iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Dr Sarah J Young

North American Dostoevsky Society @dostoevskysociety.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Dostoevsky in Athens! #CFP: The National Library of #Greece and #Northwestern University’s Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures invite papers on #Dostoevsky and #Modernity and Dostoevsky’s Modern Afterlives. 300-word abstracts are due Oct. 15. dostoevsky.org/society/cfp-...

dostoevsky.org

CfP: Dostoevsky and Modernity and Dostoevsky’s Modern Afterlives | International Dostoevsky Society | North American Dostoevsky Society

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Reposted by Dr Sarah J Young

Central Eurasian Studies Society (CESS) @cessnews.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

📣 Open Position 📣 Assistant Professor, Soviet and Post-Soviet Culture 📍 Yale University | New Haven, USA 📅 Application deadline: October 20, 2027 (23:59 EST) 👉️ For more details, see the job posting: buff.ly/MyIakuI #centraleurasia #eurasianstudies #sovietstudies #yaleuniversity #newhaven

Poster advertising job opening. Rounded beige text box with black border and black, serifed, boldface font centered over photo of New Haven skyline with Yale University buildings, green trees, and a blue sky. Kazakh pattern in beige, red, and green in header and footer of design

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Natalia Cecire @ncecire.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

👇

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Dr Sarah J Young @sarahjyoung.bsky.social · 30/09/2024

#OTD 30 September 1857 (18 September OS) Liudmila Aleksandrovna Volkenshtein was born in Kyiv. A member of the revolutionary organisation the People’s Will, she spent 13 years imprisoned in the notorious Shlisselburg Fortress for participating in terrorist activities shlisselburg.net/prisoners/vo...

Black and white photograph of a serious-looking young woman wearing a dark dress with a small white trim around the collar, and dark hair swept back from her face in a bun.

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Dr Sarah J Young @sarahjyoung.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

It’s my birthday and I got a really cool set of William Kentridge procession fridge magnets.

A photo of four black silhouetted figures against a white background. The outer two are people carrying large loads on their backs, inner left is a man (Kentridge himself) walking and reading a book, and inner right is Gogol’s Nose riding a horse.

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UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies @uclssees.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Join us for this @seeatucl-ssees.bsky.social seminar with @ivansimic.bsky.social to hear about his new book 'Sickle and Veil'. This book offers a comprehensive transnational history of communist gender policies towards Muslim minorities in Eastern Europe. 🗓️ 14 October at 6pm ➡️ buff.ly/MRttF3K

Event poster for 'Sickle and Veil: Communist Gender and Policies towards Muslim Minorities in Eastern Europe' with an image of the book cover. In person event.

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Reposted by Dr Sarah J Young

Phillips OBrien @phillipspobrien.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Russia has one enormous strategic advantage of which it is taking advantage. It can daily attack civilian targets--hospitals, universities, markets--knowing that while Ukraine can do the same, the Ukrainians are too humane to do so.

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UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies @uclssees.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

🎞️ Join us for the screening of 'Transformation' - a feature-length documentary that explores the inner metamorphosis of civilians who consciously chose to become soldiers in the context of Russia’s full-scale invasion of #Ukraine and the ongoing war. 🗓️ 5 October at 6pm www.ucl.ac.uk/arts-humanit...

ucl.ac.uk

Screening of Transformation (2026) with introduction by Dr Anke Hennig

A SSEES Cinema Research Group seminar with Dr Anke Hennig, Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts, London

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Chris⚖️Justice @chrisjustice01.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

💥 A Russian strike against the building of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine 9/28/26

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S.J. Pearce @homophonous.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

So many truths in this thread!

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Euan MacDonald @euanmacdonald.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

People in the international community, if they know about Oleshky at all, might wonder why fascist Russia indulges in such obvious evil against a seemingly random Ukrainian town under occupation by its army.

