Hannah Theaker

It feels like the sharks have had chainsaws attached to their dorsal fins and are swiming with purpose and determination toward my personal lifeboat. I am nevertheless very aware how fortunate I was to clamber aboard at all.

I'm not sure if ppl outside academia realise that if you quit a permanent post in this job market you will amost certainly never get another one, esp in arts & hums. All that post graduate training, the years of precarity, not being able to choose where you or your family live. Pffft. For nothing.

UK ban on Palestine Action unlawful, high court judges rule Protest group’s co-founder wins legal challenge against decision to proscribe it under anti-terrorism laws

Didn't expect but Hell Yeah!
High court rules proscription of Palestine Action unlawful!

Shabana Mahmood, Starmer & the rest of the gov't can shove it.

"“a very significant interference” with the rights to freedom of speech, freedom of peaceful assembly and freedom of association"

Only 24 hours left for people to fill in the consultation on the "Earned Settlement" proposals.

Join other 130k people and make your voices heard.

Settlement should be a right for everyone not a privilege for few high earners.

ukhomeoffice.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...

Did this yesterday. I was furious about the proposed changes to begin with; wasn't expecting to wind up quite so incoherently furious about the survey itself. Appallingly loaded design. I ranted in all the text boxes.

PS. Not too late to tell the government what you think about their proposed changes to Indefinite Leave to Remain - the public consultation is open until 12th Feb.

www.gov.uk/government/c...

Guan Heng takes a selfie with his mother, smiling.

Breaking: Guan Heng has just been released from detention and is now reunited with his mother, a long-awaited and joyful reunion. DHS has not yet decided whether to appeal his asylum. We extend our heartfelt thanks to everyone who stood by him and helped make today possible.

‘I’m Free’: A Muslim Official Who Lost Faith in China Gains a Voice Ma Ruilin worked as a Communist Party cadre helping fellow Muslims navigate their country as religious minorities, until the official hostility became too great to bear.

Former Party cadre Ma Ruilin speaks with @liyuan6.bsky.social about his work on surveillance systems in China: “I realized that the very systems I helped build in 2008 had become shackles for Muslims [...] I had handed a demon’s whip to the state to use against my own community.”

Its also on bookshop.org for 99p - I'm so glad they are finally doing UK e-books. And I've been looking forward to reading this for ages.

Thank you to everyone who has shared this. The hearing is over for today. DHS has filed a motion to pretermit (end Guan's asylum application in the US) and have him sent to Uganda - where he'd be at risk of being sent to China. The hearing to decide that will be held 12 January.

Labour must not repeat history by sidelining research in post-92 universities The abolition of the binary divide in HE made visible the wealth of research excellence in what became known as the post-92 part of the sector. Katie Normington worries that forcing specialisation ris...

'There in the shadows [of the White Paper] lies the call for HE institutions to specialise, with the lurking threat that many will lose their research funding in some, but perhaps many, areas, in order to better fund those with more intensive research.'

It's official: 400 redundancies and a campus closure. At-risk staff will get a letter next week. Absolutely no serious consideration of any of the union's counterproposals.

Please share widely.

Oh damn. I'm so sorry. Even in pictures, she has so much character in one long nose - and who would deny those pleading eyes anything they wanted...

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.