Laurence Cooley

CFA: These are wonderful 3-years postdoc projects, check them out and apply: 🐦🐮

#envhum
#envhist
@esehnextgate.bsky.social

the amount of Islamophobic content they've managed to generate out of a historically left-wing constituency voting for a left-wing MP is astonishing

A map of Ireland showing the scale and type of census returns sent in by local clergymen. https://www.virtualtreasury.ie/gold-seams/1766-religious-census

A map showing the extent of recovered names and numbers across the island of Ireland. 50,000 names across 246 civil parishes!

Legend accompanying the map of recovered names and numbers across the island of Ireland. Names of householders or local population numbers.

https://www.virtualtreasury.ie/gold-seams/1766-religious-census

Happy 260th Birthday to Ireland's first census! 🎂
Amazing coverage back in 1766 🙂 A tragic loss in 1922 🔥😩
Now available - over 50,000 recovered names! 📜📚5️⃣0️⃣,0️⃣0️⃣0️⃣ 🥳
www.virtualtreasury.ie/gold-seams/1...

📢 More detailed Survivors map coming today! 🔎

Some disappointing institutions close to home still posting on X …

The guy who leads the flagging group that has repeatedly targeted Stirchley is now in Afghanistan recording pro-Taliban videos for social media. 2026 needs more realistic scriptwriters.

Why can’t care workers stay, Paul? “Because they are contributing to Labour’s cache-misère’

Well, no, they’re not just as wrong. The bigger error is not seeing that “trying to win over voters from a party on the opposite end of the spectrum, whose values your core voters oppose” is not same as “chasing voters from party on same side ideologically whose values your core voters like.”

Sock monkeys holding signs that say “STOP ICE” and “STOP KILLING OUR NEIGHBORS”

Things feels calmer now in Minneapolis but the ICE siege is far from over. Many families are traumatized and remain in hiding, we still have over 900 ICE agents in Minnesota, and the economic impacts on our city—and especially on our targeted neighbors—are staggering.

Southern California air board rejected pollution rules after AI-generated flood of comments The opposition appeared overwhelming: Tens of thousands of emails poured into Southern California's top air pollution authority as its board weighed a June proposal to phase out gas-powered appliances...

They were going to pass rules to phase out gas stoves, until they received 20,000 public comments against the regulations. Except, oops, it turns out the comments were generated by AI.

One casualty of the racialisation of class: people fail to recognise that most Bangladeshi and Pakistani people in Britain are working class

That they have the highest rates of poverty

And that historically economic and related factors have been the key driver of their voting behavior

Yes, the signal it risks sending is “if by some quirk of FPTP am elected in this constituency, I will hold in ostentatious contempt the majority of people I am supposed to be representing”. That’s not a good look for any party.

'Research Professional News made FOI requests to all 24 members of the Russell Group and 10 members of the ResearchPlus mission group of universities.' 24 institutions responded: their redundancies increased from just over 2,200 in the 2023 calendar year to nearly 4,400 in 2025. 1/3

There has been a remarkable radicalisation of *elite* political and media discourse on mass deportations and remigration.

This is based on an elite perception (+ misperception) of what the public want.

Media and political elites have not spotted how skewed their perception of what the public is

Power, Politics and Territory in the ‘New Northern Ireland’ | Home Girdwood Barracks and the Story of the Peace Process

Liz DeYoung’s 'Power, Politics and Territory in the New Northern Ireland’ has just been released in paperback by Liverpool UP. Winner of the 2023 ACIS Murphy Prize, we hosted the NI launch in Jan 2024. Many congrats Liz!

www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/book/10....

The logic here only makes sense if you assume AI and human beings are in a competition for resources (which in some meaningful sense might be true), and that the most efficient consumer of resources for performing AI-related functions should be allowed to win (which is pathological).

I know it's hard to believe someone who proposes penalising women for not having children would do something sexist.

