Arianne Shahvisi 🇵🇸
@ArianneShahvisi
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Philosopher of gender, race, borders | Views rarely coincide with those of my bosses | Author of Arguing for a Better World
Brighton, UK.
Joined May 2020
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I have been putting off doing this, but can't any longer ... my book is out in the UK this week! It uses bits of philosophy to argue against racism, sexism, & capitalism. Ask your library to buy a copy and gift it to your racist relatives.
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If you've ever shied away from offering solidarity to Palestinians because you don't feel sufficiently informed, this website, run by Palestinians in the West Bank, offers an accessible but rigorous history
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I hope the folks who've been cashing in on the word "decolonising" in the title of every article and event over the last year have their eyes on East Jerusalem right now. Israeli forces are throwing Palestinians out of their homes and beating the protestors who try to stop it.
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I'm so embarrassed for bioethics. Other disciplines are off doing interesting and important work, and here we've got six white people who think they're iconoclasts putting out a boring, lousy paper that no-one asked for.
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I wrote a very personal piece for the
@gdnlongread
on the joys of my childhood holidays to Iran. It's about race, migration, and family, and the heartache of growing up between two irreconcilable worlds
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Can you imagine Diane Abbott being given half an hour on tv to explain herself? No, you can't, because the assumption is that white boys are just misunderstood.
#sackCummings
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Crikey, the things I beat myself up over. Lord give me the confidence of a mediocre white man with 40,000 deaths on his hands.
#borisvoteofnoconfidence
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Nervously excited to announce that I'm writing a book on the philosophy of social justice for
@PenguinBooks
, which will be out in 2022!
This would not be happening were it not for the advice and generosity of
@IBJIYONGI
, the wisdom of
@jkpapin
, and the support of
@Ethixbird
.
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@NadineElEnany
@BBCRadio4
That's so vile. I was on the Moral Maze last year (talking about free speech in academia). They literally laughed at my contribution in the summary at the end, on air. If they said this about your brilliant contribution, I shudder to think what they said about me.
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Totally behind everything
@AyoCaesar
says here. Also, "scum" describes nasty stuff that inevitably rises to the top and spoils things unless removed. It is the perfect word for the morally egregious actions of elites.
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@PriyamvadaGopal
When she complained about the alienation she felt at Cambridge, my sister (working class person of colour) was told by one of her supervisors that she had a classic case of "state school syndrome." They literally pathologised it.
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"To the white world, nothing can exist until they discover it, so they insisted on an ongoing debate about first principles." Another fantastic essay from
@indica
which chimes with
@IBJIYONGI
's "white empiricism"
Fighting COVID Isn’t A Mystery, White People Were Just Dumb
Idiotic exceptionalism
indica.medium.com
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227 dead, including 64 kids.1600 injured. At least 3 doctors have been killed. 18 hospitals & clinics have been damaged & the only Covid-19 testing centre in Gaza has been hit. Medical ethics scholars are awfully quiet. Is everyone too busy with their trolley problems?
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Lots of bogus claims have been made to defend meat-eating. This excellent piece from the
@guardian
's
@dpcarrington
expertly debunks eighteen common myths.
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Last year, another violent imperial power threw its weight around. Homes & hospitals were bombed, and 313 Palestinians died. Alistair Hudson, director of the University of Manchester’s Whitworth Art Gallery, exhibited a statement of solidarity. He's been fired for it.
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When I was a student protesting the marketisation of education,
@PriyamvadaGopal
was pretty much the only faculty member who spoke up for us. People like me write books because of people like her. I'm chuffed to have her words on the front cover.
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'... he didn’t really understand why so many leftists seemed to think of themselves as pessimists. “After all, we all do incredibly, insanely optimistic things all the time”.'
This uplifting tribute from
@piercepenniless
cuts through the sadness.
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Who'll replace all these giants? Rest in power, Maria Lugones. She was one of the first feminist theorists I read, and her legendary “Playfulness,‘World’-Traveling, and Loving Perception” returns to me again and again.
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Academics who come on here and post about all manner of things and never once about the 16,000 killed in Gaza: is that a reflection of what matters in your world/head, or a career move? Genuine question.
