Aida Hassan

Sent off both my national and local UCU ballots today! Historical moment for our local ballot as we’re the first union branch to potentially organise industrial action over the repression of Palestine solidarity as a workplace issue.

@kclucu.bsky.social

We are publishing a monthly Palestine Global Health Collective Newsletter featuring articles, books, podcasts, reports, events, and more on broadly health related topics while not losing sight of culture, politics, and art on Palestine.
Sign up here: mailchi.mp/d5c5a22308b9...

Call for papers: Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial 12th annual workshop- Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial (CPD) | BISA - Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial (CPD) Working Group

🚨 Call for papers 🚨

Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial 12th annual workshop - a one-day in-person event focussing on the ethical commitments of academic research, scholarship and teaching 🎉

Send in your papers now 👉 https://ow.ly/nUy250XjIZw

niharika pandit Sarah Gharib Seif

UK in £8bn deal to sell Typhoon jets to Turkey despite human rights concerns Starmer’s announcement on visit to Ankara comes as jailed opposition leader Ekrem İmamoğlu faces fresh charges

Seemingly no amount of carnage - from Yemen to Gaza - will cause Labour to deviate from it's decades-old policy of arming the world's worst human rights abusers with the most advanced means of violence. No war crimes too grave. No death toll too high.

www.theguardian.com/business/202...

Seeing Beyond the Core: Alternative visions of order in times of global crisis 6.30pm Weds 22 Oct | Ilias Alami, Lina Benabdallah, Jasmine Gani, Jenna Marshall | Free public event at LSE

Please join us for this panel tomorrow with excellent colleagues.

"Seeing beyond the core: alternative visions of order in times of global crisis"

All welcome: 22 Oct 6.30pm, at LSE
@iliasalami.bsky.social @giuliasciorati.bsky.social @lseir.bsky.social
www.lse.ac.uk/internationa...

UNAids is set to close in 2026 – four years early. Are experts right to be alarmed? The move to shut the agency comes as aid budgets are being slashed, leading to fears that global progress on HIV may be reversed

Excellent piece on the worrying decision to ‘sunset’ UNAIDS in 2026. The rise of injectables has given the tech fix brigade a victory, but it was also the advocacy, social and demographic work of highly stigmatised communities that marked out UNAIDS. www.theguardian.com/global-devel...

Baek Sehee, South Korean Author of “I Want to Die, but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki,” Dies at 35 The writer turned recorded sessions with her therapist into a best-selling memoir, and helped normalize conversations around mental health in South Korea.

Baek Sehee, a South Korean author who wrote the best-selling memoir “I Want to Die, but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki,” died on Thursday at 35. Her frank conversations about therapy and mental health helped her become a cultural phenomenon in her home country and beyond.

This Thursday 16th Oct I'll be speaking on my project on "Severing Colonial Relationality" for the ANU Cais public lecture series. (Online, all welcome).

📍5pm in Canberra (7am BST for early risers in the UK!)
Registration link below 👇 @lseir.bsky.social

cais.cass.anu.edu.au/events/cais-...

Extract from the linked article "Race Reports": "What does it mean for the university to acknowledge the 'displacement of indigenous people' in the nineteenth century as a generative driver of its wealth at the same time as it exhibits a studied indifference or, worse, active hostility to those campaigning against the decimation of the indigenous people of Palestine in the genocide that has been ongoing since October 2023? Within weeks of the onset of the genocide an early facade of institutional neutrality, itself premised on a morally objectionable equation of the violence of the colonised and the coloniser, gave way to outright condemnation of Palestine solidarity"

"Race Reports: How universities 'reckon' with their imperial past, and how their investment portfolios say otherwise." www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/...

Excellent - by @rahulraothariel.bsky.social

Pretend you’re 65 & act accordingly: save your pennies, visit friends, enjoy slow walks in your neighborhood, shrug your shoulders at old beef between family & friends, grow a garden, forgive people because they’re “still young” even if they’re not but hold all politicians accountable. Get a cat.

Petition to move away from reflexivity work altogether if they're just going to be abused by (privileged) academics and researchers for pointless reasons. Otherwise, we'll be forced to read often what I suspect to be a bragging exercise in the form of a positionality statement.