UT Head of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Speaks Out • The Austin Chronicle On Monday, the Chronicle spoke with Lisa Moore, who has served since 2023 as the chair of UT-Austin’s Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department – a department that is now being collapsed with ...

Now that Faculty Council has been dissolved and our administrators from the Dean level up have been replaced by political appointees, a free press is the only place UT Austin faculty have to speak up.
www.austinchronicle.com/news/ut-head...

“This is not about blaming farmers - many are doing their best in very challenging circumstances. This is about how the regulatory system works, and whether it truly protects rivers like the Wye and the Severn.”

River Action launches a judicial review against Natural Resources Wales.👇

"In the present climate in the US, it's difficult to fathom this kind of programming on public television or streaming platforms without it fomenting some sort of nonsensical backlash. Still, those kids on Sesame Street, now adults, would be the ones who demonstrate the neighborism..."

DOI's are a great example of the critical infrastructure that librarians quietly enable.

I don’t know who needs to hear Jesse Jackson leading the kids on Sesame Street in this beautiful call-and-response reminding them that every child is somebody, but here it is

Our new research shows that hundreds of federal surveys removed questions about sexual orientation and gender identity since the start of the second Trump administration. Read the full report at: tinyurl.com/SOGIdata

Race to find source of carcinogenic Pfas in Cumbria and Lancashire waters Exclusive: High levels of banned ‘forever chemical’ have been detected in rivers and groundwater at 25 sites

It's still a shock to find a new PFAS forever chemical hotspot, even when it's inevitable. A bit of digging around paper mills, which often use PFAS, revealed the banned carcinogen PFOS at levels as high as 3,000ng/l in groundwater in south Cumbria
www.theguardian.com/environment/...

What Peter Thiel Saw in Jeffrey Epstein In the extensive correspondence between the Silicon Valley venture capitalist and the late pedophile, both men expressed a deep aversion to democracy.

When MIT staffers whispered about whether to intervene to help the Eastern European women Epstein brought to campus, they were witnessing something larger than one man's depravity. They were seeing the infrastructure of post-democratic power.
https://bit.ly/4ahw2k4

I think the greatest gift college professors in the humanities can give to students right now is a seminar room where, for 80 minutes twice a week, nothing that happens to them is a sales pitch for an AI product.

A wonderful review essay by @liamstanley.bsky.social that we recently published in @newformations.bsky.social

Did someone say massive bureaucratic exercise of, at best, questionable value? Oh.

Wind farms and carbon credits: ‘advanced’ plans over Lough Neagh’s future Lough Neagh provides half of Belfast’s drinking water and more than 40% of Northern Ireland’s overall supply

British investors have presented ‘advanced’ plans for Lough Neagh’s future.

Documents seen by The Detail show proposals that would reshape ownership and management of parts of Ireland’s largest inland waterbody.

✍️ @tommygreene.bsky.social

Stuart Hall Archive Project - February 2026 The third of our Readings Seminars will be held on Wednesday 11 February: Education: Maximising Difference. For this seminar, we welcome Dr Ingrid Abrahams, who will introduce us to her doctoral research on the systemic underrepresentation of black senior leaders in schools in England, particularly since the Education Reform Act of 1988. Abrahams will begin with an introduction to a speech, given by Stuart Hall in the early 1980s, on 'Anti-Racist Education'. The recording was made on an audio-cassette labelled 'Prof Stuart Hall, Anti-Racist Education, Hampstead School' (no date given) and has been digitised. Those who register for this seminar will be given access both to the audio and a transcript. To Register and for details of future Seminars: https://buytickets.at/stuarthallarchiveprojectattheuniversityofbirmingham/2013038

The Stuart Hall Archive Project Readings Seminars provide an opportunity to read and listen to a selection of Stuart Hall’s unpublished lectures, interviews, and letters, discussing his life and work and our own times.
3. Wed 11 February Education: Maximising Difference
buytickets.at/stuarthallar...