Hannah Theaker

Some good news this morning - exports of Xinjiang tomatoes have collapsed. Last year I worked with the BBC to expose how XJ tomatoes produced with forced labour were making their way to UK supermarkets via Italy. 🧵

Compulsory team teaching on every module is perhaps the biggest ever threat to the quality of teaching in UK universities.

It causes chaos on the ground for timetabling, ruins course coherence and turns lecturers into permanent supply teachers. It is pedagogically incoherent… 1/

UK university halted human rights research after pressure from China Exclusive: Leading professor at Sheffield Hallam was told to cease research on supply chains and forced labour in China after demands from authorities

Absolutely shocking that the Chinese govt pressured a UK university to shut down research about forced labour in Xinjiang and the links to global supply chains. The work of Laura Murphy and her team had been instrumental in getting Chinese companies sanctioned.

www.theguardian.com/education/20...

UK university halted human rights research after pressure from China Exclusive: Leading professor at Sheffield Hallam was told to cease research on supply chains and forced labour in China after demands from authorities A British university complied with a demand from Beijing to halt research about human rights abuses in China, leading to a major project being dropped, the Guardian can reveal. In February, Sheffield Hallam University, home to the Helena Kennedy Centre for International Justice (HKC), a leading research institution focused on human rights, ordered one of its best-known professors, Laura Murphy, to cease research on supply chains and forced labour in China. Continue reading...

UK university halted human rights research after pressure from China

"In total, the documents show Sheffield [Hallam University] had earned £3.8m in 2021/22 from China and Hong Kong." That's how little was enough for them to sell out.

China intimidated UK university to ditch human rights research, documents show Sheffield Hallam University apologises to Professor Laura Murphy for restricting her academic freedom.

I actually think the BBC version does a better job of explaining quite how utterly outrageous this whole story is: www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

UK university halted human rights research after pressure from China Exclusive: Leading professor at Sheffield Hallam was told to cease research on supply chains and forced labour in China after demands from authorities

'In February, Sheffield Hallam University, home to the Helena Kennedy Centre for International Justice (HKC), a leading research institution focused on human rights, ordered one of its best-known professors, Laura Murphy, to cease research on supply chains and forced labour in China.' 1/3

‘She didn’t realise how dangerous it was’: London-bound student held in China over Tibet support Zhang Yadi was due to begin a degree in the UK but the activist vanished on holiday amid tensions over Dalai Lama

I wrote a story @theguardian.com about Zhang Yadi, a London-bound Chinese student and Tibetan rights advocate who was arrested over the summer on suspicion of “inciting separatism.”

If found guilty, she faces a prison sentence of up to 15 years.

Read the story, with comments from @hrw.org, below:

Starmer to end asylum ‘golden ticket’ of resettlement and family reunion rights People granted asylum will have to earn right to invite family in plan charities call ‘straight from populist playbook’

There is no such thing, as Starmer well knows, as a "golden ticket of resettlement and family reunion" for people who have been granted refugee status. This is meaningless guff aimed to play to populist fantasies that refugees get provided with everything. 1/

www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

The Golden Age of Transnational Repression | Journal of Democracy Authoritarian regimes are targeting exiles and diaspora communities in more places than ever before. Activists, journalists, and regular people living abroad must watch their backs…

New today: my essay in @jodemocracy.bsky.social on The Golden Age of Transnational Repression: www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/the...

Most of the restrictions mentioned in this article are in 2021's Internet Religious Information Services regs. www.chinalawtranslate.com/en/internet-...

What is new in the Code of Conduct is that it impacts online conduct of registered clergy in their personal, as well as professional capacity.⏬

My head is actually spinning at how many current and future colleagues, both in the China field and beyond it, we are about to lose because of this

I'm glad someon has said Spence, he had just such an ability to craft narrative and personality - as with probably every Qing historian, the Death of Woman Wang remains the kind of book I'd like one day to write

Henrietta Harrison, Engseng Ho (especially The Graves of Tarim), Tobie Meyer-Fong - all just beautiful writers

This is insane. Both the normalisation of a two-week turnaround for that quantity of work, but also, in what world is writing an anonymised summary of achievement and uploading it to CoPilot less work than just marking them all in the first place?