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Natasha Walter @natashawalter.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

It’s much much harder now to be an anti racist than it is to be a racist. That’s one of the things I learned from talking to Rachel Marsh, who has been doxxed and abused for standing up to the far right. www.thenerve.news/p/rachel-mar...

thenerve.news

‘I see what’s happening to Rachel; it scares me’: the woman who dared to face down Piddington’s anti-migrant storm

Natasha Walter talks to Rachel Marsh, the resident of the newly ‘independent’ Oxfordshire village whose anti-racist BBC interview led to abuse, doxxing and death threats

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Kevin Rothrock @kevinrothrock.me · 25/09/2026

Russian historian Yuri Dmitriev, known for documenting Stalinist repression and helping discover the Sandarmokh mass graves, has been hospitalized in prison with a suspected stroke, according to rights activists. He's 70 & serving a 15-year prison sentence on dubious CSAM charges. t.me/tvrain/111557

t.me

Дождь | Новости

70-летнего историка Юрия Дмитриева госпитализировали из колонии с подозрением на инсульт Об этом сообщает ЗПЧ. По их информации, Дмитриева экстренно этапировали из ИК-18 в Мордовии в лечебно-исправи...

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Reposted by Dr Sarah J Young

Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 26/09/2026

Does my Speak-n-Spell feel pain when I type O-U-C-H? The jury is out. Philosophers and neuroscientists say that's fucking stupid, but I called a guy from the Center for Pretending that Household Electronics Are Sentient and he said there's no way to know for sure.

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Ruth Deyermond @ruthdeyermond.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

This is a poor take that suggests Owen Jones doesn't know much about Russia in the 1990s, including Russia-US or wider Russia-West relations in the 1990s. By giving only one part of the story, he is repeating the Russian political elite's self-serving line that it was all the West's fault. Long 🧵

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Reposted by Dr Sarah J Young

Priyamvada Gopal @priyamvadagopal.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

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Reposted by Dr Sarah J Young

Samantha Asumadu @samanthaasumadu.substack.com · 23/09/2026

So I think maybe I just figured out why @timeshighered.bsky.social has not reported anything negative about James Orr. I could very well be wrong, but here we go: In 2024, THE signed an agreement with Hungary's Culture and Innovation Ministry which oversees Hungarian higher education..

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Dr Sarah J Young @sarahjyoung.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Realized I’m not posting anywhere near enough cat pictures.

Three ginger cats with white bibs and paws waiting impatiently for their tea. They’re sat on a red rug with a flowered pattern.

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The Kyiv Independent @kyivindependent.com · 23/09/2026

Prolific writer Vasyl Stus spent years in Soviet camps and exile for defending Ukrainian culture. Even behind bars, he refused to compromise, repeatedly defying authorities and exposing their brutality.

kyivindependent.com

How a dissident poet became Ukraine’s moral compass

Editor's Note: This story is part of the "Hidden Canon" – a special series celebrating Ukrainian classic literature and aiming to bring it to a wider international audience. The series is supported b...

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Reposted by Dr Sarah J Young

Margot Finn @eicathomefinn.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

'Security chiefs will set up a new national centre to tackle disinformation and deepfakes from hostile states such as Russia, Andy Burnham has announced, saying the government had a duty to “stem the poisonous tide” from damaging British interests.' While shrinking provision in Russian language?

theguardian.com

New UK agency will tackle ‘information warfare’ from likes of Russia, Burnham says

PM aims to ‘stem poisonous tide’ of disinformation and deepfakes with National Centre for Information Defence

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Lyndsey Stonebridge @lyndseystonebri.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

You're going to be needing specialists in: languages, narrative, history, psychology, information, mythology, conspiracies, etc, etc. then? #humanities #socialscience

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Reposted by Dr Sarah J Young

Samantha Asumadu @samanthaasumadu.substack.com · 22/09/2026

'New analysis on UK media: British media is not delivering the news to its readers. They are delivering an agenda. The seven days after Channel 4 filmed James Orr are a damning indictment of the British press. Orr is a Cambridge associate professor.' via @newscord.org

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Reposted by Dr Sarah J Young

North American Dostoevsky Society @dostoevskysociety.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Today on the blog! Hilde Hoogenboom and Editor @chloespumpkins.bsky.social discuss Noble Sentiments and the Rise of Russian Novels: A European Literary History (2025) - a 2026 recipient of the Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize by @aseees.bsky.social. Check it out: bloggerskaramazov.com/2026/09/21/a...

bloggerskaramazov.com

A Chat with Hilde Hoogenboom about Noble Sentiments and the Rise of Russian Novels

The North American Dostoevsky Society stands with all the people of Ukraine, Russia, and the rest of the world who condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine. See our statement here. Bloggers Kar…

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Reposted by Dr Sarah J Young

Min Hyoung Song @minsong.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Frankenstein really is the original tech bro. Breaks everything and flees from consequences, all while casting himself as some kind of Miltonic hero, all the while everyone goes on and on about how wonder he is despite all evidence to the contrary.

