Severine

Halloween cats 🎃

Cat tree: 1) tree for cats, 2) tree of cats 🐈

A green lawn with people sitting out on a sunny day. A stately home in the background.

A green lawn with people sitting out on a sunny day. A cafeteria in the background.

A crowd of around 70 people standing in the foyer of a library, looking up and smiling.

A crowd of around 70 people standing in the foyer of a library, looking up and smiling. A gold tree made of Open University Shields is on the wall.

We're excited to welcome our Oct #OUGradSch25 PhD cohort to campus today! We can’t wait to hear about their research journeys.
On Fri, we’ll also welcome Professional Doctorate students.
Also welcome to the first PhD by Distance Learning cohort!
@oulibrary.bsky.social @openuniversity.bsky.social

Met our 9 new WELS doctoral students today at induction, excited to hear more about their research in the coming days and years! 🤒

What we can do about belonging for postgraduates Postgraduates are often overlooked in belonging initiatives. Katy Burgess and Rachel Wilson outline some practical steps that could make a difference

This week on Wonkhe: Postgraduates are often overlooked in belonging initiatives. Katy Burgess and Rachel Wilson outline some practical steps that could make a difference

Ready for a team away day! Found a creative room on campus 🙌

🥳

The best way to relax after a long day is cuddling these two 🥰

Springer Nature book on machine learning is full of made-up citations Would you pay $169 for an introductory ebook on machine learning with citations that appear to be made up? If not, you might want to pass on purchasing Mastering Machine Learning: From Basics to Ad…

Scary stuff
retractionwatch.com/2025/06/30/s...

Loving being with doctoral students, present and former, including one behind the camera!
#EST2025Leeds

In Manchester to see Iron Maiden 🙌

Submit by JULY 6: Open call for translations of literature from Asia and Oceania. Our publisher, @twolinespress.bsky.social‬, is looking for samples of novels, story collections, and literary non-fiction. More information here ➡️ www.catranslation.org/books/submit...

Super proud of Ellie submitting her thesis today 👏 💙 happy supervisor 💕

New Post: Are EU students about to be treated like British students once more – and, if so, what will it mean for UK universities and students? www.hepi.ac.uk/2025/05/18/a...

A beautiful sunny day on campus! Learning all about my new role and meeting lovely new colleagues!

Waddesdon Manor, beautiful place

No worries if not? Why Brits need to start saying what they actually mean New research shows that British people are having conversations littered with ‘polite-isms’ to conceal the fact that they’re seething. Hannah Ewens thinks this could be solved by everyone having more ...

So true
www.independent.co.uk/life-style/b...

Gigil, alamak among new words in Oxford English Dictionary The Oxford English Dictionary has added new untranslatable words from South East Asia.

BBC News - Gigil: The new word in the dictionary for overwhelming cuteness
www.bbc.com/news/article...

Spivak decries the “trivialisation” of the humanities by universities. “They are not a cash cow, so they don’t add to the revenue structure of these corporate universities, and that’s the bottom line.”
www.timeshighereducation.com/news/gayatri...

The crisis in UK higher education is a national security issue The UK cannot enter an era of heightened geopolitical instability without high levels of social resilence, say Katharine Wright and Megan Armstrong

'How can we respond to global adversaries, or engage with partners, if we lack language graduates?'
www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/cris...

Ending the night with this.
*Get your hankies*
A D-Day veteran called a gracious and humbled Zelenskyy a hero.

US friends this might interest you. Front pages of four UK newspapers. For context, 3 of these 4 are right wing (Sun, Mail, Times).

A very thoughtful thread on dress

Job opportunity: Full professor of Interpreting Studies with a Focus on Technology, Centre for Translation Studies, University of Vienna. Deadline for applications: 15 April 2025.
berufungsservice.univie.ac.at/fileadmin/us...

Books mentioning slavery, civil rights removed from shelves at Fort Campbell schools - ClarksvilleNow.com At an elementary school at Fort Campbell, home of the 101st Airborne Division, librarians are hard at work scrubbing the shelves for books that contain references to slavery, the civil rights movement...

This is where we are now: An elementary school at Fort Campbell has removed all books from its library that so much as *allude* to slavery or the civil rights movement.

The wholesale erasure of history in real time.

UK HE shrinking This is a live page of all the redundancies, restructures, reorganisations, and closures taking place across the sector at the moment. Solidarity to all. This sector is vital to the country’s…

QMUL UCU is doing the kind of work we need UCU to do nationally to highlight the catastrophic destruction of higher education across the regions & nations. Thousands of jobs & so much talent and expertise lost. Shame on this Govt for sitting by & letting it happen qmucu.org/qmul-transfo...

Predatory Journals Scientific Publishing

Recently, while trying to discern if the research I was reading was sound I wished that there was a list of known predatory journals I could check as a first pass to save (enormous amounts of) time. Today, I learned that there is one. @predatoryjournals.org
predatoryjournals.org/about

The UK’s redundancy crisis: four views from the front line Higher education news feeds are currently dominated by near-daily announcements of large job cuts across the UK. But what effect is all this having on the atmosphere within the departments affected – ...

"In the wake of 40 years of externally driven reform, we are experiencing cumulative confusion about what universities are for and what the substantive guiding values of academic life are"
www.timeshighereducation.com/depth/uks-re...

An interesting proposal for an urgent question