Laura Graham

Saw this on FB and it feels so pertinent

JK Rowling tweeting got a boycott of M&S, stretching facts to the breaking point, and making the world a worse place for absolutely everyone.

The employee asked the girl and her mother if they needed help shopping. That’s it. That’s all. The misinformation, the insinuations (because the facts are inconveniently benign) are EXACTLY what was done to lesbians in the 80s. This is the product of hate and fear, not reality.

I prosecute and defend the most serious sexual offences in our courts.

The overwhelming majority of offenders are British-born. Overwhelmingly the victim is someone known to them, either a partner or relative.

Anybody purporting to care about protecting women might start there.

I mean more like months/years if you do participatory work. And it counts for nothing if you don't get the money 😡😡

If government wants to hear about “efficiency”: as all of us have to buy out time to do any research, since unis overload other work & often don’t even notionally cover research, we’re ALL made to apply to those things. So we’re all spending weeks writing apps rather than doing actual research.

UKRI award rate halves in seven years as grant applications double - Research Professional News Trends across research councils prompt warning that system is “overstretched or broken”

UKRI award rate halves in seven years as grant applications double. www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-r...

As others have noted, promotion often depends on getting grants, but so does permanency and the transition from precarity and, increasingly, surviving compulsory redundancy.

something I keep thinking about and which I can't make up my mind on is: were swathes of the right, centre-right and, in some cases, the centre, full of racists hiding their beliefs for decades, or are these people all incredibly suggestible? neither answer is good!

Book Launch - Newcastle Prison A History: 1828 - 1925 Join the authors to celebrate the launch of the new book Newcastle Prison A History: 1828 - 1925.

Associate Professor Helen Rutherford has co-written a book on Newcastle Prison. There will be a book launch on Thursday 21 August at 6:30pm at Newcastle City Library. You can book your place at the launch here - www.tiny.cc/newcastlepri...

Starmer really is a moral vacuum. Utterly devoid of any principles.

Palestinians either deserve statehood, or they don’t. Whether Israel continues to murder them by starvation or not is totally irrelevant to their claim on statehood

Exciting news - Prof. Sarah Kingston, Dr Nicola Harding and I are organising a special issue for @areajournal.bsky.social titled "The Geographies of Fraud and Financial Crime".

Please see attached for details and share with anyone who might be interested!

It wasn’t long ago that media used to say lesbians in bathrooms or changing rooms sexualised “innocent” straight women and made them uncomfortable. Such fears were weaponised politically to vilify lesbian women as sexual predators. Now we see the same comments recycled about trans women. It’s gross.

Maybe we should start listening to the people who said that this kind of thing was going to happen? Maybe they're the ones actually speaking common sense?

27 people — including a priest, professor and health workers — were arrested today under terrorism laws.

Their crime? Peacefully holding signs opposing genocide.

This is how we sleepwalk into fascism.

a cartoon character with a cane says that doll is evil i tells you evil evil Alt: Grandpa Simpson with a cane says hysterically ‘that doll is evil i tells you evil evil’.

I’m becoming a terrible old bore about generative AI, I know. But it’s doing my head in seeing the normalisation of this dishonest and dangerous technology.

What awful news. So sorry

woody from toy story is peeking out from behind a cardboard box that says i 'm back ALT: woody from toy story is peeking out from behind a cardboard box that says i 'm back

Finally redownloaded this app after a couple of months. What have I missed?!

JK Rowling: 'Nobody who hasn't been poor can understand what it means'

I have been. I have lived on friends sofas and hid when landlords came to collect the rent. I've done without electricity and gas because I couldn't put money in the meter. As far as I can say, it didn't turn me into a hateful, bigoted, individual who has turned what they do into demonising others.

I would go further and say that *not considering the justice implications* of your work makes it *less* rigorous. Indeed centering your work on justice is a more rigorous.

That said, I also have criticisms of how academic "rigor" is defined and weaponized within academia.

A Law Letter on FWS v Scottish Ministers A coalition of legal academics have drafted a letter setting out our support for trans rights and our concerns about the FWS v Scottish Ministers UKSC ruling. We are opening it up for signature to ev...

Dear legal community: we are at the moment 19 signatures short of reaching 200 signatures to the letter on behalf of the legal community in light of For Women Scotland & the EHRC interpretation of it. If you know anyone who would sign but hasn't yet - nudge them, please!

The Telegraph thinks we earn "£70k plus" in "the provinces". (The nationally bargained pay spine for that role tops out at about £63k and starts ten k lower).

11°C in Gateshead and we've already seen multiple men walking around with their tops off 🤢🤢

grew up with the media depiction where they rip out a guy’s still-beating heart and eat monkey brains and we still managed to win all the spelling bees m, I think the white boys can survive the message of “don’t be a rapist”

Exactly! There are also an awful lot of very clever people in the UK who are at risk of redundancy in academia at the moment so, from a UK perspective, that's more pressing

This is why mooting 'ditching net-zero' as the solution to Labour's woes is so silly. It's a policy that is popular with their core voters, critical to progressive voters they need to woo back, and Reform voters are sceptical but it's way down their priority list.

hey, uh, quick reminder that transphobia affecting cis people shouldn't be the main reason you speak out about transphobia

transphobia affecting trans people is

Bored of seeing law profs trying to defend this decisions as an act of neutral legal interpretation when the judges are there making up definitions as to who counts as a lesbian!

The biggest supporters of trans people are lesbian and bisexual women. The media’s framing of trans rights as a threat to women is as disingenuous as it is deplorable. After all, the political attacks against abortion and women’s rights come from the same governments opposing trans existence.

Reporting sexual violence isn’t a neutral act. For sex workers, it can mean arrest, child welfare investigations, public outing, or immigration consequences. It can mean being coerced into becoming an informant.

There’s literally no one to report to who doesn’t hold power over you.

it has never been more crucial for cis lesbians to be loud in support of our trans family. this is a chilling escalation of longtime tactics; attempts at a “feminist” case for transphobia ALWAYS include a disingenuous “nooooo won’t someone think of the poor lil lesbians 🥺🥺🥺” and it is such bullshit