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Reposted by Dr Sarah J Young

Dave Andress @davidandress.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Well, there you are: official UK govt figures confirm it costs £3,000 a year more to teach the average undergraduate than they're willing to pay us. www.gov.uk/government/p... Now, they'll explain how that's our fault for greedily having almost no pay-rises for a decade...

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Dr Sarah J Young @sarahjyoung.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

The latest episode in an epidemic of the most extraordinary vandalism and self destruction in our universities, each one as shocking as the last.

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Emile Chabal @emile-chabal.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

The programme I run - the MSc in Contemporary History - will be axed, amongst so many others. We've also been told our undergrad courses will need to have a minimum of 20 students over a 3 year period. The bonfire of the universities has truly come for Edinburgh.

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James_AL_Downs @magiclantern.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

The extent of the programmes being cut at the University of Edinburgh (where I took part in an event with Raja Shehadeh a fortnight ago) is extraordinary (archive.is/tACqv) - Celtic & Scottish Lit (UG), Scottish Literature (UG) & BD Divinity (UG) among the 90, not to mention Arabic & Persian.

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Martin Paul Eve @eve.gd · 18/09/2026

I think that I hate this timeline.

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Steve Barnes @stevebarnes.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Teaching online sort of mandates it but this piece captures a lot of why I refuse to give up the essay, even knowing some will take the easy way around it. For those students who will take up the challenge of slow thinking, they deserve the opportunity.

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Margot Finn @eicathomefinn.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

RPN Playbook: 'Nottingham has “suspended entry” to most of its modern language degrees; the University of Leicester has confirmed the closure of its modern language departments; and the University of Aberdeen has phased out single honours language degrees, including, unbelievably, Gaelic.'

hepi.ac.uk

Language GCSEs in English schools: a postcode lottery? - HEPI

Reversing the “death spiral” in language learning: New report highlights severely unequal participation in language GCSEs. A new Policy Note from the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI), Language...

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Reposted by Dr Sarah J Young

Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 07/07/2026

> “Hallucination,” then, is not a bug awaiting a patch but a symptomatic expression of this structural condition. doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

Human communication involves not only internal
coherence but also reference to shared reality, and
communicated words, thus, carry extensions, relations to
the actual nature of things in the world, which calculated
words do not (Bunz, 2026). Two terms may share the
adjacent intension in a high-dimensional vector space while
differing radically in extension, a phenomenon impossible in
communicated language, but routine in calculation. The result
is writing that is relevant without being reliable; contextually
proximate, but not anchored to the things those words
ostensibly name. “Hallucination,” then, is not a bug awaiting
a patch but a symptomatic expression of this structural
condition. When users treat LLM outputs as communications
of “meaning” rather than calculations of form, they engage in
“human hallucination”, anthropomorphizing generated writing
by conceptualizing it in the image of human expression
(Bunz, 2026), producing a systematic over-attribution of
understanding to systems where none exists. Training critical
thinkers to recognize the mode of production underlying a
text, rather than reasoning solely from its surface fluency, thus
becomes a pedagogical obligation.
Of note, this argument does not claim that LLMs are
useless.‡

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UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies @uclssees.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Join us for this seminar with Prof. Stephen F. Jones, who will discuss his latest book 'The First Social Democracy: The Democratic Republic of Georgia, 1918–1921'. @harvardpress.bsky.social 🗓️ 19 October at 6pm 📍 UCL SSEES www.ucl.ac.uk/arts-humanit...

ucl.ac.uk

The First Social Democracy: A Conversation with Stephen Jones

A SSEES Rethinking Eastern Europe and Eurasia seminar with Stephen F. Jones

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Pete Fraser @petefrasermusic.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

In the movie version of this, after Piddington runs out of food water and money as a result of leaving the UK, the residents apply for asylum and end up housed in a military base, with HILARIOUS consequences. www.bbc.com/news/article...

bbc.com

Piddington in Oxfordshire votes to leave UK over asylum plans

Piddington residents voted over proposals to house up to 1,256 male asylum seekers nearby

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Josh Shepperd @joshshepperd.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

The professors and instructors who turn classrooms back into spaces for reading and discussion, are going to leave the biggest legacies in this world. Everyone one else will disappear into LLM wallpaper proxies and derivatives.

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Reposted by Dr Sarah J Young

Jo Wolff @jowolff.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

The fallacy that University leaders pushing AI are falling into is thinking that the point of undergraduate research is to find things out. It isn't. What students find out is typically already generally known. The point of undergraduate research is to learn how to find things out.

