Chris Pearson

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Practice Research Fellowship Scheme Announcing our Medical Humanities In Practice Research Fellowship Scheme

📣 Applications are open for our 2026-27 Medical Humanities in Practice Research Fellowship scheme! The scheme supports professionals and researchers from health or voluntary and community sectors to develop research within the medical humanities.

Apply by 30 Jan:

Thanks so much Sam 🐶

Collared is out in paperback today! 🐶🐾

Hey authors, the official list of Anthropic works is available for searching.

secure.anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com/lookup

Hey there. Today we launch @g-ehr.bsky.social - an open-access, digital publication of the American Society for Environmental History and dedicated to publishing work that explores topics connecting the environmental present with its past. Let me know if you have questions! @aseh.bsky.social

Melting Metropolis: An Interview with Daniel Cumming and Kara Murphy Schlichting — The Gotham Center for New York City History Melting Metropolis: An Interview with Daniel Cumming and Kara Murphy Schlichting Interviewed By Rachel Pitkin Public archives help create a record that highlights, or at least can suggest, the var...

This Climate Week NYC, read about the work of our NYC team Kara Schlichting and Daniel Cumming on the Gotham Centre blog: www.gothamcenter.org/blog/melting...

[with brilliant photos from our Urban Archive collaboration]

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n

NYC’s Fight Against Extreme Heat: A Citywide Effort — Melting Metropolis

Who is in charge of tackling extreme heat in New York City? Read about @queenscollegecuny.bsky.social intern Selassie Mawuko's reseach on our blog:

www.meltingmetropolis.com/teamblog/nyc...

#nyc #climatechange #heatwave

Manchester University Press - Electric wind Electric wind - Browse and buy the Paperback edition of Electric wind by Marianna Dudley

If you would like to review my book for a publication, get in touch! The book is a history of wind energy and I’m trying to get it out to as wide an audience as possible.

manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526182968/

Post-Doctoral Research Associate - LSTM Decolonial History Project | Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine The Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (LSTM) is seeking a Post-Doctoral Research Associate (PDRA) to support the delivery of a two-year, independent academic research project to develop a rigorous...

A 2 year postdoc research assistant job to work on the early institutional history of Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, leading to the writing of a report to contribute to broader decolonising and reparative efforts. Around 40k, deadline 5 Sept 25.

app.vacancy-filler.co.uk/salescrm/Car...

bar chart showing deaths associate with extreme heat with and without climate change in 12 European cities

About 1500 of the approx. 2300 people that will have lost their lives across 12 European cities last week would still live, if it wasn't for our burning of oil, coal and gas. If we care about the right to life, we need to stop burning fossil fuels. www.imperial.ac.uk/grantham/pub...

Children escape the heat of the East Side New York by using fire hydrant as a shower bath

Op-ed piece from team members Kara Schlichting and Selassie Mawuko:

Does NYC need a heat czar?

citylimits.org/opinion-its-...

TLDR: yes!

Essential reading in @citylimitsnews.bsky.social given the high the temperatures #NYC has experienced this summer

#heatwave

📷 LoC

Associate Professor in Environmental History (281801) | University of Stavanger Job title: Associate Professor in Environmental History (281801), Employer: University of Stavanger, Deadline: Thursday, August 7, 2025

Important news for the #envhist crowd: We are hiring an Associate Professor of Environmental History!

www.jobbnorge.no/en/available...

Application deadline is August 7.

Some tips for those interested from abroad in thread 👇

Delighted to see this finally announced!
Liverpool-led AHRC Doctoral Focal Awards
Funding loads of Environmental/Medical Humanities PhDs with CHASE, @livunienglish.bsky.social, & lots of collaborators!!!

Congratulations!!! Brilliant news! 🎉

How to turn off AI on Google searches. Took me 30secs 🙏🏻🥳

Many thanks for including @meltingmetropolis.bsky.social in this round up. Delighted to be building on your excellent book Fatal Isolation!

Heat waves everywhere in the global north this week, so time for a thread on heat humanities research. Humanities scholars are exceptionally good at analyzing intersections of race, class, gender, and labor to highlight social vulnerabilities to meteorological disasters.

We have a ☀️NEW ☀️date for Stand of the Sun - Thursday 19 June 2025.

Still FREE, still at Orleans House Gallery, Twickenham, TW1 3BL

Reserve tickets here: www.ticketsource.co.uk/richmond-art...

A reminder of an upcoming webinar organised by ESEH UK & Ireland region on 'New Directions in Urban Climates of the Atlantic Archipelago'

May 20, 2025: 13:00 – 15:00 (GMT +1)

Presenters: @erikahanna.bsky.social @rebwright.bsky.social @chrisjpearson.bsky.social

Zoom link eseh.org/envhistoday-...

Photo of Antoine Marc and Bumi Thomas with Bryony Ella's artwork My Body is a Sundail

☀️Come to a FREE Melting Metropolis event at Orleans House Gallery on #Summer #Solstice 21 June 2025: Stand of the Sun ☀️

Art, music and dance, with Bryony Ella, Bumi Thomas and Antoine Marc

Booking essential:

www.ticketsource.co.uk/richmond-art...

#climatecrisis #londonart

Historians, please sign!

IHR@Liverpool: Difficult Histories

We are excited to announce that @liverpooluni.bsky.social will host the next big @ihr.bsky.social workshop - IHR@Liverpool! The topic is 'Difficult Histories' ✨

This is geared toward PGRs + early career folks & there are bursaries available!

Sign-up + more info ➡️ www.history.ac.uk/events/ihrli...

Organising a conference on extinction with Duncan Wilson. We have enough funding to provide free registration, some support towards accommodation and limited bursaries for travel. CFP here, with the form to submit your abstract.

We also have incredible speakers for the keynote and plenaries!

Exciting film-maker opportunity to work with Melting Metropolis

META BOOK THIEVES - They Must Do The Write Thing The Society of Authors are protesting Meta’s HQ today This image shows illustrations of authors holding placards saying “make it fair” and “do the write thing”

Today UK authors are protesting against Meta for stealing our work to train their AI model. Authors earn an average of £7000 per year, we are not rich, and yet a trillion dollar company decided it didn’t want to license our work fairly as it was “too expensive”

Theft is not a valid alternative.

Amazing opportunity alert!

📢ACTUAL ACADEMIC JOB🚨

Tell the ECRs in your lives that we have full-time, 12-month teaching fellowship @livunienglish.bsky.social

So, while the world continues to burn, they can at least be paid properly to teach books and in a friendly department that is 75% human (10% Witch; 15% miscellaneous)

Postdoctoral Researcher: Colonial History of Botanic Gardens Interested in colonial history, botanical gardens and decolonisation? Join our international team of scholars!

*Job Claxon*: we're hiring a Postdoc to research the Colonial History of the Botanic Gardens at Universiteit Utrecht.

www.uu.nl/en/organisat...

#skystorians #jobs #histofscience #colonialhistory #botanicalgardens