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Kate Spowage

@katespowage.bsky.social
441 followers 456 following 49 posts

Critical interdisciplinary sociolinguist working on the politics of language, capitalism, and colonialism. Shamelessly plugging Language as Statecraft, which thinks about all those things. Lecturer at the University of Leeds. Own views, reposts ≠ agreement

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Reposted by Kate Spowage
Caroline Dodds Pennock @carolinepennock.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
In news that will surprise absolutely no one in HE... ‘It notes that institutions “routinely” hire consultancies for these restructures as well as change management specialists, however, these processes often introduce additional management layers, “adding cost rather than removing it”…’
timeshighereducation.com
Restructuring ‘too often adding cost rather than removing it’
Universities are ‘underestimating’ the challenges caused by outsourcing services amid major professional services staff redundancies, report warns
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alexismoraitis.bsky.social @alexismoraitis.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
An article I really enjoyed writing is now out with Capital&Class
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Jonathan Birch @birchlse.bsky.social · 07/08/2026
Whenever scandal engulfs a humanities prof, some say "why are my taxes funding this?" - but rest assured, they really aren't. The national AHRC research budget is around £80m, about £1.10 per person per year. As a taxpayer you contribute far more to the royal family than to the arts and humanities.
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Kate Spowage @katespowage.bsky.social · 22/07/2026
Delighted to say that my mum found this readable, which is a serious endorsement. It was great to do the first of the new interview series for @r-williams-soc.bsky.social, and I hope that it includes useful stuff for others who want to think about capitalism and culture as intertwined ✊
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Jim Mussell @jimmussell.bsky.social · 17/07/2026
We’re looking to appoint two lecturers in School of English @universityofleeds.bsky.social: 1) Lecturer in Creative Writing: jobs.leeds.ac.uk/AHCEN1086 2) Lecturer in English Language (with expertise in DH): jobs.leeds.ac.uk/AHCEN1087 Happy to provide more info if you're interested
eur03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com
Job Opportunity at University of Leeds: Lectureship in Creative Writing
Ranked 29th in the world (QS 2026), the School of English at the University of Leeds operates at the leading edge of recent developments in literary studies and creative practice. Located within the F...
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Kate Spowage @katespowage.bsky.social · 17/07/2026
🚨 Job Klaxon🚨 at UofLeeds we are advertising for a permanent lecturer in English Language! Interesting people please join us! Please share 🙏🏽 Link aqui: jobs.leeds.ac.uk/Vacancy.aspx... #linguistics #sociolinguistics #appliedlinguistics #digitalhumanities #academicjobs #discourseanalysis
jobs.leeds.ac.uk
Job Opportunity at University of Leeds: Lectureship in English Language
Ranked 29th in the world (QS 2026) English Language at the University of Leeds has a strong reputation for the quality of both its research and its teaching. Based in the School of English, the Englis...
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Kate Spowage @katespowage.bsky.social · 10/07/2026
Excited to share this interview I recently did for the Raymond Williams Society: "We shouldn't comfort ourselves that our work is outside of social struggles". I'm not really quoting myself, it's the title. First in a new series for the @r-williams-soc.bsky.social! 💬💬💬
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Helen @helenm40.bsky.social · 18/06/2026
Fighting Conservative Thoughts ft Gollum
youtube.com
Fighting Conservative Thoughts ft Gollum
Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.
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Adam Selzer @adamchicago.bsky.social · 22/05/2026
In 1872, the Chicago Evening Post published an absolutely brutal editorial mocking people who objected to sharing public spaces with Black people. Still some dated language but a remarkable piece. “Hire a carriage and you can sit all alone by your own sweet self for $2 an hour.”
1872 article reading, in part: “AYou do not like, reader, to sit by the side of a well-behaved negro in a theatre's dress circle? Very well; take a box. If your antipathies are not worth $5 extra, they are not very important.