More than 150 lawyers and refugee NGOs report being ‘pressured into silence’ by far-right protesters At least two groups supporting UK asylum seekers have closed their offices after credible threats to their safety

We recently had to close offices due to the far-right threat, and clearly are not alone as asylum orgs face even more intense hostility and abuse than usual. The UK desperately needs clear, anti-racist political narratives on migration to end the slide to fascism. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

New research published in The Lancet finds that Western unilateral sanctions have caused 38 million deaths since 1970. The average death toll ranges from 400,000 to over 1 million per year.

Staggering levels of violence. This system is intolerable and must be replaced.

More extraordinary still is the sanitising of Kirk's politics. Kirk was - and this is just a straightforwardly factual statement - a far right activist. And here's a former British Prime Minister not merely mourning his death or condemning his murder but actively *praising* his politics.

And academic publishing is marked with so much hostility that more often than not impacts racialised and marginalised researchers, sustaining a culture of exclusion and precarity in the academy (not to mention reproducing epistemic injustice). So, and I ask this genuinely, what is the point?

I know epistemic legitimacy might be one of them (but the rise of AI in publishing now calls that into question) but the value beyond that, it's still not clear. We end up rewriting our contributions in different outputs anyway, depending on the audience (e.g. policy for public/third sector).

In the five years working in academia, and the couple year stint working for an academic publisher (before my PhD), I still don't fully know why we even bother with this at all? What value do we get with journal publishing and who benefits (apart from institutions and funders), if any at all?

Richard Seymour · Baseline Communism: David Graeber’s Innovations Graeber seems to have had most fun as an outsider, a movement anthropologist wending his way among anticapitalist...

‘He wonders why useful labour is so undervalued and useless labour so heavily remunerated. Is capitalism doing something supposedly foreclosed by the profit motive?’

@leninology.bsky.social on David Graeber: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

We built a calculator that doesn't work, but don't worry, it's also a plagiarism machine that will tell you to kill yourself. It runs on the world's oceans and costs 10 trillion dollars.

🇵🇸Our Refugee Mental Health and Place Network has published a new blog by Dr Abdullah Aldiwan on "Healing in the face of genocide: How to respond to needs of Palestinian refugees".
🔗 kcl.ac.uk/healing-in-t...
🙏 Please share widely

While it's been stunning to see legacy media finally calling it a genocide, those Palestinians who have been calling it such for 20 months were routinely ignored, hounded and if they lived in Gaza, murdered. Edward Said wrote about this in 1984. Nothing has changed - www.lrb.co.uk/.../edward-s...

It’s pretty depressing that universities and HEIs are normalising AI use for everything - from grant applications to student assignments. Not surprising for the neoliberal university, but so much for valuing independent thought and rigour in our (already flawed) research ethics.

Women receive more than 3x more service requests at work than men. AND colleagues view them more negatively if they say no.

More than forcing victims to say "no", orgs need to compensate equally for actual work and ensure equal service requests.

Kevin Okoth · The Pessimist’s Optimist: Beyond the Postcolony Achille Mbembe is the pessimist’s optimist: he delivers a devastating analysis of the contemporary moment while never...

‘Mbembe has been accused of writing at a “frustrating level of abstraction” and performing “language acrobatics”. But those who stay the course are rewarded.’

Kevin Okoth on the postcolonial theorist Achille Mbembe:
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

You know there are ways to critique (and criticize) development and humanitarian aid —and developmentalism and humanitarianism—without either suggesting they’re unquestionably good or (only a) conspiracy coordinated by nefarious state agents.

Iraq war ‘made extremists of people’: ex-police terrorism chief looks back at 7/7 Exclusive: Former Met officer Neil Basu says there is link between UK foreign policy and radicalisation, and atrocity did lasting damage to race relations

Officially the UK’s counter terrorism policy deines that link (see Prevent, The guidance, Channel guidance), so where does that leave us. And in relation to Palestine, the government’s policy is an absolute denial of this undeniable link www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

The myth of anti-racism in British mental health care [Online] What Palestine reveals about the politics and racism of British mental health care

Research Launch: What Palestine reveals about the politics & racism of British mental health care
Online, July 22, 6-8:30pm BST

Exploring how Palestinian solidarity is silenced, disciplined or managed in healing spaces. Led by @tarekyounis.bsky.social

www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/1441078146...

Why I wrote an expert report supporting the case to deproscribe Hamas in the UK The widespread anxiety around speaking up for Palestine stems from the severe consequences that may follow

Terrorism legislation is State violence.
It ruptures communities and immobilises them for fear of being labeled a "terrorist."
In this article I make a psychological case for deproscription, esp given the current push to proscribe Palestine Action.

www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/why-...