Florian G. Kern

🌍 The Africa Special Interest Group (ASIG) meets every Tuesday from 11:00 — the hub for Africa-focused research at Essex!

Co-directed by Prof Hannah Gibson & Dr. Florian Kern, and open to all — staff, students, and anyone interested. Come say hi! ☕

#EssexGov #ASIG

That’s me talking about links between my daily job and climate change for the @leverhulme.ac.uk, thanks to the Expeditions partner which come to speak to me and championed my research 💙

(yes you can tell it is me because that is indeed my house and I‘m zero tv trained but hey at least it‘s not AI!)

Professor @fgenovese.bsky.social @politicsoxford.bsky.social, specialises in the politics of climate and crises. She reflects on the need to take responsibility in the fight against climate change. www.joinexpeditions.com/experts/4624

An actual pragmatist would evaluate and change course. Someone who understood public opinion might notice that anti-immigrant sentiment responds to media coverage, not objective reality. They might reason that this is not a problem that can be addressed by policy concessions because policy is not what is causing it. They might even consider offering a different narrative and seeing whether that makes a dent. A truly daring politician might consider telling the British public the truth: that they are being lied to by the right-wing press about the cause of the country's problems, and that Reform is capitalising on this for political gain. The government does not seem inclined to do any of this. Despite understanding themselves as critical thinkers, reactionary centrists are conformists at heart. And they are so unmoored in our current age because, increasingly, there is no social consensus for them to conform to. Affluent countries the world over are balkanising into fascist and anti-fascist factions. One must simply pick a side. There is no longer such a thing as “British public opinion” (if there ever was). Rather, half the country supports socially illiberal parties and half supports (broadly speaking) liberal ones, similar to the split in the Brexit referendum. If we follow international trends, the values of these two sides will only grow more irreconcilable. Starmer is—though you would never guess it—the captain of the liberal team. His job is not to find consensus, but to hold his own coalition together.

extremely well put

Our research makes it clear: by capitulating to the right, Labour is driving voters to Reform UK | Tarik Abou-Chadi and Stuart Turnbull-Dugarte Mimicking Farage on immigration is senseless. Labour voters feel betrayed; anti-immigration voters see through the ruse, say academics Tarik Abou-Chadi and Stuart Turnbull-Dugarte

For the Guardian, @turnbulldugarte.com and I discuss our research that clearly shows one thing: Labour's anti-immigration strategy will only strengthen Reform and weaken its own electoral prospects. It won't win voters back but ultimately normalizes the far right

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Most of the time, I’m outnumbered.

Angiachi presents at Makerere University

MCCRA team members Angiachi Demetris, Hannah Gibson, and Fiona Tumusiime present research on language and conflict at Makerere University, Uganda.

Most of the team will be in Kampala soon - stay tuned!

@uniessexgov.bsky.social @africasigessex.bsky.social @universityofessex.bsky.social

A collage of images showing highlights from the project team meeting.

❗This week the MCCRAfrica project team is in #Kampala -planning the next stages of our research.

Today, we kicked off with a planning session for our upcoming field trip in the #DRC led by Dr. Alain Bernard Nseka and Dr. Delphin Kayembe.

More updates to follow, as the workshop unfolds…stay tuned!

It’s that old Arminius and Teutoburg forest spirit.

Very Bielefeld of Bielefeld train station to cancel all trains to and from Bielefeld.
#DeutscheBahn

The vanilla manosphere.

What happens to central banks under pressure? : Planet Money President Donald Trump has been pressuring the Federal Reserve from a few angles. So we wanted to look at other examples of political pressure on central banks, to see what it might mean for us and fo...

I had the pleasure of joining NPR's @planetmoney.bsky.social to talk about central banks, what’s happening with the Fed, & why it matters.

Big thanks to @erikaberas.bsky.social for a fun and engaging interview (+ Carola Binder & Lev Menand).

@uniessexgov.bsky.social
www.npr.org/2025/09/05/n...

👏 Congrats to Dr Laura Sudulich on completing her Parliamentary Academic Fellowship with @ukparliament.parliament.uk!

Outcome: a global map of parliamentary public engagement 🗺️

📅 Launch Event: 25 Sept, Westminster
🎙️ Chaired by @shane-martin.bsky.social

#EssexGov #EssexImpact #UKParliament

📈 The University of Essex is on the rise!
The Guardian University Guide 2026 ranks us:
🏆 12th overall in the UK
📚 12th for Politics
🌍 9th for International Relations
#EssexGov #EssexImpact #EssexIR #UniversityRankings

That’s awesome and very much deserved @carlmc.bsky.social! Congrats!

Congrats @dianebolet.bsky.social! looking forward to seeing what you find.

President Trump’s attempt to remove Fed governor Lisa Cook could undermine the economy -- and amp up inflation.

The Fed’s role is to keep decisions like interest rates tied to data, not short-term political gain. Video from an article by political economists Ana Carolina Garriga and Cristina Bodea

When you were just one voluntary severance scheme away from sucking at this. #whodathunk

It’s August, but a decently sized @uniessexgov.bsky.social Institutions group met today for our monthly reading workshop to discuss @sascenciob.bsky.social’s super interesting working paper on gender quotas and intraparty battles. No presentation, just reading and discussion. Good group, this.

Ever heard of The Self Sabotage Workshop? @teodannemann.bsky.social @riadsala.bsky.social

The purveyors of AI want us to believe that AI is the perfect educator. Because they want us to believe that it's more effective to invest tax dollars in private companies than in public services.

Es gibt aktuell keinen besseren Journalismus zu afrikanischen Themen als @thecontinent.org und Ihr könnt ihn einfach über Signal und WhatsApp UMSONST abonnieren:

wa.me/27738056068?...

signal.me#eu/_OpoNMfIF...

Matula, hau mich raus.

Das ist der Zeitgeist: aufgeben

Erklär mir mal einer warum Superpunk‘s Ich weigere mich aufzugeben nur 55k streams of Spotify hat. Unfassbar.

@dalangmalang.bsky.social da muss mehr kommen.

Everything is AI news or AI related opining, so as a cleanser here is one of the most humanly raw pieces of art still around:

Opera dei Pupi (hand-made marionettes theatre telling stories of the Crusades) in Palermo, Sicily

This is very bad. Although entirely predictable. Once more the humanities are being cut back to prop up STEM and, increasingly, AI investment (including at the expense of bench science). In the past, cuts to humanities were promoted on two separate logic streams that do not hold true: /1

Italy's top court says climate case against Eni can continue A climate change case against Italian energy group Eni can continue, the country's top appeals court has ruled, in a jurisdiction case that had been raised by environmental groups Greenpeace Italia and ReCommon.

The fossil fuel majors are going to be held legally accountable eventually. It is a question of whether they face justice before they condemn us to an unliveable future, or after www.reuters.com/sustainabili...

Great research workshop yesterday with our @mccra-essex.bsky.social team discussing our paper drafts on multilingualism, conflict and conflict resolution in Africa, as well as our fieldwork plans. Lots more to come. @uniessexgov.bsky.social @odi.global

But elsewhere is "a forest of confounding variables", says Mark Antoniou of Western Sydney University. Bilinguals are not like monolinguals in lots of ways. The child of diplomats, raised in a foreign language abroad, may have cognitive and educational advantages that have nothing to do with bilingualism. At the other end of the socioeconomic ladder, though, studies have found striking evidence that in poorer parts of the world multilingual people show the strongest advantages from speaking several languages. Where schooling is scant, researchers surmise that bilingualism exercises children's brains in a way that their schooling may not.

Interesting piece on the complex research field around the benefits of speaking other languages
economist.com/science-and-...