iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Sumi Madhok @sumimadhok.bsky.social · 9h

The brilliant Rafeef Ziadah is giving the BRISMES annual lecture! Date: 12 Nov.

Reposted by Sumi Madhok

Emile Chabal @emile-chabal.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Thanks Lucy! I will never tire of the wonderfulness of my students, past and present. And it's not just in the classroom: many students of mine have appeared in book acknowledgements, too; they shape our research in myriad ways. A reminder that *we* are the university, not the bean-counters!

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Sumi Madhok @sumimadhok.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

“The authoritarian turn, which can be understood as a process of fascisation, is enabled by crises internal to liberal democracies…” Everyday shows that a ‘fascist majority’ is a real possibility in the UK, too.

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Sumi Madhok @sumimadhok.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Yes. There’s a certain bizarre breathlessness and a palpable thrill even, in the media reportage on the far right. Frightening, really.

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Sumi Madhok @sumimadhok.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Everyday household names. “King James II… whose statue celebrating him as a “defender of the faith” stands in Trafalgar Square, London; the composer George Frideric Handel; and the philosopher John Locke, both shareholders in the Royal African Company (RAC).” www.theguardian.com/uk-news/ng-i...

theguardian.com

Monarchs, MPs and merchants: the register laying bare Britain’s slave-trading past

Exclusive: New research identifies thousands who profited from trafficking enslaved Africans and traces some financial links to institutions still operating today

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Reposted by Sumi Madhok

Hetan Shah @hetanshah.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

‘At a time when many policymakers are concerned about strengthening public control, humanities and social sciences research is central to ask questions about how and in whose interests technology is being developed, how it can be adopted, deployed and governed’ ukri.substack.com/p/why-ai-wil...

ukri.substack.com

Why AI will fail without the humanities and social sciences

AI can transform society. But only if society has a say in shaping it, writes Hetan Shah, Chief Executive of The British Academy.

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Sumi Madhok @sumimadhok.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

We’re witnessing colonialism in action in real time. That’s all.

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Sumi Madhok @sumimadhok.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

A beautiful piece on knowledge, understanding and mathematical research as “ free creative art”—‘one of the rare remaining examples of unalienated labor’.

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Sumi Madhok @sumimadhok.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

“We saw our grandparents hold on to the keys of return…” “We need to prove we have the right to this land, because things could change drastically. There is fear of forced deportation, the expulsion of people from their homes and the permanent seizure of the eastern areas.”

ft.com

The battle to prove who owns Gaza’s ruins

Under the Palestinian enclave’s rubble are papers showing to whom the land belongs

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Reposted by Sumi Madhok

Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

“Reading is, for me, the most sacred relationship to a text. It is a sustained prayer to be *haunted* by a text: let it take me over, in an unanticipatable way.” Introduced movingly by Ranji Khanna, Gayatri Spivak on Jameson, the burden of reading, & “humanities as a weapon” 💙😭🙏

youtu.be

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: “Reading Jameson” | Fredric Jameson and the Future of Critical Theory

YouTube video by Holberg Prize

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Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

Plenty to reflect about re: the Arday affair, but I'm going to repeat this one thing. The playbook the right used here is effective even though it's not especially sophisticated, as it relies on the audience to do the dirty work. I've been calling it "Trojan horse propaganda", let's go with that. 1/

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Sumi Madhok @sumimadhok.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

Oh yes! In my case, it’s also a growing mountain of piled up LRBs. @lrb.co.uk

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Ben Ansell @benansell.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

Glad someone senior from the sector is pushing back. Labour MPs need to understand the serious real anger from graduates and the people who produce them. And the dangerous financial situation they have allowed to fester, or indeed worsened, in one of Britain’s leading sectors.

ft.com

Labour has harmed universities as much as Trump, London School of Economics head says

LSE vice-chancellor Larry Kramer points to domestic student fees freeze, international student limits and rise in employers’ national insurance

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Laleh Khalili @lalehkhalili.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

I had the pleasure of reviewing Nadine Attwell's wonderful Archives of Intimacy: Racial Mixing and Chinese Lives in the Colonial Port City, 1905–1949 (www.sup.org/books/histor...) and also writing about women seafarers. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

lrb.co.uk

Laleh Khalili · Canton Kitty: Seafaring

Seafaring is a bundle of contradictions. It is highly skilled labour, yet mostly invisible. Lower ratings of seafarers...