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Solidarity with Sussex students protesting the transphobia of one of their teachers. Senior admin have emailed us all to condemn the protest on the grounds that the transphobic teacher has the right to exercise "academic freedoms." Don't the students also have that right?!
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@PriyamvadaGopal
Ugh
@billybragg
. Churchill tested chemical weapons on Kurds, saying: "I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes."
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@PriyamvadaGopal
@Cambridge_Uni
The cost of a poorer student losing out on a Cambridge place goes beyond education, reputation, confidence etc. The financial support it gave me for living costs and travel were life-changing, and unimaginable elsewhere. Poorer students need access to that wealth
#HonourTheOffer
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I doubt anyone was ever puzzled over what
@PriyamvadaGopal
said, but rather intent on wilful misrepresentation (in some cases through pure fabrication). Those still throwing a tantrum, go away and chew on James Baldwin's "White is a metaphor for power" and see if that helps.
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If you've ever been in the position of having someone implore you to *understand* racism, sexism etc, then my latest paper might be useful in thinking about why we must resist these requests and how to do so. You can download it for free here:
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Allowing acts of solidarity (like flying a trans pride flag or being part of a protest) to be condemned as 'silencing' or 'bullying' cedes something much deeper than 'academic freedom.'
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"places with Black Lives Matter protests experience a 15% to 20% decrease in police homicides over the ensuing five years, around 300 fewer deaths."
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A couple of years back, I was tidying my classroom after a session on colonialism, and peeled back the flip-chart to find this. I joyfully rolled it up and kept it, so here it is making an appearance again.
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I wrote a short piece for the
@LRB
on toppling statues, 'free speech', and why 'eloquent' isn't always a compliment.
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Now that everyone's concerned about 'silencing' in academia, can we talk about Palestine? About the shrinking discursive space for those of us who want justice for Palestinians?
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@PriyamvadaGopal
@ChurchillCol
15 yrs ago when it was v rare to do so, my Cambridge interviewer made me an EE offer. He later told me he'd googled my school (failing comp) and didn't want to risk me missing an offer. If the interview system isn't about seeing beyond grades, what's it for?
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Solidarity with
@PriyamvadaGopal
. A bunch of racists are sending violently hateful messages, including death threats.
@Cambridge_Uni
, can we see a message of support for your employee, whose anti-racist work is a great service to so many of us?
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Two years into the pandemic, global vaccination coverage looks like this. There's absolutely no excuse for it. It's morally wrong, variants will thrive and hurt us all, and the myth that waivers on patents hinders 'innovation' is irrelevant: we already have *these* vaccines!
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Arguing for a Better World will be published in the US next week by
@penguinusa
. I'm thrilled to have this endorsement from the mighty
@IBJIYONGI
, who has cheered on the book at every turn, and whose fearless (and fun) writing on gender, race, and capitalism was a major influence
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How are any of us supposed to carry on after this, and find meaning in things, and peace in our minds? Any politician not asking for an immediate ceasefire should be deemed unfit for office. None of us are safe while power is in the hands of those who can allow this to go on.
@QudsNen
A Palestinian boy cries for his parents after an Israeli strike hit Rafah in southern Gaza on🇵🇸😭
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Sussex trades on its (mostly outdated) reputation as a radical university. It's shocking and hypocritical that the VC sees fit to email the entire university to tell off a group of students who are exercising their right to protest. Such a misguided, absurd, and terrifying move.
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@PriyamvadaGopal
Also, wtf is this: "it may be that we are heading toward a more equal society — I don’t know — but what essential values will we forfeit in the process?"
Wild guess: values that promoted inequality?
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Roe v Wade is over. People will die. A recent study showed that a ban on abortion would lead to a 21% rise in deaths overall & a 33% rise for Black people, just because pregnancy is riskier than abortion. Factor in the rise in unsafe abortions & those numbers will be higher still
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"Instead of saving Earth, these men dream of escaping it" A brilliant essay from
@IBJIYONGI
on billionaire space cowboys (e.g. 'Apartheid Clyde' Musk) and the imperative to think ethically about space, the Earth, and each other
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I have an essay in the
@LRB
on the history of bricks and mortar, the environmental cost of concrete, and the lies that led to the
#GrenfellTower
fire and the current cladding crisis. You can read it in the latest issue, or here:
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Absolutely remarkable that: (a) Dawn Butler was chucked out of parliament for calling out Boris Johnson's lies, and (b) Keir Starmer has nothing to say about it.
