Catherine Baker

Is Terry as disappointed by Eurovision as a number of people on here currently…?

"Everything is politics...You don't get to make art in a fascist state"

CMAT delivering, mar is gnách. 👏

(Same goes for sport btw)

#Speirgorm

Half Excel, Half Imagination: UMK's Quirky Confidence And Rebellion Promotional image for an article prvieiwng UMK 2026 (photo: Ben Robertson)

What sets UMK, Finland’s selection show for Eurovision, apart from the others is the quality of its staging concepts, argues @bensvision.bsky.social. Here, he speaks with Show Producer Matti Myllyaho to learn how Yle finds each act, the quality-over-quantity approach, and how it all comes together.

"He propagates what we call cyborg conservatism."

I spoke with @quinnslobodian.com and @bentarnoff.com for this week’s @verfassungsblog.de editorial about their new book "Muskism" and the fusion of political authority and machine power.

📖 Read the full interview here: verfassungsblog.de/muskism/

…or of European public broadcasters?

I loved this article, particularly this: "In highlighting the ways some fans endeavour to minimize or avoid contributing to harm, even as they continue to watch to the contest, I do not aim to let people off the hook for more complicit actions, but to show that complicity and resistance coexist"

“I was completely heartbroken”: Trans woman forced to stop playing cricket for fun | Good Law Project When the ECB banned trans women, Lily’s amateur club barred her from the team where she had played for years – we’re helping her hit back

"These rules are hurting women who just want to play sport with their friends.

"We’re helping Lily sue the ECB for discrimination under the Equality Act 2010. Lily, and players like her across the UK, are pillars of their community, and excluding them is a stain on women’s sport."

*agrees in historian*

Not been following Eurovision much for obvious reasons, but this long read from Catherine is a great exploration of the complicated cultural history some ex-Yugo nations are struggling with on the musical front <3

Few in this country have worked to promote the understanding of race and class as historical phenomena in Britain as long, or as well, as Catherine Hall.

None of it is a fad. It is all politics, in the hard, real sense.

Witchiness, feminism, ethnonationalism, Balkan religious and historical messiness, the intersection of art and politics, complex messaging and the lack of it, etc etc
There's no politics in Eurovision though.

Teaching Slavery Teaching Slavery offers ground-breaking research and practical guidance for teaching Britain’s role in transatlantic slavery. Combining historical analysis with classroom strategies, it equips educato...

I cannot recommend highly enough this free, open access resource for anyone teaching about slavery in the UK

uclpress.co.uk/book/teachin...

It certainly took me back to when I was writing mine!

‘Why is history writing itself all over again?’: 37 things about Lelek which can all be true at once This year’s Eurovision Song Contest will be taking place without five of its most regular participants, including one from the post-Yugoslav space: Slovenia’s broadcaster was one of the earliest to…

Since Lelek became Croatia’s #Eurovision entry, I’ve been trying to think through where they sit in 🇭🇷 and 🇪🇺 cultural politics right now.

New blog post: ‘Why is history writing itself all over again?’: 37 things about Lelek which can all be true at once bakercatherine.wordpress.com/2026/02/26/w...

Policy priority 2 after 4 years of Russia’s war against Ukraine: Stop relying on 🇺🇦's ‘resilience’ to ensure its survival. European leaders should not look at the dogged endurance of Ukraine’s armed forces & civilians & assume that it is infinite.

Read here: buff.ly/6RWmjER

Whatever else you’ve done today, you probably haven’t had a £2m Fabergé egg nicked out of your handbag.

There’s more to say about how the Fabergés were helping a Russian Empire that was colonising Ukraine, the Caucasus etc assert itself as an imperial power, but that’s a whole other conversation.

And he got away with her laptop. How big was this handbag…?

Queer histories in the farm records What can farm records teach us about same-sex relationships? Researcher Tim Jerrome shares his work exploring queer rural experiences.

If you're researching queer history in England, farm records might be one of the last places you'd check.

Yet for #LGBTQHistoryMonth, @timjerrome.bsky.social shares how he's tracing queer histories within our farm archives, and gives tips for future research.

merl.reading.ac.uk/news-and-vie...

Politics take center stage at 2026 Winter Olympics From JD Vance at the Opening Ceremony to athletes refusing to shut up and ski, politics has been a major story at the 2026 Olympics.

‘In other words, the Olympics has always been about more than just the sports athletes compete in, and the Games have always been political. So, too have sports outside of the Olympics … “Everyone’s humanity is worth more than sports.”’ awfulannouncing.com/news/politic...

YouTube video by Festival of Tomorrow Festival Of Tomorrow - Eurovision and the future of broadcast entertainment

One of the exhibition curators was speaking a few weeks ago - it takes so long to develop exhibitions like these that this is legacy from #Eurovision being in 🇬🇧 in 2023 www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9HI...

I was *just* at a wonderful event on queer cultures and the post-Yugoslav space at the IAS last week.

Firmed up some ways of thinking with Bosnian queer ideas of possibility, connected an activist and researcher who didn’t know each other, and that’s just what one person got from being there.

‘The turn of c20/21 witnessed mainstream politicians hype the far right & use it as a scarecrow, while they positioned themselves as the bulwark: vote for us to save democracy!… Yet as crises remained unaddressed & things worsened, the far right found itself increasingly legitimised & mainstreamed’

Bluesky autocorrect seems to have its own miniature internal demons over and above whatever Apple thinks it’s doing (and at same time even less likely to catch the extra letters between words I type all the time) - am continually deleting and reposting things…

Myth, monsters and making sense of a disenchanted world: why everyone is reading fantasy I have made the leap from literary fiction to fantasy – for those who think it’s mere wish-fulfilment, here’s why we need that thing with the dragons

‘…(paradoxically) a kind of necessary realism, arising in response to qualities of the contemporary world that we couldn’t properly attend to, couldn’t narrate, any other way’ www.theguardian.com/books/2026/f...

Vince Rafael, my teacher and dear friend, and eminent historian of the Philippines, passed away today. If you work in cultural anthropology, translation studies, Asian studies, Asian Am, you'll know the monumental impact he had. He also endlessly supported young scholars. He'll be deeply missed.

Monica, Erica, Rita, Tina: Why do so many women’s names end in A? There’s a certain air of femininity around the letter A. For one reason, it brings a great number of modern female first names to a close. A sample of famous names, especially if skewed towards the…

A pattern among women's names gave me a reason to dig very deep into linguistic prehistory, lost grammar and language's arbitrariness. These rank among my favourite interests, along with 1990s pop music.

Put them all together, and I can offer you this long read:
dannybate.com/2026/02/19/m...

congratulations rümeysa

If you haven’t, please read this beautiful, horrible op ed by her on the conditions in which she finished her phd

www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...

*waves* One more person I’m going to see today in between much the same kind of journey!

Nazi letters reveal paper restorers’ role in compiling Holocaust ‘hitlist’ Exclusive: Research uncovers programme to make centuries-old records legible to detect people’s ancestry

Fascinating story about how illegible documents were made readable for the Nazis in “a shocking abuse of skill”. Beware the uses to which things can be put: the problem is the user. But imagine if the Nazis had had AI... www.theguardian.com/world/2026/f...

*disbelieves* *remembers own age* *sighs*