I am not going to say what it was, but this is the message I left in the chat. "This is all framed so individually and individualistically. In the absence of effective and resilient social movement organisations, there will be this endless boom-and-bust, guilt-spasms followed by burn out. But we are all so thoroughly neoliberalised... Continue Reading →
Cesspit or money-spinner? Depends on your pov
Siggie Freud would have a field day with this Those benefitting from the status quo will act to resist socio-technical change, obvs. One of the "derailing risks" we don't talk about enough... Barles, S. (2014). History of waste management and the social and cultural representations of waste. In The basic environmental history (pp. 199-226). Cham: Springer International Publishing.
Who is going to educate the mice to bell the cat? #Climate #Academia
Will admit that I am losing the will to ... write the same thing over and over. This occurring long after others have lost the will to read the same thing over and over. And yet we plod on (or I do). There's a two page comment in the latest Nature Climate Change (an academic... Continue Reading →
There’s never an irony policeman when you want one – academic hilarity
So, one thing the Bad Guys do is set up fake "consultation" processes where a few voices, who are saying the right things, are amplified and other more problematic ones marginalised ("we're outa time..." etc etc) And so in an hour and a half (felt longer) webinar about precisely this - the Bad Guys and... Continue Reading →
Specific archive finds as “Rabbit Hole Invitations”
On a particular type of news article/magazine piece you may find when trawling archives and online database, that take you on OTHER documents… I need to come up with a decent name for these “Rabbit Hole Invitations” (but anything can do an RHI, if you want it to!) “Signposters” “Threads to pull on” Something else?... Continue Reading →
Dunning-Kruger, fnords and the smugosphere (homeosmugopheric mechnanisms)
I am fascinated by failure - personal, movement, species (not that the three are distinct, of course, but that's for another time). (see previous blog post, to which this is a sequel). How is it we persist with doing things so "obviously" stupid and self-defeating? Are we just blind? Blinded by ego? Blinded by fear?... Continue Reading →
The first rule of smugosphere is, nobody talks about smugosphere. #PointlessPodcasts
Ugh. Listened to some podcasts while walking along the canal tow-path feeding the moorhens. Love those moorhens. The podcasts? Not so much. There's so much smug self-congratulatory circle-jerking going on. "Ooh, it's the evil oil companies." "Ooh, it's the corrupted politicians, meatpuppets for the EOCs." "Ooh, it's the x, ooh it's the y." Over the... Continue Reading →
What IS it about libraries and archives that affects me so much?
The emotions of archives, their "affect" - presumably someone's done an autoethnography of that? (Yes - see further reading!) Of the joy of handling papers that haven't been looked at for decades/centuries? Of the rituals of the getting of the entrance card, furtling around in archives, of visiting, of becoming adept at the various rituals... Continue Reading →
New Conversation article abt history, Sunak and the climate culture wars
You can read it here. And yes, I screengrabbed this below. Bugger #humblebrag, just straight up #brag
Hollaback poems – Maud Miller and Mrs Judge Jenkins
A couple of years ago I was doing some tutoring for The Brilliant Club in a school in Trafford. One of the things the students had to do was compare and contrast some poems. There was a Yeats one about young love in later years "When you are old", followed by Carol Ann Duffy's "Havisham".... Continue Reading →
marchudson.net 