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Charlotte Weatherill @ckweatherill.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

The point isn't to produce essays, it's to teach students how to think for fuck's sake. The minute you automate that, it's over. You might as well close the course. Which they're also doing. This is an attack on learning, and everyone is just shrugging.

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Sumi Madhok @sumimadhok.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

Arundhati Roy: “Just when hope seemed lost, they came. Young roaches riding in on the rain. The progeny of the unholy union between a judge and a joke.” m.thewire.in/article/righ...

m.thewire.in

Cockroach Democracy: Unarmed and Dangerous - The Wire

Can all the people be fooled all the time? Can a country with a population of a billion-and-a-half be dragged around like a corpse forever? It cannot. The Cockroaches are out and about.

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Sumi Madhok @sumimadhok.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

Louis Althusser murdered his wife and “it took over 40 years for this murder to be recognised as a femicide, and only thanks to the work of feminists, researchers and activists who kept the story alive”.

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Sumi Madhok @sumimadhok.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

It’s taken a quarter of a century to arrive here and will probably take a few more years for criminal charges, warrants…justice.

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Sumi Madhok @sumimadhok.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

Theory 101: “gender is a framework that’s been developed through the social sciences. A framework is not subjective. A framework is a way of framing knowledge and a mode of inquiry”. www.currentaffairs.org/news/judith-butler-explains-the-gender-panic

currentaffairs.org

Judith Butler Explains the Gender Panic

The leading scholar and philosopher responds to critics of “gender ideology,” both from the right and left.

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Reposted by Sumi Madhok

Adil Haque @adhaque.bsky.social · 19/07/2026

Artists in the Shati refugee camp in Gaza City paint a mural of Lamine Yamal (Omar Al-Qattaa / AFP via Getty Images)

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Sumi Madhok @sumimadhok.bsky.social · 19/07/2026

Zohran Mamdani is beauteous on solidarity as a ‘strategy’ for universal justice without exceptions. “But justice is not measured by where we stand after history has issued its verdict. It is measured by where we stand when the verdict is still being rendered”. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

theguardian.com

Nelson Mandela held a mirror to humanity – and showed us what solidarity means | Zohran Mamdani

In a speech given on Wednesday in honor of Nelson Mandela Day, New York’s mayor reflects on what Madiba can teach us in a fractured era

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Reposted by Sumi Madhok

Plashing Vole @plashingvole.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

Congratulations to the government on saving 2700 jobs by nationalising British Steel. Now, about the 18,000 university jobs lost in the last 18 months, with more coming…

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Sumi Madhok @sumimadhok.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

Of course, I like to be cited but for the things I’ve actually written! In the last few months I’m noting hallucinatory citations attributed to me, which I’ve no memory of ever having written. Can I say, the article titles are pretty unimaginative and quite rubbish, too. Oh well…

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Sumi Madhok @sumimadhok.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

Environmental nightmare for real. electricity, land and water. “By 2030, AI data centres could be using enough water to meet the basic needs of all 1.3bn sub-Saharan Africans”. Transparency and ethics…anyone?

giftarticle.ft.com

The great AI data centre cover-up

Tech companies need to come clean about the mounting environmental fallout of their race to build more hubs

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Reposted by Sumi Madhok

Professa Murray @kalimurray.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

The greatest singer of Cabo Verde was Cesoria Evora, and it is because she mixed with melancholy with joy. Sodade: youtu.be/ERYY8GJ-i0I?....

youtu.be

CESARIA EVORA Sodade .wmv

YouTube video by SuperXavier30

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Sumi Madhok @sumimadhok.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

OK I’ll say this: Theorists of all stripes from ‘most of the world’— political, feminist, social and cultural—have always theorised from the empirical realities of not only their own but also of ‘other’ worlds. They do because Eurocentred theories and concepts don’t ‘theorise’ ‘other’ worlds.

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Laleh Khalili @lalehkhalili.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

These are the numbers being cut from Humanities and Social Sciences at Exeter:

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Sumi Madhok @sumimadhok.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

This looks terrific. It’s now on my ‘to read and teach’ list. Congratulations, @galarexer.bsky.social

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Sumi Madhok @sumimadhok.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

Not so much surprised, I have to say.

