrow Wilson.
A powerful collective statement from current and former IR PhD students at Aberystwyth. The kind of nuanced intervention you couldn’t imagine if you only listen to those who denigrate decolonisation as illiteracy.
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Inspired by the example of
@AstroMikeMerri
, I plotted the Guardian league table performance of the top 50 UK Politics departments (2019 ranking) to explore the year-on-year variation in position.
Behold the hot mess.
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Feminists who are visibly trans inclusive, subjected to bizarre accusations, Twitter abuse, and reported to their bosses. Solidarity with Alison and all others against this toxic nonsense, which gives itself away as an ongoing desire to make gender signify monolithically.
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The thing with bothsidesism is that it never means giving both sides the same military, financial and diplomatic support. If in your myopia you think the violence is historically equal, reciprocal, you should be demanding that your government stops putting its fist on the scales.
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On the whiteness of the foundational texts of neo-realism, liberalism 2.0 and constructivism. More, an examination of *how* whiteness matters: as immanence, ignorance and innocence. Maybe the single most important effort to question the disciplinary core.
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Please for a moratorium on “as a father of girls” allyship. Fathers can abuse, neglect, and diminish, and many of the childless recognise women as full people. If it took genetic kin for you to notice patriarchy, maybe don’t tell on yourself so obviously?
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In response to the feminist injunction to think beyond the war moment, and supported by an ESRC Strategic Network,
@LSE_WPS
is convening a two day workshop in May 2018 on the continuum of gender violence.
This is the call for papers.
Do the RT, plsthnx.
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Thanks for the free copy of your new textbook, and truly I sympathise with the need to simplify, and yeah I do teach a first year introduction to IR course, but with summaries like this I’m afraid it’s going to be a hard no from me.
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The uncanny temporality of liberal handwringing, where rocket attacks become the cause of the expulsions that preceded them, settler colonialism a retaliation against an independence struggle, annexations the fault of the displaced.
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@ucu
But there are clearly teachers employed by UniTemps who have been compelled to cross picket lines, presumably on pain of immediate dismissal, and UCU guidance confirms that this is 'third party' employment thus these colleagues cannot take strike action.
I didn’t have a choice about crossing the picket line of the
#UCUStrikes
today because of outsourcing, but you know who did?
All 45 of my students.
Proud mama TA.
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