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'The problem is therefore not that poor white children are being taught that they’re privileged along the axis of race, it’s that they and others are not being told they’re oppressed along the axis of class.'
My latest
@LRB
blog is on shame and privilege
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Important to note that this year the government made two changes to the law to increase the likelihood that migrants crossing the Channel are left to die:
1. Helping someone to enter is now a crime even if it's not “for gain”;
2. The max sentence has gone from 14 years to life.
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'Does it need stating that people shouldn’t be asked to work for wages that leave them hungry and cold? '
I wrote about the cost of running a human body for the new issue of the
@LRB
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31 people drowning in their desperation to get to this cruel, racist, thieving isle of plenty isn't a terrible accident. It's the system working to plan. Politicians and mainstream news outlets feigning sadness today can fuck right off. They've left migrants nothing but the sea.
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Ever wondered why men tend to be taller than women? It's likely not a big-fighting-man evolutionary thing.The answer is oestrogen, which causes bone growth in all of us, but higher levels mean bones fuse earlier. Check out
@HollyDunsworth
's brilliant paper
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“We are very cruelly trapped between what we would like to be and what we actually are. And we cannot possibly become what we would like to be until we are willing to ask ourselves just why the lives we lead on this continent are mainly so empty, so tame, and so ugly”
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This is terrifying. The day we entered lockdown, scared for our lives, there were 967 new cases and 74 deaths. Over the last 3 days, there've been an average of 1158 new cases and 62 deaths a day. We're just where we were at lockdown, and we're giving Covid-19 a new lease of life
So for England, here's your new normal
1. Pubs + hospitality + hairdressers opening sat 4th
2. '1 metre plus' - the new rule on social distancing
3. 2 households now allowed to meet INDOORS
4. Outdoor gyms, theme parks, libraries all able to open too
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200 dead, including 59 kids. All Muslims. Bombed in an overcrowded, blockaded strip of land that they cannot leave. Silence from Western governments and academic institutions. Just the vague implication that they must deserve it. I'm going to call it what it is: Islamophobia.
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I’ve long resisted Twitter since my loud mouth and my work on race and gender make me a Pied Piper for the trolls. But it doesn't make me feel good to shy away from a fight, and I've been missing out on interesting conversations, so here I am, at least for the lockdown.
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White man from a totally different field who objects to one of my articles emails me 24 hrs after his last (very strange) email to ask why I haven't replied. Is it because I now realise that, poor little woman I am, my coauthors have conned me? I've worked in this area for years.
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" ... dendrochronologists of the future will be able to read the marginalisation of Indigenous knowledge in the hundred-year absence of fire scars in the rings of old trees" My latest blog for the
@LRB
is on fires, climate crisis, gender, and hubris:
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Me watching politicians find science to support whatever they plan to do next
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Driving to the Brighton
#BlackLivesMatter
protest and every young person in the streets is wearing black, holding signs, converging, and my heart is singing for the world we might yet have
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I've just joined
@JMEJournal_BMJ
as an associate editor. Glad to be working with
@briandavidearp
@DrZoeFritz
@lucy_frith
and the rest of the team, and looking forward to helping to publish brave decolonial and feminist scholarship that pushes the discipline!
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My first piece for
@TheEconomist
's
@1843mag
uses Immanuel Kant's philosophy to argue that eating anything other than a very modest amount of meat means hogging an unfair share of the world's land
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Let's be clear: transphobia isn't covered by "academic freedom." Even if there are grey areas (I don't think there are in this case) the VC can't just decide what is okay because of "academic freedom" and what isn't.
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My book is the bestselling new release in 'Philosophy of Logic & Language'! If nothing else, this means that it's been properly categorised: it's all about language! It explores mansplaining, political correctness, 'Black Lives Matter', 'men are trash', dog whistles etc.
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"There is no excuse for it. Teachers know what nakedness means to a fifteen-year-old and they know how the state treats Black children. Resistance is sometimes as simple as not calling the police."