You do not like, fastidious madam, to sit by the side of "some offensive creature" in the car? Very well; hire a carriage, and you can sit all alone with your own sweet self for $2 an hour. But you cannot expect to charter and monopolize a Persian heaven on wheels for five cents, you know. You object, dear sir, to risk the chance of meeting… Fred. Douglass, Alexander Dumas, Minister Bassett, John Jones, or Jared Grey? Very well; you have an inalienable and God-given right to object. You can avoid these people by having your meals served in your room. Isn't your pet aversion worth a dollar to you? ... To insult people because of their color is bad enough; but it is mean and cowardly to make them pay the expenses of their own crucifixion. “.  Likely by George Mclellan or his brother.
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Kate Spowage @katespowage.bsky.social · 01/05/2026
Language, labour, and workers, my triad of obsession 🛠️ 👇🏽
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Claes de Vreese @claesdevreese.bsky.social · 01/05/2026
May 1 🌹 Whatever rights you have, they did not come automatically. Someone fought for them. Join a union. Contribute. Benefit.
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Open Library of Humanities @openlibhums.org · 01/05/2026
The Open Library of Humanities Open Access Award 2026. Applications for OLH funding of up to £500 are welcomed from individuals or organisations and may be used to help fund events, projects or activities on OA or with an open access component. Deadline 30/06:
openlibhums.org
The OLH Open Access Award 2026: call for applications
The Open Library of Humanities (OLH) is proud to continue its work towards its open access mission across the globe with the OLH Open Access Award 2026, a fund dedicated …
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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez @aoc.bsky.social · 22/04/2026
You ever try to code switch at work and fail? 😂
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Aaron Reichlin-Melnick @reichlinmelnick.bsky.social · 15/04/2026
This is horrific. A U.S. citizen describes the facility in Arizona that her husband was brought to while he waited to be put on a deportation flight. Dozens of people were crammed into tiny cells, there was a "chain of people vomiting" from filthy toilets, no medical care, and only one meal per day.
Barrera said her husband said the smell of human feces in the toilet caused a fellow detainee to vomit and, in turn, created a chain of people vomiting.
She said her husband is asthmatic and has not received medication to treat his condition. The lack of medicine and the stress of the overcrowded holding cell has left him short of breath and teetering on the edge of an asthma attack, Barrera said.
ICE did not immediately respond to questions on April 10 about the conditions of the Mesa or Phoenix facilities.
After the publication of this article, Barrera told The Arizona Republic her husband was transferred to the ICE facility at San Luis Regional Detention Center at about midnight. The San Luis Regional Detention Center is in Southwestern Arizona and has the capacity to hold 700 people.
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unraveled @unraveledpress.com · 15/04/2026
Many, many brave people are fighting to stop this, and also—our collective failure to stop it from getting this far will haunt us for the rest of our lives.
azcentral.com
Smell of feces, vomit fills crowded ICE facility, detainee's wife says
Conditions at the ICE facility in central Phoenix mirror the conditions at a Mesa facility, where people were being treated worse than "animals," lawmakers said.
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Kate Spowage @katespowage.bsky.social · 14/04/2026
It's 2033 and the apocalypse is here. An advert in the ruins of a fashion boutique sparks a conversation, and a longing for the abundance of capitalism. The past seemed to be an era of food, fashion, coffee, and - of course - the lesbian paperback. The message is clear: 𝘤𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘵 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘣𝘭𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘯𝘨𝘴.🧵👾
Image of Laron's fashion boutique, The Last of Us. Image shows Joel and Ellie looking at an advert for a fall collection, featuring a slim model.
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Money on the Left @moneyontheleft.bsky.social · 17/03/2026
Zack Polanski’s Bold Politics Requires an Even Bolder Economic Vision
moneyontheleft.org
Zack Polanski’s Bold Politics Requires an Even Bolder Economic Vision: The Case for Democratic Public Finance
by Rob Hawkes The Green Party of England and Wales is attracting new members in unprecedented numbers and achieving polling percentages that would have seemed impossible a year ago. However, tensio…
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lastpositivist.bsky.social @lastpositivist.bsky.social · 20/02/2026
Individually one cannot, but it is striking (in a way that really advocates the old Marxist in me) that socially we can only really see a technology that saves a bunch of labour without generating replacement level jobs as a disaster. This is because we are *so* sure the profit will be privatised.
