Itay Lotem

I think there’s very much a ‘you can’t have it both ways’ element here: the complete businessification of HE discourse actually makes it harder to go culture wars that specific front (doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, see trans issues, where a segment of crazy transphobia here is… salient).

And I think the culture war at uni salience also can’t be the same as in the US because we don’t have the same idea of what uni is for, and since the establishment of the idea of ‘uni as nothing more than professional training’ there’s even less space for arguing unis are cultural agents?

On the latter I have many colleagues who are entirely convinced it’s all about vocational stuff (lambasting reading as non inclusive, making fun of research as ‘not authentic learning’) and argue that devaluing our work is good for inclusivity.

So I’m not sure it’s always management taking ‘easy’ decisions, but just adopting this bizarre enthusiasm for metrics, competition with other unis and most importantly the idea of ‘vocational learning as inclusive’.

Also if there’s an ideological element to government reactions to the looming crisis, it’s not really the same ideology? In the UK it’s a lot more the businessification of universities than actually attacking them as evil.

Make Cheese Not War: Transnational Resistance and the Larzac​ Join Dr Andrew WM Smith to discover how rural resistance on France’s Larzac plateau became a global movement of solidarity and success.

This coming Thursday 4 December, I'm giving a public lecture in Paris at ULIP (in English) about my new book on peasants and protest on the Larzac.

You're very welcome to come along in person or to follow along online. Details at the following link:

www.london.ac.uk/institute-pa...

🗃 #skystorians

So let me get this straight, so you’re going to create chaos at universities that will not only make some collapse, but also not raise hardly enough money to balance anything, and then you’ll have to raise taxes on top of having wrecked what’s left of universities?

Imagine having a thumping majority in parliament and deciding to use it for something as squalid as this.

So many of the post 1960s waves of racism and segregation against South Asian or Afro-Caribbean migrants in UK cities map on to many of the same neighbourhoods that experienced waves of pre-1960s racism and segregation against Irish and Jewish migrants.

Après l'investiture de Chikirou et de Gaccio, le bal des militants insoumis qui sont mécontents de leurs positions poutiniste / antivax / antisémite / homophobe / pro-Chine / pro-Assad, mais qui vous expliquent qu'il faut quand même voter pour "la gauche de rupture"...

I think this thread just explained my life to me.

Ah oui. Je ne l’ai pas annoncé ici en septembre, même si j’aurais dû, peut-être 😉 je reste jusqu’à fin janvier. Trop court, hélas !

Quand l’antiracisme devint postcolonial  - Iméra Itay Lotem, titulaire de la chaire EHESS/Iméra – Etudes transrégionales 2025-2026, interroge le tournant antiraciste des années 2000.

Vous passez à Marseille et avez envie de venir discuter la race et l’histoire de l’antiracisme demain ? Je serai à l’Iméra à 17h30. Venez nombreux ! Je ferai de mon mieux de ne pas être trop chiant

Der Herr ist Sprecher für Antisemitismusbekämpfung in seiner Fraktion. Die Vereinnahmung jüdischer Anliegen für rassistische Hetze gegen andere Opfer des Nationalsozialismus ist selbst einer nach rechts entgleisten CDU unwürdig.

It’s also kinda interesting how much Londoners’ self image is so attached to how Paris is supposedly filthy and dysfunctional, when in actual fact it’s the exact opposite today. And it’s a bit hard to tell them: you know the Liz Line is just a clear RER with a 50-year delay.

But yeah, I also get the argument. I think there’s that weird disconnect between how some people keep on shouting how London is the GREATEST CITY IN THE WORLD and how much it’s all ripping in the seams and the Liz Line was “look, we’ve still got it!”.

Tvärbanan är också bara tvärbanan? Den är bra (ännu bättre när man bor i Årsta). Men ändå, det känns inte så emotionellt stort som gula linjen.

Aren’t inhabitants of every big city emotional about a new tube line? I remember when the 14 opened in Paris in the 90s and it was a big thing for people. And I can only imagine the joy when gula linjen opens in Stockholm (whenever that happens).

Think the marriage of convenience between the historically antisemitic far-right and the Israeli right has been bad for Diaspora Jews? Wait until you see the divorce.

So my great aunt in Paris just sent me a screen capture of that post, complaining about the “masochism” of NY Jews, and telling me “my wokisme” will be the end of us all. And anyone fueling this dangerous nonsense is just a pyromaniac.

Also I just realised how many reposts with very personal stories that thing got, because it’s utterly bleeding insane.

I want the world to stop. Now.

(I mean, I call my great aunt/cousin, who is the daughter of my grandfather’s cousin, my aunt. In my case it’s not a “big family” but a family where everything is between kinda got murdered, but that’s not important. WHY IS THIS EVEN A TALKING POINT?!)

Instead, they need to fight tooth and nail as long as a good majority of voters still find that kind of politics unacceptable and morally repugnant. Otherwise all they do is to weaken any belief in the necessity of goodwill in politics and society as a whole. And it might be too late afterwards.

The second is that it’s really important to just resist that normalisation before it happens. That’s why Labour’s slow response to the latest Tory radicalisation is so self defeating. It reeks of accepting tacitly that voters now want nastiness and they need to abide by the tide of history. 3/4

And that means two very different things to resist that new far-right energy (and normalisation). The first is that it’s very hard to regain voters who have normalised the idea of nastiness as a political value, as it implies accepting new trade-offs, including a dog-eat-dog view of politics. 2/4

What is absolutely striking about the current political conversation is that what defines much of the lurch to the (far) right is the logic of embracing nastiness and abandoning goodwill for the sake of political positioning. A type of “après moi le déluge” that gives supporters utter freedom. 1/4

Quand l’antiracisme devint postcolonial  - Iméra Itay Lotem, titulaire de la chaire EHESS/Iméra – Etudes transrégionales 2025-2026, interroge le tournant antiraciste des années 2000.

Si jamais vous étiez à Marseille le 13 novembre et aviez envie de venir parler d’antiracisme et le tournant de 2005, venez me voir à l’Iméra à 17h30 !

The sense of quick unraveling and complete loss of any backbone and coordinates is the oddest thing about waking up to how British political establishment is talking about cleansing and deportation as if it were just normal? And even if I see how we got here, it doesn’t make it any less depressing.

I’m glad senior Labour figures are feeling like this, but they need to translate their feelings into action. Real action, not just complaining to journalists on background. Get your damn house in order.

« Pourquoi il y a débat ? Parce que nous n’étions que huit journalistes à suivre le procès. Pas une seule télé », rappelle @fabricearfi.bsky.social.

Remettre sans relâche la brutalité des faits au cœur de la conversation publique sur la condamnation et l’incarcération de Nicolas Sarkozy 👇