iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

I guess the same. My biggest disappointment was when such dynamics were reproduced by (senior) women, I worked in departments that were more women than men typically. At that point it stopped being about gender—whatever the origin—and 100% about hierarchy. Hideous workplaces (for the most part).

Smarmy politeness is such a good description of it!

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On the plus side, it made me dedicate my entire career in the academy to creating safe spaces and to model and practice feedback that is inclusive and reflexive, to work w/ a hermeneutics of faith, and practise with as much generosity as possible.

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melissa nolas @smnolas.bsky.social · 03/10/2025

Fascinating description. Yes, it was a game in my experience too: a blood sport. Some of us—who didn’t enjoy it—used to call it ‘who let the dogs out (who? who?)’ and I would bet good money that nobody in those PhD seminars or departmental seminars had a critical understanding of this ritual.

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What goes around comes around and everyone gets what they deserve. I’ll be raising a glass to Karma this evening. www.gold.ac.uk/news/2025/vc...

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melissa nolas @smnolas.bsky.social · 19/09/2025

Yes, absolutely. My email address is melissa dot nolas at proton dot me and website melissanolas.com thank you!

melissanolas.com

Melissa Nolas | Μέλισσα Νόλα

I can point / link all this to your website. Let me know! Thank you x

These are beautiful! I am writing a book on women’s experiences of fibroids and looking at representations of fibroids in art (amongst other places). May I add these to the collection? By collection I mean examples and use in ppt presentations and also I will be making a section on my website?

I’m sorry to hear this. I hope you’ve had treatment since posting. It’s such a miserable experience. I’m writing a book about it as there is so little info and stories out there. The medical characterisation as benign needs to change give the trouble fibroids can give!

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I can point / link all this to your website. Let me know! Thank you x

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Really excited—& a bit nervous—but mostly looking forward to meeting up w Verónica Policarpo & Jussara Rowland in person—finally—& thank them both for their really kind invite and interest in my work! Jussara & I will also be co-facilitating a workshop on the Friday which will be fun! 🤗🤗🤗

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How do you follow a #fibroid and other more-than-human actors? In two weeks from today I will be in Lisbon giving a keynote on my current research / writing project on #fibroids #womensreproductivehealth #multimodality

melissa nolas @smnolas.bsky.social · 15/09/2025

A little mid-monthly note about things I’ve been up to & things I’m planning to do as I venture forward as an independent multidisciplinary researcher, writer & photographer. Lots of things going on and I look forward to sharing more about in the coming months! open.substack.com/pub/melissan...

open.substack.com

Play #1

a mid-monthly note on happenings

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melissa nolas @smnolas.bsky.social · 14/09/2025

This is such an astute observation. I hadn’t put the two together. Certainly this resonates with my own experience.

melissa nolas @smnolas.bsky.social · 11/09/2025

100% shocking news and responses…

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melissa nolas @smnolas.bsky.social · 11/09/2025

All of this! 100% I love the dictionary and thesaurus as a repository of sedimented meanings! We use language in such an unconscious way—which can sometimes be violent—and I love getting lost in etymologies.

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Reposted by melissa nolas

Shannon Mattern @shannonmattern.bsky.social · 08/09/2025

"It suggests that developing a commons-based, scholar-led publishing landscape through [presses] managed by working academics cld offer a productive counterpoint to marketised systems of open access + subscription publishing [—] a counter-hegemonic project based on mutual reliance and care"

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Shannon Mattern @shannonmattern.bsky.social · 08/09/2025

"The academic career is framed as a privileged but high-risk venture that ppl knowingly choose to embark on so they must endure the consequences or find a way to cope, thus obscuring deliberate adoption of biz models that [deprioritize] investment in staff + render large sections of the workforce 🗑️"

tandfonline.com

‘You just have to learn to play the game’: survival, resentment and resignation in women academics’ narratives of precarity

This paper discusses precarious academic labour and its implications for gender and interrelated inequalities, drawing on narrative interviews with temporarily employed UK women academics. It ident...

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*that earlier one should have read ‘… research on gender and publication *during the pandemic* is only the tip of the iceberg here.’

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Reposted by melissa nolas

entanglementsjournal.wordpress.com

You are correct and I—with colleagues—did this: entanglementsjournal.wordpress.com the archive is here. It was a struggle to get indexed bc of our explicit political choice not to reproduce structures from existing systems that aren’t working as well as they should & can be damaging (peer review).

Past issues

experiments in multimodal ethnography

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Publish or perish is dangerous—we’ve always known this but inevitably upheld it as a regime in a million different ways—and in the end won’t save you. I now write more slowly and with a purpose I don’t think I had before.

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I am out of all this now—thanks to the wave of redundancies that are sweeping UKHE at the mo. From a writing perspective it is highly sobering. I started to be able to hear myself think again very quickly after ‘leaving’ (a funny euphemism for redundancy!)

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I do not regret our little publishing experiment in the least and would do it a million times over!

There is also such a lack of reflexivity around the affordances of who can publish in a way that satisfies that prestige economy—that will never be satisfied—research on gender and publication is only the tip of the iceberg here.

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I agree with the follow up post that this is a labour issue and I think as academics we have bought into the prestige economy of publishing hook, line & sinker, and once in it’s hard to untangle without consequences.

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commonplace.knowledgefutures.org

…— who are amazing and it’s been a total pleasure to see them make tracks here. There are others too such as Common Place and a number of other journals who took an indie route who you can find as co-authors here: commonplace.knowledgefutures.org/pub/y0xy565k...

Labour of Love: An Open Access Manifesto for Freedom, Integrity, and Creativity in the Humanities and Interpretive Social Sciences

With a number of recommendations toward the commonification of open access

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The experiment lasted 4 years bc it was entirely voluntary & a labour of love, & I,for one, burnt out. Our experiment was cutting edge appearing just before a movement towards more community led peer publishing and things like @openbookcollective.bsky.social took off…

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