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Kate Spowage @katespowage.bsky.social · 20/02/2026
Very interesting analysis - at least partially the result of obsessive austerity policymaking since 2008, and the straightjacket provided by the political economic discourse on debt and investment.
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James Brandt @jamesbrandt.bsky.social · 17/02/2026
I don’t think most people realize just how little the United States has traditionally spent on public media.
A chart showing public media spending as a proportion of
gross domestic product (GDP) in 27 countries. The US is third from last.
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Zack Polanski @zackpolanski.bsky.social · 13/02/2026
A court has ruled that the government's authoritarian ban on Palestine Action was unlawful. Time to stop criminalising the people protesting a genocide - and start ending the UK's complicity.
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Kate Spowage @katespowage.bsky.social · 28/01/2026
The first article in our collection 'Gaming & the Humanities: Interdisciplinary Essays on the Last of Us' is out! Bob Yeates deftly critiques the biopolitics of race in #TLOU. It will be followed by work on objects, muscles, infrastructure, linguistic landscapes, and more! 🧟‍♀️ Congrats Bob👏🏼
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Robert Yeates @bobyeates.bsky.social · 13/01/2026
Very happy to say my article on The Last of Us and race has been published by @openlibhums.org, part of their special collection on Gaming and Humanities edited by @katespowage.bsky.social and Adrienne Mortimer: doi.org/10.16995/olh...
doi.org
Racialized Contagion and Defensive Biopolitics in <em>The Last of Us</em>
In the opening moments of the video game The Last of Us Part I, players are introduced to an emerging pandemic via Austin’s Texas Herald newspaper. Below a headline warning of mass hospitalizations fr...
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Helen @helenm40.bsky.social · 07/01/2026
Dear Labour: Not all women are transphobic. I'm not sure why your party has such difficulty with this very basic concept.
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Acyn @acyn.bsky.social · 16/12/2025
AOC: I want to remind you where the real crime is. It's in the oligarchs taking $170 billion of our money from health care and food assistance and public programs and taking that and funneling it into a secret police program.
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AFL-CIO @aflcio.org · 15/12/2025
Starbucks’ CEO makes 6,666x what the average @sbworkersunited.org barista does. It’s unconscionable. As baristas at corporate stores fight for a fair contract and against Starbucks’ union-busting and greed, they have the solidarity of all 15 million members of America’s unions.
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Nebullama @nebullama.bsky.social · 19/11/2025
Write like no one will read it. Edit like everyone will quote it. You'll be unstoppable! 🚀 #WritingCommunity #AmWriting #AmEditing #BookSky #WriteSky
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George Monbiot @georgemonbiot.bsky.social · 10/11/2025
Once every 20 years or so, the director-general of the BBC is forced to resign for being insufficiently rightwing. Alastair Milne in 1987. Greg Dyke in 2004. Tim Davie in 2025. The great irony is that the BBC was in all cases profoundly biased towards established power. But just not biased enough …
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George Monbiot @georgemonbiot.bsky.social · 07/11/2025
11. Regaining the freedom we’ve lost is much harder and less likely than defending the freedom we already possess. We must do all we can to stop governments with autocratic tendencies from winning elections and reasserting the old order. Lose it once, and it might be gone forever.
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Lynda Lopez @lyndab08.bsky.social · 07/11/2025
A family friend was telling us about what her husband shared about his experience in Broadview before he was deported back to Mexico. She's been sharing to friends and family because she's just in disbelief & horror what her husband told her. She wasn't able to talk to him until he was in Mexico.