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Daniel C. Blight @danielcblight.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

***URGENT PLEASE SHARE*** University of Brighton management have announced today that they ‘give notice of termination of all collective agreements’. This is a fundamental erasure of workers' rights. Management have announced the termination of all contractual documents, which includes:

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John Levin @anterotesis.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Launched today: The Register of British Slave-Traders "presents biographical data related to each of the known investors in the transatlantic traffic in enslaved African people from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries." britishslavetraders.org/about-us/ #History #EnslavedHistory

britishslavetraders.org

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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 11/09/2026

Universities are subsidizing internal AI tools that are, from the perspective of the humanities, enabling cheating & cognitive outsourcing. The cost in resources is certainly an issue, but the fact that these tools undermine the work we ask students to do is ridiculous www.umass.edu/it/genai/pla...

umass.edu

GenAI Platform : UMass Amherst Information Technology : UMass Amherst

The UMass GenAI platform is an intuitive and user-friendly platform designed to provide the UMass community with equitable access to leading generative AI models, including OpenAI (ChatGPT), Anthropic...

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Liza Adamczewski aka the accidental ecologist @lizaadamczewski.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Let’s get a colourful thread going to bring a bit of happiness to our feeds by posting photos of the Welsh tapestry blankets we own. Just imagine if everyone who has one posted a photo! It would be like a rainbow blanket thread running around the world

A Welsh tapestry blanket in yellow white red and black

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Margot Finn @eicathomefinn.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

'Am I really reading a report on universities offering work experience that has managed to involve 30 universities, 200 employers and business groups, a poll of 500 employer senior leaders, but not a single student?' 'I am, I'm afraid.' UUK: universities, but without the faff of students & staff.

wonkhe.com

UUK's work experience target forgets that most students already have some

Am I really reading a report on universities offering work experience that has managed to involve 30 universities, 200 employers and business groups, a poll of 500 employer senior leaders, but not a s...

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Annalisa Nicholson @apuddleofmuddle.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

It's just weird isn't it when the British Museum is running a sold-out exhibition, when The Odyssey reports $1billion at the box office, when the V&A has just opened the most innovative and accessible museum model in Europe....and this is what our minister for research comes out with.

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Eilish Hart @eilishhart.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Must-read reporting about the more than ten thousand Ukrainian civilians who have disappeared into the Russian prison system. For the @newyorker.com, Joshua Yaffa tells the story of the women held in one cell in Russia's “new Gulag.” www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

newyorker.com

Inside Russia’s New Gulag

Human-rights groups estimate that more than ten thousand Ukrainian civilians have disappeared into the Russian prison system. This is the story of one cell in the new Gulag.

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Reposted by Dr Sarah J Young

Otto English @ottoenglish.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

The balaclava blackshirted thugs are a result of a decade of politicians, tabloids and the broadcast media telling racists they have "legitimate concerns." The normalisation of actual fascism rhetoric and action has led to this and is a far greater "legitimate concern" than any migrant on a boat.

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Dr Sarah J Young @sarahjyoung.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Including a special mention for my @uclssees.bsky.social student Alexander Feeney in the undergraduate essay contest for a brilliant essay on free will in Notes from Underground!

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Jonn Elledge @jonnelledge.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

I want the Prime Minister to look into a TV camera and say the RNLI are heroes, that we do not change policy by street violence in this country, and that he expects any criminal action to face the full force of the law. That's it. That's all he has to do.

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Steve Peers @stevepeers.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Note how the moral panic about blocking the roads disappears if it's the far right doing it

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Matthew Willis (Naval Air History) @navalairhistory.com · 06/09/2026

Contrast the police statements about the Dover blockade yesterday with the Just Stop Oil protests in 2022

No arrests made during Dover protest, Kent Police says
published at 13:34 5 September
13:34 5 September
Kent Police has issued a statement following the disruption in Dover earlier today.
It says officers "responded to a spontaneous protest" during Saturday morning, adding "no arrests were made".
"Traffic is flowing normally, and all involved had dispersed by midday," it adds

The Met Police said 35 people had been arrested in response to the disruption.
Assistant Commissioner Matt Twist said the action was "criminality", not protest, and pledged to bring those involved to justice as quickly as possible.
"This was a very significant and co-ordinated effort to cause massive disruption to the entirety of the M25," he added.

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