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Sumi Madhok @sumimadhok.bsky.social · 26/06/2026

Yes. “We must stand firmly by our commitments under the 1951 refugee convention and the ECHR…”. No “performative cruelty”. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...

theguardian.com

Remove home secretary Mahmood and rip up her asylum plans, says Alf Dubs

Exclusive: Labour peer who fled Nazis as a child says Andy Burnham has chance to ‘correct mistakes’ on refugees

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Reposted by Sumi Madhok

Laleh Khalili @lalehkhalili.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

Friends of Exeter, former students and alumni, can you please sign the petition below: www.change.org/p/stop-redun...

change.org

Sign the Petition

Stop Redundancies at the University of Exeter

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Reposted by Sumi Madhok

Alan Lester @alanlester.bsky.social · 23/06/2026

With hardly any media coverage one of Britain’s few world-leading sectors is, right now, being decimated. The university funding model does not work and anti-immigrant hysteria has deprived the country of the means by which we met the shortfall: international students.

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Sumi Madhok @sumimadhok.bsky.social · 20/06/2026

World Refugee Day. The sublime Mahmoud Darwish ‘Think of Others’.

As you prepare your breaktast, think of others (do not forget the pigeon's food).
As you conduct your wars, think of others (do not forget those who seek peace).
As you pay your water bill, think of others (those who are nursed by clouds).
As you return home, to your home, think of others (do not forget the people of the camps).
As you sleep and count the stars, think of others (those who have nowhere to sleep).
As you liberate yourself in metaphor, think of others
(those who have lost the right to speak).
As you think of others far away, think of yourself (say: "If only / were a candle in the dark").

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Reposted by Sumi Madhok

Rosemary Joyce @rajoyce.bsky.social · 13/06/2026

Anthropological research on subsistence is offered in the dangerous and authoritarian “report” on the humanities as a key example of supposed ideological weakening of scholarship. This critique begins to show how the key example cited actually proves the opposite. Let’s go into it in some depth 1/

insidehighered.com

Academic Authoritarianism in New Attack on Humanities Scholars

There is virtually no evidence offered in the report for its sweeping conclusions about the entirety of the humanities.

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Sumi Madhok @sumimadhok.bsky.social · 12/06/2026

Maybe I’m in the minority, but it’s unfathomable to me and even somewhat shocking if I am absolutely honest, that academics are using AI to write their research manuscripts. A scholar’s work is attributable to someone. AI implies that there is no one behind the writing. It’s quite something, this.

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Tanja Bueltmann @tanjabueltmann.net · 10/06/2026

There are, in my view, 25 things everyone needs to understand in light of recent events: 1) Those out in our communities last night were not protestors, but organised far right extremists. 2) Their actions align with fascist ideologies. 3) So yes: these are fascist practices on our streets. 🧵

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Caleb Ward @calebw.bsky.social · 07/06/2026

Thinking of Helen De Cruz suddenly today, and their guiding words for doing philosophy: "We should write philosophy with a sense of urgency, a sense of survival, a sense of horror and wonder at the world." ❤️‍🩹

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Sumi Madhok @sumimadhok.bsky.social · 08/06/2026

Hmm…Let’s start with the ‘stop and search’ figures, shall we? From the government’s latest figures: “…there were 24.5 stop and searches for every 1,000 black people, and 5.9 for every 1,000 white people…”.

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Sumi Madhok @sumimadhok.bsky.social · 06/06/2026

The Africa exception in global reparations: “The west has repeatedly demonstrated its willingness to pay reparations for the loss of what it once considered its African property – but never for the loss of the African person”. www.theguardian.com/news/2026/ju...

theguardian.com

The Africa exception: the slavery reparations debate was once ‘unthinkable’. Now it is unavoidable

The architect of the African Union’s reparations framework for the historic UN resolution explains why demands for historical justice are inseparable from the struggle for Black sovereignty

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Jessica Whyte @jessicawhyte.bsky.social · 05/06/2026

New report based on interviews with those sanctioned for their work with the ICC—including individuals in The Hague who now can’t book flights or hotels, and a Palestinian human rights organisation whose website and social media accounts were shut down. coalitionfortheicc.org/news/cicc-la...

coalitionfortheicc.org

Coalition for the ICC launches groundbreaking report on US sanctions: "Criminalising Accountability: The US lawfare against the international justice system" | Coalition for the International Criminal...

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