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Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · 31/10/2025
"An organized urban wing of the [Underground] railroad called vigilance committees focused on protecting, supporting, and learning from fugitives." Jesse Olsavsky for @hammerandhope.bsky.social's latest, just released issue hammerandhope.org/article/unde...
hammerandhope.org
The Black People Who Fled Slavery Had a Lot to Teach Their Northern Allies
Black-led vigilance committees not only protected and aided fugitives but also learned from the formerly enslaved as they built a movement pedagogy together.
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Tim Christiaens @timchristiaens.bsky.social · 31/10/2025
The university is not a skills machine and neither should politicians think of themselves of oiling the gears of economic performance. Politics is not just about adapting populations to fit labour market demands.
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Zack Polanski @zackpolanski.bsky.social · 14/10/2025
The Spectator (owned by GBNews owner Paul Marshall - estimated wealth of £800 million) doesn’t like taxing wealth fairly. I wonder how they got to this editorial decision? Let’s tax wealth fairly, fund front line services & make hope normal again. join.greenparty.org.uk
Polanski is talking nonsense about wealth taxes.
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George Monbiot @georgemonbiot.bsky.social · 14/10/2025
To be effective, protest must be noisy, obstructive, annoying. No longer is this allowed. Now the last attribute of effective dissent – persistence – is also to be banned. But the moment protest ceases to be effective is the moment democracy dies. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
theguardian.com
Here’s what you need to know about Starmer’s illiberal protest curbs: they would have killed the Labour party at birth | George Monbiot
The rights we enjoy in the UK, and the movement the PM purports to lead, were built on protest. Those rights are in dire peril, says Guardian columnist George Monbiot
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George Gantsoudes @pedsortho.bsky.social · 13/10/2025
Please remember that the disgust people have over Christopher Columbus is not based on some modern, 21st century “woke” ideology, but rather on contemporaneous accounts of atrocities that make many modern genocides appear quaint in comparison. Below, are the accounts of Bartlomé de las Casas.
But too many of the slaves died in captivity. And so Columbus, desperate to pay back dividends to those who had in-vested, had to make good his promise to fill the ships with gold. In the province of Cicao on Haiti, where he and his men imagined huge gold fields to exist, they ordered all persons fourteen years or older to collect a certain quantity of gold every three months. When they brought it, they were given copper tokens to hang around their necks. Indians found without a copper token had their hands cut off and bled to death.
The Indians had been given an impossible task. The only gold around was bits of dust garnered from the streams. So they fled, were hunted down with dogs, and were killed.After each six or eight months' work in the mines, which was the time required of each crew to dig enough gold for melting, up to a third of the men died.
While the men were sent many miles away to the mines, the wives remained to work the soil, forced into the excruciating job of digging and making thousands of hills for cassava plants.
Thus husbands and wives were together only once every eight or ten months and when they met they were so exhausted and depressed on both sides... they ceased to pro-create. As for the newly born, they died early because their mothers, overworked and fam-ished, had no milk to nurse them, and for this reason, while I was in Cuba, 7000 children died in three months. Some mothers even drowned their babies from sheer desper-ation.... In this way, husbands died in the mines, wives died at work, and children died from lack of milk ... and in a short time this land which was so great, so powerful and fer-tile... was depopulated... My eyes have seen these acts so foreign to human nature, and now I tremble as I write....
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George Monbiot @georgemonbiot.bsky.social · 09/10/2025
Astonishing advance by the Greens, astonishing implosion of Labour. When will Starmer's government get the message that it is destroying its base with deeply unpopular, rightwing policies? By chasing Reform, it legitimises the far right while delegitimising itself.
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Kate Spowage @katespowage.bsky.social · 10/10/2025
100%! And the hype can't be separated from the insane speculation on it (if I had zeroes riding on the success of AI I might tell people it was the future, regardless of its shortcomings).
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Mike Sowden @mikeachim.bsky.social · 06/10/2025
Damn. This is amazing. £325 per week, paid monthly, for 3 years - and the result was a profit for the Irish economy: www.citizensinformation.ie/en/employmen...
