@solgamsu
Sociologist/sociologue/soziologe of education (elites, geographies, social mobility, dreaming/fighting for another education). Union rep UCU: organising in various capacities. Working/living in Durham/Newcastle mostly. https://linksta.cc/@Sol%20Gamsu
Thank you! At an event last night I said "If the word hope doesn't work for you try, 'Never fucking surrender.'" The word hope seems too sunny to a lot of people, but the heart of it as I'm interested in it is: we make the future in the present, if we show up, and that never surrender part.
“Israeli spies coached a U.S. Senator to talk the President into war” is it conspiracy when the person in question brags about it
Reform win a seat: The true Volk have spoken and we all must listen.
Greens win a seat: Early reports that Muslims may have ‘voted’ (an ancient Islamic practice designed to steal elections). How severely should the franchise be limited in response?
Beside Israel's northern border fence, the bursts of machine-gun fire from inside Lebanon are loud and long, as new Israeli forces push in to take strategic positions near the border. The regular rumble of air strikes echoes over the shattered remains of Shia villages, destroyed during Israel's last ground war there in 2024. A senior military official said on Thursday that Israeli ground forces were taking additional hilltops inside Lebanon - a defensive operation, he said, to better protect Israel's northern communities. But there has been a significant military build-up here. On Friday morning we passed dozens of tanks and armoured bulldozers, newly-positioned right by the border, fuelling growing speculation that a full-scale ground invasion is planned.
Hundreds of thousands of Lebanese civilians have been fleeing Israeli air strikes in Lebanon over the past few days, less than 18 months after a ceasefire ended the last conflict with Israel in November 2024. During that war, Israel fought its way house to house through many Lebanese border villages. Their crushed remains still litter the landscape. But some Hezbollah fighters have reportedly returned to these areas, and Israel is now fighting its way through the area again. Without those assaults on Hezbollah in 2024, which left a key Iranian proxy severely weakened, Israel would have found it much harder to launch its current war on Iran - or the previous one in June last year - without a much higher cost at home.
This is the language used by the BBC to describe Israel's war on Lebanon www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
Cited: IDF Chief of Staff, Israeli living near the border, another Israeli, an Israeli politician and a Israeli commentator. No one else.
The Lebanese are just numbers throughout the piece.
Iran’s state media share CCTV footage of a U.S.-Israeli attack near a boys’ school in Abyek, Qazvin, #Iran. The strike on the first day of the war resulted in the death of a teenage student. A communication tower was dislodged by the strike, went airborne, and fell on him, the narrator explains.
The smaller print on the sign, below the price of potatoes, says that anyone unable to pay can take what they need for free. Iran is a deeply polarized society, politically. It is also this.
Tabriz, Chahar Rah-e Taleghani, Sixth Day of the War
“We are trapped between the regime that is killing us with machine guns, and a foreign power has likely decided that we are collateral damage.”
This is very good, though affirms what so many of us fear. Iran can at best achieve a “pyrrhic impasse,” at the cost of many, many Iranian lives.
I asked my students this week to consider the power of the phrase "the ayatollah(s)," the automatic appendage of "world's largest supporter of terrorism" before each and every report on Iran, how language sets the conditions for violence. The result: Iran "had this coming."
Thread: In my latest, I reflect on the war with #Iran. I begin by examining the war’s early human cost, explore the uncertain succession process in Tehran after Khamenei's death, & discuss why the Islamic Republic may be more durable than many assume. guardeddomains.substack.com/p/after-kham... 1/6
We're witnessing one of the darkest periods in #Iran's contemporary history. The fate of a nation of 90 million hangs in the balance. The population inside is enduring bombardment by foreign aggressors while dealing w/ domestic oppression, w/ little glimpse of light within the immediate future. 2/6
🚨 Iran’s Health Ministry says 926 people have been killed and 6,186 injured in U.S.–Israeli attacks across the country in the past 5 days, according to Hossein Kermanpour, head of public relations for the ministry. ➤ Killed: 926 ➤ Injured: 6,186 ➤ Hospitalized: 2,054 ➤ Treated and discharged: 3,545 ➤ Treated at the scene: 552 ➤ Surgeries performed: 502 ➤ Children killed: 180 under age 18, including 3 under age 5 ➤ Youngest killed: a 1-year-old child in Tehran ➤ Children injured: 301 under age 18, including 39 under age 5 ➤ Youngest injured: a 6-month-old boy in Bostanabad https://x.com/hkermanpour/st/hkermanpour/status/2029224689990512828
🚨 Iran’s Health Ministry says 926 people have been killed & 6,186 injured in US-Israeli attacks across the country in the past 5 days, according to Hossein Kermanpour, head of public relations for the ministry.
