iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Hirah Azhar @herazhar.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

🎙️ I’m joined by the wonderful Dr Pippa Oldfield in the latest episode of The War We See podcast 🎙️ Pippa is a photography curator & historian, whose work on photography, gender, & war is equal parts thought-provoking and exciting. This was a joy to record! Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/6Exh...

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Hirah Azhar @herazhar.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

I successfully defended my PhD this week! 🎉 Thank you to my examiners: Prof. David Brown & Dr Tom Allbeson. V. grateful to the AHRC for funding my research. I had the best supervisors in the world in Dr Chris Fuller (Southampton) & Chris Cooper (IWM) & couldn't have done this w/out them.

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Hirah Azhar @herazhar.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

'The War We See' podcast is back with a second season! 🎙️ First episode out today. I’m joined by the absolutely wonderful Professor Katy Parry @katyjparry.bsky.social for a really special chat! Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/6IXx... Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/b...

open.spotify.com

Media framing of contemporary war, soldiers’ visual self-representation, and AI-generated war photos...with Professor Katy Parry

The War We See · Episode

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Hirah Azhar @herazhar.bsky.social · 19/05/2026

I'm writing up my PhD + I need all these AI-pushers to please god please shut up. I don't WANT my written output to look more polished, have more citations etc. If my writing is meh, FINE, I'm not a fucking chatbot in my area of expertise. What is the POINT of training to become a scholar otherwise?

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Hirah Azhar @herazhar.bsky.social · 17/04/2026

Nice to see everyone heaving a collective sigh of relief as oil prices start to come down. You know what we can't go back to? The 3000+ Iranian lives and 2000+ Lebanese lives lost in just over two months. Gone.

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elia ayoub @ayoub.bsky.social · 07/04/2026

Moral rot

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Hirah Azhar @herazhar.bsky.social · 05/03/2026

Do they even know what beautiful cities Tehran & Beirut are? Thousands of years old. Made unbreakable by their thriving communities, the rich histories etched into their walls. Cities of unimaginable contrasts. These empty plastic tourist trinkets know nothing except war & greed.

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Coach Finstock @coachfinstock.bsky.social · 28/02/2026

We hate kids. Like SO MUCH. We vote for the guns. We vote for the bombs. We protect the rapists. We have LEOs physically restraining parents from trying to save their children in Uvalde. We just blew up a school in Iran. We love Jeffrey Epstein and his friends. They run the country.

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Hirah Azhar @herazhar.bsky.social · 28/02/2026

My podcast has completed its first series 🎉 In this special episode, I offer a recap & share unaired snippets of my conversations w 3 guests. For everyone who has supported this totally independently produced podcast, thank you from the bottom of my ♥️ Back soon! open.spotify.com/episode/2SGx...

open.spotify.com

The War We See: Reflections & Unheard Moments

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Hirah Azhar @herazhar.bsky.social · 01/02/2026

I've just marked the best 1st year undergrad History essay I've ever seen & I'm a weepy wreck. I love seeing young people learn to become historians. I love that they're still as excited by the discipline as I was 20 years ago & as so many fellow historians continue to be. It's a wonderful feeling.

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Hirah Azhar @herazhar.bsky.social · 03/01/2026

We really are cursed to live in cycles of repeated history. To grow older is to relive the same global currents of batshit stupidity. But while our parents could cushion some of it w financial stability, we’re just stuck in endless loops of absurd evilness & bludgeoned prospects.

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dr. rich traditions, JD @helldude.bsky.social · 29/12/2025

look we're all making a big bet on AI! and if it pays off as big as we hope, well, it's going to make a handful of people super rich and you're going to lose your job but get to watch mickey mouse fuck geralt from the witcher. if it doesn't pay off well then you get to pay for the bailouts

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Hirah Azhar @herazhar.bsky.social · 29/12/2025

Looking for something to listen to during this in-between time when the prospect of yet another year feels quite...bleak, may I suggest a wee podcast on conflict imagery? The War We See is available on Spotify, Amazon Music, Apple Podcasts (iOS), Pocket Casts & Castbox (Android).