Post from Threads user rodneyowl: "Ireland has declared the Basic Income for Artists scheme permanent. This will be officially announced in tomorrow’s budget. Details to follow. Congratulations to all who fought for it and the present and future artists of all sorts in Ireland. That includes me 👌We’re just comin to the end of a 3 year pilot scheme. It’s been a roaring success. For every €1 paid out to the 2000 participants, the government got €1.46 back. Can’t argue with that. Other countries are already taking note."
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Signal @signal.org · 03/10/2025
We are alarmed by reports that Germany is on the verge of a catastrophic about-face, reversing its longstanding and principled opposition to the EU’s Chat Control proposal which, if passed, could spell the end of the right to privacy in Europe. signal.org/blog/pdfs/ge...
signal.org
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Kate Spowage @katespowage.bsky.social · 26/09/2025
The explosiveness of the attack, also, is noteworthy. There's no warning given here - it's drawn less from the repertoire of professional policing and more from the fear-inducing tactics of unstable, abusive people in interpersonal relationships. 'Snapping' is all about keeping people on edge.
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George Monbiot @georgemonbiot.bsky.social · 26/09/2025
1. I've long contended that austerity doesn't save money. It merely transfers costs from one group (the very rich, who would otherwise pay more tax) to others. Last night was a powerful reminder of that. Before I go further, I should say I’m fine. Just a black eye, cuts & bruises, no serious harm. 🧵
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Julia Carrie Wong @joolia.bsky.social · 20/09/2025
this exists it is called thinking
Matthew McConaughey says he wants a private LLM, fed only with his books, notes, journals, and aspirations, so he can ask it questions and get answers based solely on that information, without any outside influence.
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Kate Spowage @katespowage.bsky.social · 19/09/2025
Working at the BNF in Paris, and came across this fabulous cartoon from L'Élongé (May 1968). Will show students on my new Language Policy & Politics module - De Gaulle, in a hospital bed, is schooled on French grammar by a nurse. A satire on conservativism and verbal hygiene perhaps? 🤔
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Zack Polanski @zackpolanski.bsky.social · 08/09/2025
People are exhausted. Our high streets, public spaces, whole communities left unloved. Blaming migrants won’t fix this. Tackling inequality will. Tax the super-rich. Fund public services. #DrawTheLine www.theguardian.com/politics/202...
theguardian.com
‘We have to tell an alternative story’: Green leader Polanski chats to Nigel Farage’s constituents
Visit to Clacton-on-Sea part of social media strategy that Zack Polanski feels can rebut Reform’s rhetoric
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Leonardo Carella @leonardocarella.bsky.social · 28/08/2025
Bingo. Westminster majoritarianism makes democratic backsliding not only easier to carry out but also harder to warn against, as I argued here. bsky.app/profile/leon...
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Kate Spowage @katespowage.bsky.social · 29/08/2025
Worrying in lots of ways, including the suggestion that the talking points of political bodies should set the agenda for funding bodies. Growth and prosperity are falsely equated - growth can also impoverish people. Prosperity is about redistribution - not a word British governments are keen on.
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Kai Heron @kaiheron.bsky.social · 28/08/2025
"These fires are neither isolated nor "natural" phenomena. They are expressions of a system in combustion, accelerated by climate change induced by our socioeconomic order and aggravated by land-use policies subordinated to accumulation, profit and growth." www.aljazeera.com/opinions/202...
aljazeera.com
Mediterranean wildfires are no accident
This summer’s infernos expose how climate change, land neglect and disaster capitalism turn forests into fuel.
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Florian Foos @florianfoos.bsky.social · 26/08/2025
Looks like we are now live-broadcasting Reform events on mass deportation plans on major TV channels including the BBC. We've just published a study showing that this type of coverage moves public opinion in an extreme direction & normalises those ideas further: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
cambridge.org
Media Platforming and the Normalisation of Extreme Right Views | British Journal of Political Science | Cambridge Core
Media Platforming and the Normalisation of Extreme Right Views - Volume 55
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