Radical Humanities, Medical Humanities, Urban Studies, Science & Tech Studies - https://linktr.ee/des_fitzgerald
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Our Sonic Practices Symposium is this Friday! Please come along but remember that there is a blanket ban on questions starting: "This is more of a comment than a question really but..." There will be a buzzer, and a security guard. You will be escorted out.
Oh thanks!! (I know Evan's v good stuff on spiked/RCP - will check this out)
Wales though! (I was there five years - big fan of the place).
I genuinely cannot be arsed to look up whether "new left review" is still denying genocide in Gaza. Presumably they are.
Someone's going to write a really solid book one day about the consistent anti-Irishness of the British left, and one of its beefiest chapters is going to be about the NLR. #speirgorm
The Proustian rush of junior infants Irish: mála scoile, halla, small lón.
Begging the english liberals to realise the policy exchange/ECHR document isn't actually making a legal argument about how the treaty works, it's making a political argument that treaties made with Ireland don't count, and any effects of UK policy on Irish people should be discounted.
Let's go.
They all have the fbpe vibe of people who thought themselves above any kind of political conflict until, like, six months ago.
Does anyone have an account of why all the "alt" US public institution accounts are so uniformly bad/ridiculous?
“It is time to STRIKE GERMANY now more than ever” strikegermany.org
Anyway I hope the book launch was good. bsky.app/profile/joen...
The "my children will share everything nicely" to legislating whose crumbs are whose pipeline.
Should the STS/environmental history/whatever book launch really be happening in a city where the police are empowered to beat the shit out of anti-genocide protesters, as part of the state's general support for genocide? I would venture, no.
As much as it is baffling that people are going to conferences in the US, it is also honestly baffling that people are hosting - and attending! - conferences in *Germany,* a country in the midst of an extraordinarily violent police crackdown on intellectual freedom.
Okay, okay. We'll take Bertie. m.independent.ie/irish-news/a...
This is probably bluesky-inappropriate snark, but anyway, here's an excellent example of how the encrusting of academic jargon into the dullest of mainstream cultural institutions can usefully signal the (long ago!) voiding of any critical force from the same term. designmuseum.org/exhibitions/...
The strong position is that anything before 2020 is basically the 1900s.
I'm going to need you all to stop referring to articles from 2011 as "recent literature."
I mean, lmao, but is there really no one at **Nature** who might intervene editorially and save them from printing this obvious bollocks?
Extremely not here for "it could happen here too!" takes about the UK, a state that, within my lifetime, has openly murdered its own citizens in the street, and granted total impunity to the murderers.
Hagai El-Ad: "As far as Gaza is concerned, the public in Israel can stomach dead medics, slaughtered journalists and starving children. What the public cannot stomach is Israeli officials or soldiers being held to account." www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2025...
Newnham College, Cambridge. Horrifying. We have to stop this happening in other British universities
It's secondary ignorance obviously, but the idea that there are not signifiant numbers of medical academics with anti-vax or other odd views is bananas. Andrew Wakefield graduated from Imperial and was a medical academic at the Royal Free!
The truly sad thing here is to see what an absolute clown convention the once-great Theory & Society has been reduced to.
This could have been written in crayon and I'm not sorry to say so.
Yes!
Live footage of me participating in the thing while also repudiating the thing.
I'm there now!
Can't believe they got Father John Misty to play the over-40s night at Cork city hall.
Also the only act to come out of Woodstock 99 with reputation, if anything, enhanced
Korn ftw
It's worth noting that these are not merely stupid questions, but have the function - as does much of the professional and academic ethics industry - of taking up up space for serious discussion of politics and value with speculative, sci-fi bollocks. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...
I know STS is basically the art of not noticing things that are politically awkward, but anyway, possibly the field's most prominent figure is on this bill also.
Anyway, it turns out when your kid starts primary school, they're only in for two hours a day for the first, like, ten days 😵💫
Jesus, yes.
This is a really good piece! It strikes me too that the soulless shopping plaza, as an object of desire/recoil in Irish discourse, is worth unpacking vis-a-vis wider ambiguities about IRL's relationship to ordinary European modernity (another"eurocountry" indeed) www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
The modal bluesky user is someone who thinks themselves very clued-in to current events and also has no idea that a world outside the US exists.
From the Archive: Des Fitzgerald and Felicity Callard, 'Social Science and Neuroscience beyond Interdisciplinarity: Experimental Entanglements' - an account of the dynamics of interaction across the social sciences and neurosciences. (Open Access) journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....
😂
It's (in passing) remarkable how much of the affect literature is locked in fierce, one-sided debate with, like, airport self help books.
Incredible scenes as another Duke UP dwells on a bad thing, while refusing the possibility that such dwelling might have recuperative potential.
Great to see the beautiful Healy Pass, but depressing that the official signage uncritically describes its construction as an attempt to "prevent famine." Decolonise Cork/Kerry tourism!
"The agora isn’t dead. It just needs redesigning. And if we’re smart about it, AI might just help us get there." Genuinely I think these might be the three stupidest sentences I've ever seen back to back.
