David Wright

I am very much on this bus.

Section 6.10.3 in this doc. This is the word of the Lord...
2029.ref.ac.uk/guidance/sec....

Pleased to hear Drs. Melanie Stavrou, Hao Xie and Younggeon Byun talk about their work on Decolonisation as Cultural Justice.

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

Great to see this article from our PhD student Pengyun Lu now out, open access, in @ejcs-journal.bsky.social
"Between ‘audience lords’ and ‘rich fathers’: Triadic relational labour and contingent moral improvisation among Chinese tech creators on UGC platforms"
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

These were great. And in the end, weirdly hopeful.
I learned a lot. And I bet the Christmas parties at the Centre for Existential Risk are pretty fun.

Newcastle pubs ban AI art from breweries to protect local creatives As two pubs in Newcastle ban AI art, artists discuss the impact it can have on creatives.

"no longer be accepting AI art, including on bottles and pump clips, in order to try to protect local artists from losing out on work."

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Famously, all fish and chip shops used to display their wares on chopping boards in the window.

Free Thinking - Working Class Creativity - BBC Sounds Depictions of working class life on TV and in culture and how they've changed.

Fascinating discussion around class on Radio 4's Free Thinking feat. @adellestripe.bsky.social

www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...

Shattered dreams: How the battle for Sunderland’s glass centre turned into a political flashpoint Custodian University of Sunderland says renovation costs of £45m are too high and building must be pulled down. Not without a fight, say locals, who believe they’re being taken for fools

Another example (just like the Essex campus closure) of how refusing to have a structured and effective HE policy destroys the rest of the government’s place-based goals www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...

It's Yorkshire, Jake.

Excellent. I always preferred 'morbid symptoms'. And it's a much better name for a pub quiz team.

Gotta be American Music Club - "What Godzilla Said to God When His Name Wasn't Found in the Book of Life"

France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US European governments are moving away from U.S. tech giants, opting for domestic or open-source alternatives.

apnews.com/article/euro...

Going live for our CDI stream on digital intimacies.

Collaborative PhD on art and/as R&D with me and the Serpentine gallery - tracking how value, labour, knowledge and resources move through art-technology production networks.

I'll happily chat to anyone you think would be good for (and would benefit from) this.
www.westminster.ac.uk/study/postgr...

The BBC coverage is absolutely terrible.

It leads on "sharply contested narratives"

It has a dramatic skew to the US government

It has posted the video but has failed to report on what it shows: it shows the US govt account is untrue

Tennis in Venice?

Title of project and image of project lead in bottom right hand corner

Thrilled to share some brilliant news 🎉
Ulster University has been awarded an AHRC Creative Communities Co-Lab Policy Network Award 2026

Huge thanks to Arts & Humanities Research Council, @northumbriauni.bsky.social and our incredible partners across Northern Ireland
More soon!

Looking forward to working, as part of the AHRC Creative Communities Co-Lab Policy network, on Strengthening the Cultural Foundations of the West Midlands

creativecommunities.uk/research_art...

And that is: asking a student to do a literature review isn’t really about the output, the final product. It’s about learning the process - assessing the quality of the evidence as you read it, learning how your question may evolve as you engage with the literature, learning how to spot SALIENCE 1/2

Use of fixed-term posts ‘stifling more critical research’ Scholars with short contracts seen as more likely to favour doing ‘safer’ work, with ‘serious ramifications’ for their disciplines

'“Embedded precarity” in higher education is diminishing research quality as staff on short-term contracts favour “safer” work to secure future employment, according to the author of a new report.'

Royal Geographical Society maps important connections between precarity and research topics. 1/3

Will the AI bubble burst? Podcast Episode · The LRB Podcast · 07/01/2026 · 55m

‘There’s a sort of alarming and mysterious aspect to this wave in AI: that thing about the nature of the black box. We don’t know why it’s coming to the conclusions it’s coming to.’

John Lanchester on the AI bubble, on the podcast:

podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/w...

The neuroscience laboratory is closed for the holidays, but a staff member is on hand to answer the Consciousness Hotline. Scientist on the phone in an otherwise deserted office: "So, to summarise: No, I can't say with complete certainty that you exist. But yes, you probably ought to go back to work after the holidays anyway."

My cartoon for the latest @newscientist.com

Globally, the cultural and creative industries contribute to 3.1% of GDP and 6.2% of employment. Yet we can't think of them only as an industry.

Great to speak last month at #CIMAM to museum curators and artists about our work on Public Value of the Arts.

Watch the keynote ➡️ buff.ly/yUF9QFO

Except the Aussie franchise league was the model for the ECB's, more Aussie test players have played for longer (and more effectively) in the IPL and there are fewer fixtures in the Aussie first class season. They still excel.

Where is Participatory and Community Arts in the Hodge Review? The independent review of Arts Council England (ACE), led by Baroness Margaret Hodge, is now part of the policy landscape in which participatory and community arts will have to operate for the next several years. The review is candid about bureaucracy, uneven cultural investment, weakened local cultural infrastructure, and the need to rebuild trust in the funding system. It also points towards a structural shift, including stronger local and regional decision-making and a more explicit relationship between culture and place.

How do small, focussed-arts activities change how people relate to a place and to one another, and what gets lost when cultural value is judged only by scale, numbers, or economic return?

UK to rejoin EU’s Erasmus student exchange programme Exclusive: British students will be able to participate in EU-wide scheme from January 2027, sources say

EXCL: An agreement to rejoin Erasmus – the EU’s student exchange programme – set to be announced on Wednesday as part of UK government’s drive towards closer relations with Brussels.

www.theguardian.com/world/2025/d...

Trump sues the BBC is the stupidest story ever

Of course, cover it but please, please point out - early - how stupid it is.

And don’t put it at the top of the news. Because it’s really, really stupid.

Stuart Hall on teaching 💛
“Let me put it this way: you have to be sure about a position in order to teach a class, but you have to be open-ended enough to know that you are going to change your mind by the time you teach it next week” (Hall, Essential Essays vol. 1, p. 245)

NEW on Wonkhe: For Mollie Etheridge REF is a missed opportunity to recognise and reward early career researchers buff.ly/C8IKo7z