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Dr Rupert Barrett-Taylor @rbarretttaylor.bsky.social · 06/12/2025

Getting tired of having to take the tech industry seriously. These are not serious people.

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Hirah Azhar @herazhar.bsky.social · 03/12/2025

V. pleased to have my friend Dr Ali Fisher on to talk abt terrorist imagery, the visual records from Gaza, navigating study of sensitive content, & developing data tools like BlackLight & Mujahid Mind AI. Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/7s0y... Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/t...

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Hirah Azhar @herazhar.bsky.social · 19/11/2025

Ep 5 of The War We See out today! Delighted to talk to Rebecca Newell, Head of Art at the IWM about war art, the evolving role of the war artist & questions around documentation, representation & access. Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/a... Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/1lTD...

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Hirah Azhar @herazhar.bsky.social · 24/10/2025

A complete stranger pointed at me and shouted “dirty little socialist!” when I was parking my car this morning. I am, yes, but how does he know???

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Hirah Azhar @herazhar.bsky.social · 17/09/2025

Introducing "The War We See", my podcast on the history of war imagery, feat. conversations w/ some truly excellent guests. Trailer’s out today & first episode drops on the 24th. Pls give it a listen + subscribe/share if it’s of interest! Spotify: lnkd.in/d4y4_-TT Apple Podcasts: lnkd.in/dHkgp-Mg

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elia ayoub @ayoub.bsky.social · 23/07/2025

AI’s been an amazing case study disproving the concept of supply and demand

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Hirah Azhar @herazhar.bsky.social · 22/07/2025

There's something otherworldly about forced starvation. It's not explicitly violent. It's slower, more systematic. It kills differently, depending on your physiology. It is so unbelievably cruel, it defies understanding. How can anyone bear this?

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Hirah Azhar @herazhar.bsky.social · 20/07/2025

Every post about Palestinians in Gaza being systematically starved attracts a long line of the worst people you can imagine. Sneering, jeering, labelling everything "propaganda", denying what's visible & has been legitimately validated. I can't comprehend this level of cruelty.

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yaoi gagarin @mel.bzky.team · 20/07/2025

interesting thing about the ai discourse is that you will say "companies pumped a trillion into glorified chatbots" and get the answer of "well ai will revolutionize medical diagnosis/chem research etc" and its like ok but those companies didnt fund those, they very pointedly funded the chatbots

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Hirah Azhar @herazhar.bsky.social · 22/06/2025

here we go again with the heavily fetishised bombing of brown people

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J.M. Berger PRE-ORDER THE POPE'S HITMAN @jmberger.com · 22/06/2025

They were careless people, they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness.

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Dan Sohege @danielsohege.bsky.social · 19/06/2025

I do genuinely think that if a lot of people knew just quite how horrendous and inhumane the UK's immigration system is there would be fewer people claiming that it needs to be made harsher. Not all obviously, but a number. Too many don't pay attention though. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

theguardian.com

UK Home Office tells parents their children should return to Brazil alone

While Ana Luiza Cabral Gouveia and Hugo Barbosa can remain, letter says sons, 11 and eight, must go back to Brazil

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elia ayoub @ayoub.bsky.social · 09/06/2025

If you stop thinking that Germany's response to anything Israel is about Holocaust guilt and instead about rewriting German history, you'd understand German politics better. 🧵

""Frankly, we have imported antisemitism with the big numbers of migrants we have within the last 10 years."

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz blamed the rise in antisemitism on migrants, calling it a "terrible challenge" for the country."

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Hirah Azhar @herazhar.bsky.social · 29/05/2025

Every day, good people desperately push the limits of how they tell the story of this genocide so that those with power can finally be moved to take action. The question then is not “why won’t you do anything?” but “how do I dismantle the system that gives people like you control?”

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Hirah Azhar @herazhar.bsky.social · 18/05/2025

What else should I care about when a population is being deliberately pummelled and starved in this brazen, shameful dismantling of international law, norms, and basic human decency? “This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal".