Say hi to Lucy for me!

Most humanities research — including the best, most world leading research by people we’ve all heard of — is unfunded, by which they mean produced as part of one’s routine job as a university lecturer, just “not funded by a big competitive external grant”.

This would mean the death of research.

This is a jaw-dropping statement from anyone in a uni leadership role — but also — what exactly is ‘low-quality’ and ‘hobbyist’ research? Nearly every academic I know is burning the candle at both ends and STILL producing important work in their fields. This feels like an anti-humanities dog whistle

US tech companies enabled the surveillance and detention of hundreds of thousands in China U.S. technology firms such as IBM, Dell and Cisco largely designed and built China’s surveillance state, an AP investigation finds. The tech companies deny wrongdoing.

Tens of thousands of people in China are barred from leaving their province and sometimes even their homes by the world’s largest surveillance apparatus.

An AP investigation finds much of this technology came from U.S. companies.

Yes, very much this. I am currently appreciating the fact that I am playing it with someone who is better at this sort of game than I am. Love the world, the way it hands out haunted morsels of narrative, but my fingers are so slow to learn this sort of game and each death hurts.

Would talk Silksong, can't talk Silksong as so far my experience can be summarised as "What an utterly beauti - oh shite I died again"

IMMARKUS An image annotation environment for the MARKUS platform. Developed by Prof. Dr. Hilde De Weerdt, Dr. Rainer Simon, Dr. Lee Sunkyu, Dr. Iva Stojević, Meret Meister, and Xi Wangzhi with funding from the...

We just released IMMARKUS 1.0 - our first full release!

An open-source tool for semantic image annotation: multi-image workbench, AI-powered selection tools, ontology builder, knowledge graph, #IIIF support.

Runs fully local–no login, no-signups, no data sent to the cloud!

👉 immarkus.xmarkus.org

So considered, so accessible. And the story is always paramount.

I've always loved the way Supergiant approach this, and its through all of their games, not just Hades - as I (slowly) improve, they offer a range of ways to make it harder, so its not just an arbitrary higher health bar, I can finetune challenge in ways that suit me.

I have no idea how you get students to turn up. Once in a while they stop behind after class to talk to me, and I suggest this conversation would be better during office hours. I also work extremely hard to convince them I'm not intimidating, but it seems to take 2.5 years for them to believe me.

I had a personal tutor all the way through at Edinburgh (Julian Ward), and somehow, I had it in my head that turning up to speak to him was a dreadful imposition and/or a statement that I was academically struggling, which I wasn't.

The Technopolitics of China’s Yarlung Tsangpo Dam Project and the Paradox of Hydropower | Made in China Journal Three years after announcing their intent to construct a mega-dam along the Yarlung Tsangpo (Brahmaputra) River as part of the Fourteenth Five-Year Plan, Chinese officials gave their approval to proce...

From Sanmenxia and Three Gorges to the Yarlung Tsangpo Dam, China has long relied on monumental hydropower to prove state capacity. @zenel25.bsky.social and @pguer.bsky.social show how such projects, while promising development and security, often deepen the very insecurities they claim to resolve.

Lovely to hear Melvyn Bragg talking about the big idea behind "In Our Time": to get academics on the air, talking about the subjects they were most passionate & knowledgeable about, without worrying about whether they had "media training".

It's remarkable that this was (& remains) such an odd idea!

... in the event the BBC is reading this, the time is definitely right for an In Our Time on the question of Muslim rebellions in China. Just saying.

Oh damn, always my dream to one day make to In Our Time, so I am delighted it will continue. But this still feels huge to me - so much admiration for Bragg and his curiosity about absolutely everything.