I wrote about Child Q and police brutality for the
@LRB
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"Scientists have so much power, and we're not trained to use it. We're not even trained to recognise it as power." Just tuned into
@IBJIYONGI
's UK launch of "The Disordered Cosmos" at
@Ri_Science
. The book is out today and will leave you spellbound.
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Not only is
@PriyamvadaGopal
's "On Decolonisation and the University" clever and beautifully-written, it's exactly the reminder many of us need that decolonial work calls for a "more demanding relationship with history and with the world." Read it here:
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British exceptionalism is preposterous. Cases rise and people say we're just doing more testing. Deaths rise and people say we are just more diligent at counting them, as though other countries are so callous or innumerate they just have a wild guess at how many people are dead.
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Some of us are raging and heartbroken for Ukrainians because we know the cost of imperialism in Palestine, Kurdistan, Iraq, Afghanistan, and so on.
Some of you are freaking out because you thought being white, or European, would keep you safe.
We are not the same.
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@DrKeishaRay
Right? And it's not the first time the Monash Bioethics Review has published something like this. They ran a similar piece in 2018. I'm so tired of the bioethics bro culture and its fixation on "enhancement."
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@PriyamvadaGopal
It's vile how quiet so many people have gone, weighing their time and career opportunities above an obvious duty to put all their might against the genocidal dominant discourse, as anyone with any epistemic power ought to.
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If you love science and hate racism, come and hear physicist
@IBJIYONGI
argue that, in her mother's words, "we live in a universe that is bigger than the bad things that are happening to us." This Thursday at 7pm at the Royal Institution.
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Aldous Huxley's first novel was written a hundred years ago. This year, I'm rereading his books, and my latest blog for the
@LRB
reflects on the sharpness and 'futilitarianism' of his early novels (and is illustrated with my own teenage fangirl sketch)
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Just thinking about how we're urged to excuse the atrocious behaviours of big companies on the grounds that they "create jobs." As though jobs are some kind of gift, rather than a way of locking people into decades of exploitation and alienation in return for food and shelter.
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I'm one of the lucky few who has read a draft of
@IBJIYONGI
's "The Disordered Cosmos." It's a breathtaking achievement, and one of the books I most wish I'd been given at a more tender age, trying to make my way in science and hold onto my conscience. Pre-order it from July 8th!
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"One word for what the teacher was telling us is propaganda, and that may be the best way to understand statues of slave traders in a country that doesn’t teach its own colonial history." My latest blog for the
@LRB
is on
#RhodesMustFall
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@NadineElEnany
@BBCRadio4
Also, if you've got time at the end, why not lay into Nigel Biggar, a professor of ethics who thinks that "there was some good stuff and some bad stuff so who knows?" is a justifiable philosophical position. Weigh up the "good" and bad, Nigel. That's what we're trained to do.
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Calling on my old college
@MECCambridge
to honour its offers to state school candidates. You gave me a chance, please do the same for them.
Given our far too slow track record on "widening participation", as a matter of principle,
@Cambridge_Uni
should honour all existing offers made to state sector candidates regardless of result.
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These pictures are of Hasankeyf, a 12,000 year old archaeologically-rich settlement in
#Kurdistan
of Turkey. It's now gone, flooded as part of a Turkish dam project. I've written about it for the
@LRB
here:
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The new
@LRB
has 21,000 words on the overturning of Roe v. Wade and reproductive justice, featuring some of my favourite writers. I'm honoured to have my words alongside theirs. My piece explores what it means when we refuse to trust pregnant people
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Solidarity is powerful and beautiful. But its absence is gutting, frightening, and lonely. Academics: please look out for your students and junior colleagues. Don't ever let them feel that their bravery leads to solitude, silence, or worse. Give them something to carry forward.
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So fed up with the government making us feel like we need to buy stuff to save the economy. It's their job to make sure people don't starve. Delegating that to us via consumerism is unconscionable.
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"Bribing people to congregate during a pandemic and spend money so that others don’t starve is the mark of an economic system that doesn’t work, and a government that lacks the imagination to do better." Here's my blog on
#EatOutToHelpOut
for the
@LRB
.