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Hirah Azhar @herazhar.bsky.social · 16/05/2025

It messes with my brain so much that there is widespread consensus on the active genocide in Gaza, but then... nothing. More death, more hunger, more trauma. I hope this photo & thousands more haunt those with the power to enforce change until their last breath. (Anadolu/Getty)

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Hirah Azhar @herazhar.bsky.social · 13/05/2025

Please can someone tell me how one is meant to joyously assimilate into British society when all public discourse, every bleeding moment, tells us we’re not wanted, we need to be disincentivised from staying & crueler, harsher policies are needed to make us leave & keep us out?

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The Mary Rose Museum @maryrosemuseum.bsky.social · 15/04/2025

On the anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, we thought we'd answer a question that's often asked, "If they raised the Mary Rose, why not raise the Titanic?" Allow our scaled diagram to explain...

A light blue diagram depicting the sea, with the water's surface at the top, and just below it is an outline of the Mary Rose, with the depth (12m, 40ft or 6.7 fathoms). There is a line showing the seabed, which takes a rapid dive into the vertical...

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Faine Greenwood @faineg.com · 03/04/2025

Jesus Christ can’t you people just let millennials express some entirely deserved outrage and anger over getting hit with yet another major financial crisis without parachuting in to finger wag at us about it

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Hirah Azhar @herazhar.bsky.social · 23/03/2025

Some days I think we didn't mourn the death of print media as long and as hard as we perhaps needed to.

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Jeremy Littau @jeremylittau.com · 08/02/2025

Tech bros cheering on the cuts to grant funding built businesses and wealth on the back of decades of university R&D work. Much of that knowledge was given away to the public. This is basic pulling-up-the-ladder nonsense via rewriting history. They owe the public, not the other way around.

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Eric Gordy @ericgordy.bsky.social · 29/01/2025

OpenAI complaining about Deepseek: oh horrors, the plagiarism machine got plagiarised.

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Geoffrey Hughes @geofffhughes.bsky.social · 26/01/2025

Worth noting that Biden also wanted to facilitate the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. Most of the Jordanians I interviewed at all levels at the time always thought this was the endgame of the Abraham Accords paradigm... www.reuters.com/world/egypt-...

reuters.com

Egypt's Sisi rejects transfer of Gazans, discusses aid with Biden

President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi said on Wednesday that Egyptians in their millions would reject the forced displacement of Palestinians into Sinai, adding that any such move would turn the Egyptian peninsula into a base for attacks against Israel.

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Ruth Watson @ruthwatson.eurosky.social · 26/01/2025

Disgraceful bigotry at play. Badenoch and her fellow dog whistlers would do well to spend time talking to people working at Women's Aid and Rape Crisis. She would find there is a 'rape culture' here which needs addressing. Her government cut community funding which worked to change attitudes.

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Kat Tenbarge @kattenbarge.bsky.social · 10/01/2025

Hard to overstate just how much of the tech industry’s horrifically dystopian present grew right out of its transparently misogynistic past

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Heba Gowayed هبة جويد @hebagowayed.bsky.social · 01/01/2025

70k tons of bombs dropped on Gaza. Millions displaced. Millions traumatized by injury, arrest & loss. Astronomical no. of people killed. And this genocide is sullying its third calendar year. What a failure we are as a species. Peace is an empty word. May the new year bring justice.

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Jasmine K Gani @jasminekgani.bsky.social · 17/12/2024

This is excellent 👇 If you haven't had the chance to watch this lecture or read the article version yet, it is well worth your time.

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Neil Renic @ncrenic.bsky.social · 09/12/2024

Too much of a procrastinator to start; too much of a perfectionist to finish

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Frederick Deknatel @freddydeknatel.bsky.social · 07/12/2024

The NYT tech reporters who actually cover Musk and his businesses the most don’t parrot his PR and propaganda like this. Unfortunately it’s another hallmark of the politics desk.

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Ruth Watson @ruthwatson.eurosky.social · 06/12/2024

This almost took my breath away.

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Mark Wilson @marksonofwil.bsky.social · 06/12/2024

This is a brilliant and super helpful threat!

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