➤ Killed: 926
➤ Injured: 6,186
➤ Hospitalized: 2,054
➤ Treated and discharged: 3,545...
🚨 EXCITING NEWS - SAVE THE DATE!
The History of Education Society conference is back for 2026.
🇮🇪 13-15 November 2026. Maynooth University, Ireland.
Find out more below 👇
historyofeducation.org.uk/conference/
Pubs for the People by me & Vallu is out with @manchesterup.bsky.social in October. On how the pub can be salvaged as a space for the Good Life that goes beyond boring ideas of White England.
A bargain at £18.99 in hardback (cant even get 3 pints for that!)
www.waterstones.com/book/pubs-fo...
Israeli map showing all of southern Lebanon in red with yellow arrows pointing to north of the Litani river
The IDF just ordered the *entirety of south Lebanon* to be forcibly displaced.
They are emptying the land of its population, creating a massive crisis, and will now proceed to further annihilate large parts of Lebanon.
The very nation state of Lebanon is being destroyed.
The brutal, despicable, and grim side of war. The burial of the 150 elementary school girls killed in American-Israeli strikes on #Iran was today.
Most of the world is focused on Iran or the GCC. Haven’t heard much from international actors comment on Israel reclosing entry into Gaza or the disproportional response Israel is committing on Lebanon through mass displacement and constant attacks
03-03-1976 SPAIN: In Vitoria-Gasteiz, Basque Country, Spanish police killed 5 workers and injured another 100 during a general strike.
We have filed supplemental evidence to GANHRI on the EHRC. Raising concerns about health impacts, lack of EIAs, no trans stakeholder engagement and opaque AI use in the 50k+ consultation. A rights regulator should not be a risk to the people it exists to protect.
tacc.org.uk/2026/03/02/e...
"Birzeit is confronted with a crisis it can’t manage its way out of, because it is caught in a structural contradiction: how can it produce thinking subjects in a world organized to neutralize thought itself? "
Birzeit University is no longer what it once was. The transformation has been gradual and, therefore, easily rationalized, but the result has been the hollowing out of a university that once led the Palestinian struggle.
mondoweiss.net/2026/02/the-...
I saw this and at first thought "no, there's no way 'we definitely had alternative leadership in mind for Iran but I blew them up alongside the schoolgirls using AI' is what the White House is actually saying, that's too clueless and evil to be real"
NEW:
"No to the Islamic republic, no to Israel and no to the United States" — many Iranians are weighing contradictory truths as war hits their country. @negarmortazavi.bsky.social and
@arashtehran.bsky.social join @faisalalyafai.bsky.social on The Lede. newlinesmag.com/podcast/in-t...
Motahari Street, Tehran, #Iran.
Double tapping, an Israeli trademark, the height of their civilization
Only a handful of anonymous op-eds have been published by The New York Times. I had the (hidden) honor of being one of those authors with my piece, "A Different Iranian Revolution," written in hope & fear at my aunt's dining room table during the early stages of the 2009 Green Movement in #Iran.
Suppression of journalists, mass arrest & torture of protestors, violent crackdown of protests, “chain murder” of intellectuals & academics, corrupting the country’s educational system, and so many other things. Plus all the humiliation we had to suffer for 37 years. No one will mourn Khamenei.
The number of dead kids in the Israeli bombing of a girl’s school in Minab, southern Iran, has now reached 148.
Don’t let them sell you dead children as “collateral damage of a just war”. The death of Khamenei does not justify 148 dead children.
You don't say?
photo showing damage to Golestan palace
photo showing damage to Golestan palace
As I read about neighborhoods bombed in Iran, I've been thinking about its historic sites. News today that Golestan Palace, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, dating to the 16th c was hit.
