@juliespray
Childhood & medical anthropologist, child health researcher, Lecturer at University of Galway Ireland, Pākehā New Zealander, she/her, never enough cats. I study people because they fascinate & confuse me. Children make most sense though. We like to draw.
Proud to share this article by our @uniofgalway.bsky.social Children's Studies student Leanne Keohane! "The gap between media panic and the lived reality of children on Roblox is striking." www.irishexaminer.com/opinion/comm...
Cool assignment! I’m gonna steal this
If you can set aside the category violation, I reckon this actually sounds amazing
A hand-drawn illustration of a person with messy hair in a bun, surrounded by scribbles, with the text "WELCOME TO A STORY ABOUT MY BRAIN" at the top.
A person wakes up surrounded by colorful creature-like drawings, talks to them, gets out of bed, and is later seen choosing clothes while the creatures interact around the room
Comic strip of a boy named Alex encountering colorful characters while trying to get dressed. Each character represents distractions. Alex's frustration grows as he falls behind schedule.
A frustrated person in a kitchen surrounded by chaos. A red devilish figure suggests making "fancy bread." The person, overwhelmed, covers their face, thinking, "I should’ve stayed in bed."
Sharing some delicious student comics from my course "Comics, Childhood and the Alternative." This one is about the experience of ADHD, by the creative phenom Ellie Bradley.
What We’re Talking About On April 28, 1967 (the year of the goat) Muhammad Ali refused to step forward when his name was called in the military draft to serve in Vietnam. He famously said, “Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights?” In the prime of his career (25-28 years old) he was immediately stripped of his heavyweight title and was suspended from competition. In June of that year Ali was convicted of draft evasion and sentenced to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine. He remained free on appeal and in 1971 his case was heard in front of the Supreme Court (Clay v. United States) where his conviction was unanimously overturned. Seven years after he was stripped of his title Ali beat George Foreman in the famed Rumble in the Jungle. Muhammad Ali isn’t the greatest of all time because he has the best boxing record. In fact, during his comeback from exile he lost two of his four matches. What transformed him from a champion to a legend—and global icon—required courage and sacrifice. Ali stood for something and it cost him. At the time, it’s estimated that only 11% of Americans supported his decision. It’s safe to say he was hated. He was willing to sacrifice his reputation, millions of dollars, the prime of his career and even his own freedom for a justice he believed was being denied. This, of course, sparked others to find courage, including the famous raised fists by Tommie Smith and John Carlos in the 1968 Olympics. Once again we are living through tumultuous and terrifying times where basic human rights are being denied and our neighbors are being kidnapped and even murdered. I recognize that it’s unfair to ask or even wish for this, but the moment is once again ripe for a champion to become a legend. And it needs to be asked what good is a large platform if those who control …
The gymnastics sports podcast I follow has some seriously impressive newsletters @gymcastic.com
"We are not unemployed because we are unemployable.
We are unemployed because we are the first to buckle under exploitation."
Pluribus is an intense ontological experience for Christmas break
Win for political enfranchisement of the young! I teach university students and they don’t know this stuff because our society’s ideologies of childhood and youth prevent us from making the political system universally accessible
Discworld QOTD, from Hogfather
It’s hard for many people to learn that things aren’t real. It’s a big worldview shift that can be really triggering and destabilising, overturn identities, undermine cultural sources of moral authority and advice. You can see the barriers preventing that one small epistemic step for man.
“The longer I live, the more convinced I am that this planet is used by other planets as a lunatic asylum.”
- George Bernard Shaw
Is it just me realising like humanity is way way worse than I was led to believe
White men, imagine you go for a job. The interview panel is three black women. The board of directors is all black women and has been, without exception, forever. You notice that all supervisors are black women and the only white man you see is cleaning. The company insists they appoint on merit /1
“Anyone who’s ever found a blunt “no” scrawled in the margin of an essay knows that universities force humility upon us.… you realise how much of yourself is inherited or assumed and how freeing it is to rebuild that self from first principles.”
thespinoff.co.nz/society/10-1...
Also would love recommendations of journals in critical higher education whose editors understand feminist epistemologies
Frustrating example of #epistemicmirecognition: rejection (after 2 rounds of review and reviewers recommending acceptance) from journal editor because this autoethnographic paper sounds like a story retrospectively told from my experiences (and so cannot be "academically rigorous inquiry"). Sigh.
“In the Kalahari, one little boy who would almost certainly be diagnosed with autism in an American doctor’s office is highly valued for his abilities… the boy, his father told me, “is great herding goats. He always knows where they are in the day or night.””
www.nytimes.com/2025/09/24/o...
This is a super helpful and interesting window into the editorial process - I learned a lot! I found the explanation of the relationship between editor and reviewer reports in final decision-making especially helpful to understand.
I was a grad student when Trump got elected in 2016, and the next day a very senior professor commented: "just goes to show the dangers of an uneducated populace."
I have always remembered that remark over the last few years of social and political regression. Lest we forget what education is for.
And you know so much more than them! You know so much more than you did the last time you taught, you’ve forgotten how much you know
Trump helped me learn to recognise narcissistic people in my own life. Once you see the pattern and understand the drivers, confusing people become a lot more predictable. Thanks Donald, I guess?
It was, I think, the most exciting episode I’ve ever seen of any franchise. So well edited too. What a dream cast, what a joy to watch them
And the students are so much younger right?!
Please tell Lisa congratulations ngā mihi nui on an amazing first episode and I’m so proud of her! Also why is she not on Bluesky
#AcademicSky #SciPub #PeerReview #PhDSky #OpenScience #AcademicResearch #AcademicWriting #ScholarlyPublishing #AcademicPublishing #AcademicChatter 🧪
We've had huge societal shifts that made childhood a private matter instead of a collective social responsibility, then wonder why so many youth are alienated & vulnerable. We need to think about this with a social & generational lens on gender & power, not an individualised developmentalist lens.
We are asking boys, who are age-segregated and stripped of agency in schools, where they must play a social Game of Thrones, to resist the vortex of power and make themselves relationally vulnerable without any models as to how. This is actually super hard and wise adult men need to step in to help.
If boys are being algorithmically gender-segregated into cultural bubbles where leaders and role models convert their vulnerability into a sense of power, then that's a potent vortex and we can't hold kids responsible for knowing how to navigate that alone. This is a hermeneutic injustice issue.
A valuable checklist. Thanks Julie. And for those seeking to explore further and challenge adultism in research, can I offer some additional resources from my own back catalogue: www.harryshier.net/docs/Shier-A...
www.harryshier.net/docs/Shier-W...