Big fan of this genre. "We used AI to find out something that is obvious and yet also somehow stupid." share.google/MXM9dQpnGnaP...
Just going to replace the out of office message with this.
A fun thing about Ireland is that viewing important archaeological sites often means working your way gingerly around angry livestock.
Hahahaha
🤣🤣
3yo has started introducing whatever mad thought she wants to share with "speaking of [mad topic]' even though no one has been speaking of this topic.
Dursey Island metro interchange
Congratulations Jay!!!
Amazing!
🤣🤣
Staying in a rental in west cork (boo hiss etc) and our neighbour just knocked on the door to ask if we wanted any CRAB CLAWS
It's not the main thing obviously, but it's noteworthy nonetheless how the British left, such as it is, also depends on a (negative) fantasy of UK dominion over Ireland and Irish people. Of course, the UK government has no power to either extradite or try Irish citizens.
What an absolute shower of pathetic, two-bit authoritarians the UK Labour party are.
We're planning to go on the way back - will watch out for the gravel!
We're off to see an archaeological site somewhere in a field today. Will report back.
Finally inducting the kids into our long-standing family tradition, the Bleak Irish Holiday.
Right. Dreadful!
Lol they deleted
I'm pretty sure this headline - with its spelling mistake, factual inaccuracy, and lazy British colonialism - is AI btw.
Completely!
The phrase "artificial intelligence humanities sandpit" genuinely makes me sorry to have ever been born. www.ukri.org/opportunity/...
An awful lot of people on this website need to google Obama+drones
I always forget he's a Leeds Uni grad!
We visited the William Butler Yeats for heritage week!
It's a tiny sideshow obviously, but Ireland gradually becoming culturally and politically unhooked from "the Anglosphere" has been one positive development of the last few years.
"If the Government in Dublin truly believes that Israel is committing genocide, how can it look elsewhere while its nearest neighbour [the UK] funds and supports that genocide and its own citizens are arrested simply for speaking out?" www.irishtimes.com/culture/book...
Ha ha (specifically thinking of the pol*ri prize guy alas)
Quick snap of me arriving at the FPL group chat to reveal my team
Irish fiction writing is now so dominant that even our worst, most objectionable writers are establishing themselves as the worst, most objectionable writers globally.
Reluctantly coming around to the view that the only person making a big emotional drama of the eldest's last day at crèche - while bemoaning having to manage the same drama - is me.
Let people enjoy things, unless the thing is Oasis, in which case ask them if their commitment to this one, exceptionally simple aesthetic attachment, formed in early adolescence, might not be symptomatic of their wider inability to live within the disappointments and compromises of late adulthood.
I don't think so. But it is strange!
Lol!
There's also so much to be said here about where the intersections between anthropology and the tech industry ended up, and about the endpoint of the willfully naive, post-critical politics of collaboration that animated this move (that still animates it!)
Not only is what's happening at ANU appalling, but as we've so often elsewhere, so-called critical social scientists are once again overseeing the disaster. www.abc.net.au/news/2025-08...
My neighbour brought his new dog over 🥹
I will never not be naively scandalised at just the sheer number of total dumbasses occupying chairs at ivy league universities: thedispatch.com/article/scie...
I once said to someone at LSE, as a self deprecating joke, "I worry that with my accent I can never sound like a serious intellectual," and they replied very seriously, "yes, I can see that."
NGLI was going to mock this as obviously made up until I saw it was Durham 💀 www.thetimes.com/uk/education...
Even by English standards, this is bleak.
It's weird alright. I guess this is what you can do with solid access to a very small and intertwined business/media elite.
Hot take, but I think if you want to be president of Ireland, it's not a lot to ask that you're sufficiently engaged with Ireland, such that you actually live there. #speirgorm www.irishtimes.com/business/202...
Scholarly orgs based in the U.S. that purport to be "international" are going to need to come to terms with what it means to continue holding their in-person gatherings in a country many people cannot travel to or no longer feel safe visiting for all kinds of reasons.
Oh, worse if anything.
Haha, wait, I'm actually kind of into that.
"see how he spins sweeping historical theory from tiny ethnographic details" - yeah they all do that. And it's bad!
An unfortunate thing about David Graeber being basically the only widely-read anthropologist now is that his admirers often take Graeber's use of very basic anthropological tools and stances as evidence of his idiosyncratic & puckish genius.
Prepping for the mandatory west cork holiday (I'm reliably informed that "Inishkillane" = Allihies).
Prepping for the mandatory west cork holiday (I'm reliably informed that "Inishkillane" is Allihies).
Me: My children [not even in the same building]: WHAT WAS THAT
It is once again not nothing - and not dismissible as convenience or bad faith - that this fascist seizure of grant infrastructure narrates itself as a contribution to the reproducibility crisis. www.whitehouse.gov/presidential...
Ah amazing - so glad the central argument (architecture: bad) comes through so clearly!
Few things in my life have brought me as much pleasure as this stupid 3D printed "now playing" shelf I got on Etsy.