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"When you orientalise a group, you stop seeing the obvious ways they’re similar to you, and risk missing your common frailties." My latest blog for the
@LRB
covers Orientalism, wet markets, coronavirus, and Jaws.
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Academics who write in ways that mean only their little subfield gets them, what's that about? Can we just take it as given that we're all quite clever and focus on actually saying something? Journals and reviewers should be harder on this.
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Just finished
@NesrineMalik
's We Need New Stories and it's so relentlessly brilliant that the inside cover of my copy looks like this.
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"While rivers elsewhere are gaining moral recognition, England’s are full of shit."
I wrote about sewage, rivers, and environmental personhood for the
@LRB
.
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With forests ablaze, grasslands may be one of our most robust carbon sinks, but the warming effect of managed grass now cancels out the cooling effect of unmanaged grass. My latest
@LRB
blog is on the environmental costs of real and fake grass
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“the ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.” Rest in power, David Graeber. I'm sorry you didn't live to see something better.
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If you've always kept quiet about Palestine and now you're seeing these horrifying scenes and you feel compelled to break this silence with a "neutral" statement about "violence on both sides" or your hopes of "a return to peace" can I request that you just maintain your silence?
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The government leaving it this late to make their u-turn is no accident. They waited until we'd all maxed out on buying food and presents, which is the only part of Christmas they were ever concerned to protect.
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Fascists wouldn't make these gains if the other side were actively, unashamedly, unshakably ANTI-fascist, rather than just mealy-mouthed centrists. It makes perfect sense to rage at all parts of the political establishment for their hatred, complicity, or inaction.
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The Shamima Begum decision is a yet another reminder that the citizenship of migrants is never really secure, but is always conditional, and can be readily weaponised. Not all citizens are equal; how you got your citizenship is never forgotten.
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It must have crossed Keir Starmer's mind that if he switched parties now he could be the sensible Tory PM he's always wanted to be.
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The distinction between "FGM" and "female genital cosmetic surgeries" rests on a racist distinction between consenting white women and subjugated women of colour. I've written a short (free!) paper for
@yoursexmedjour
arguing against the double standard
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Always a joy and education to work with
@briandavidearp
. Here, we and coauthors expose the racism of WHO-led mass circumcision campaigns: “A new
#Tuskegee
? Unethical human experimentation and Western neocolonialism in the mass circumcision of African men”
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"Borders pose a limit to a person’s moral imagination. [...] It strikes me that if it wasn’t so easy to keep people out, we’d have to think harder about poverty and climate change." I talked to Jumanah Younis about extractivism & health for
@raceandhealth
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We published this beautiful poem by
@cambarnett89
in
@theoffingmag
two years ago. It hurt like hell to read it then. It hurts even more now. It's called Supernova.
@IBJIYONGI
@MarkZastrow
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Imposter syndrome gnaws at me constantly. But not sure it needs problematising: questioning one's place is healthy. What about the opposite phenomenon, where people with particular identities feel unjustifiably centred and at home wherever they are?
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Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett argues that abortion isn't necessary because you can just have the baby adopted. It's an old argument, and it's absolutely unconscionable. It attempts to make invisible the nine months of unwanted physical labour that gestation demands.
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It came out a while ago now, but in case anyone is interested, as of today there are 50 free copies of my article on feminism in Rojava. It's part of an excellent special issue of
@Geopolitics_JI
, edited by
@KamranMatin
and
@clemhoffmann
. Here's the link:
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On the longest day of the year, I'll be talking to astrophysicist and feminist scholar
@IBJIYONGI
about science, philosophy, gender, race, queerness, and childhood dreams. Join us (virtually) at
@Feminist_Books_
in Brighton on Monday 21st at 7pm
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"While mountaineers who’ve paid their way to recreational breathlessness are up in the clouds chugging on oxygen canisters ... people are fighting for their lives down at ground level." My latest
@LRB
blog is on Everest and Nepal's Covid-19 crisis
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Shout out to Black students (college/university) writing on bioethics, feminism, applied ethics, philosophy of science, or related areas, I will read your work and give comments. I have the weekend set aside for it. Message me. Please share widely.
#BlackLivesMatter
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