Catherine Cronin

Lifting up the life of civil rights icon Jesse Jackson. Hard to lay out the range of his work and contributions and how much he inspired. They are leaving us one by one, exhorting us to pick up the mantle with courage & determination. Justice work is a lifelong commitment. Thank you Rev. Jackson.

If you weren't around at the time and never heard what Jackson's oratory was like, this is what it was like.

If you heard it before, you know you want to hear it again.

chills. I remember this vividly. rest in power, Jesse Jackson — and thank you.

NEW: The story of America’s largest national strike for 100 years.

Here are the biggest protests from Jan 30, 2026. And national news still did their best to ignore the scale of what happened yesterday.

Soundtrack courtesy of The Boss 💪

"the economic system, including companies, financial institutions & other economic actors, does not exist for its own sake... [it] exists to ensure that all people can live a good & meaningful life, in a just society & within the ecological limits of the planet"
thank you @ingridrobeyns.bsky.social

Good morning!

Get your day started on the good foot with the one and only genius James Brown.

oh Sue, I’m so sorry. I hope your mum gets good care — and sending much love to you all. x

Sir, – I am energised by Una Mullally’s article calling on the Opposition to act now on the housing crisis through collective organisation (“United left must build a housing movement in 2026,” Opinion, December 15th). It needs no repeating that the Government refuses to treat housing as a true emergency; this is evident in their actions or lack thereof. As Mullally argues, this has produced not apathy but defeat at a grassroots level, suiting those in power very well.

Following the successful campaign to elect our new President, the united left are well positioned to organise a housing movement to counter this defeat. I believe the scale of support for such a movement could extend beyond Irish shores. Having moved to London nine years ago, I left an Ireland buoyed by marriage equality and found community in the London-Irish Abortion Rights Campaign, an organically-formed group which rapidly built an effective structure spanning protest, policy, media, fundraising, legal support – and, crucially, had direct links to active campaign groups back in Ireland.

A large-scale housing movement in Ireland would no doubt see similar satellite groups form here in London and across the globe. Over the past decade, the Irish diaspora have already proven they care deeply for our country through support for abortion rights and successive #HomeToVote campaigns. However, I believe there would be greater support behind a housing movement, as housing not only affects those who stayed but also those of us who left. Many of us want to return but see no viable path to doing so. The belief and energy to fight for a better Ireland exists – and not just from within. What is missing is leadership to harness it. – Yours, etc, SARAH CRONIN RODGER, London.

Sharing a letter published in yesterday's @irishtimes.com, written by my amazing daughter Sarah Cronin Rodger, in support of a housing movement in Ireland.

YouTube video by TED This Is What a Digital Coup Looks Like | Carole Cadwalladr | TED

So today I found out that my TED talk ‘This is What a Digital Coup Looks Like’ was TED’s most watched talk of the year.

It’s sort of amazing & terrifying. Because this *is* what a digital coup looks like.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZOo...

Thank you very much for such an informative session today!

beautiful by Rebecca Solnit: “The fabric of this country is forever being torn apart by hate & exclusion; it is forever being stitched into new patterns, new connections, new relationships… a quilter's art of bringing the fragments together into a whole”

thinking of Frances Bell & #FemEdTechQuilt

Letter from President

What a wonderful President we have. #translivesmatter #transrightsarehumanrights

brilliant news! 👏👏👏

such a long and terrible journey, Ian. I am *so* happy to hear that it is over. thank you, thank you, on behalf of so many of us, for standing up what was right and never backing down. IAN LINKLETTER 👏👏👏

thank you, Ingrid! I have just ordered a beautiful calendar :)

Postscript to Open Access Week 2025 Two years ago this week Higher Education for Good: Teaching and Learning Futures, edited by Laura Czerniewicz and myself, was published openly by Open Book Publishers. To our amazement, the publica…

"This work is not easy, it is risky, and there’s no guarantee that those who do it will see its benefits. But it is essential."

I am grateful for those in #HigherEd who stand alongside me. In the work. And now, when the work is trying to leave me behind.
catherinecronin.net/reflecting/p...

always standing alongside you, Robin. x

thank you for sharing @francesbell.bsky.social & @sheilmcn.bsky.social –– and I hope to be able to see your presentation @gabiwitthaus.bsky.social! the threads of good work, like #femedtech, continue on in new ways and are woven into other good work. thanks for the reminder. love to you all 💛

Transcending the digital and physical at #altc22 – the #femedtechquilt It’s always tricky to try and summarize a conference experience in one post, so this post like so many other of my past conference posts is not going to try to do that. Instead I want to take…

So lovely to see images of the #femedtech quilt peppered through @gabiwitthaus.bsky.social keynote this morning - here's a post about it from a previous conference howsheilaseesit.net/oer/transcen.... #altc25 - @lornamcampbell.bsky.social @francesbell.bsky.social @catherinecronin.bsky.social

Two days to go for submissions (closing 22 October) - please consider submitting a proposal - #Springer #OpenAccess

On-Demand Learning in a Changing World: Philosophical, Technological, and Practical Perspectives on Workforce and Vocational Education

iasle.net/call-for-cha...

I resent having to learn so much about a cabal of ridiculously wealthy mostly, but not exclusively, white tech dudes who believe they should inherit the earth. They really will be the death of us all.

YES, Sherri! and I recently ordered the book. like you, am committed to paying attention to it all as I am quite sure that many will seek to rewrite history at some point. in the meantime, we take receipts and challenge as best we can. thanks for all you do.

We Need To Rewild The Internet  | NOEMA The internet has become an extractive and fragile monoculture. But we can revitalize it using lessons learned by ecologists.

Can't work because AWS?

It's a good time to read this piece if you haven't! www.noemamag.com/we-need-to-r...

What an honor to be featured in this series! Shout out to @brennacgray.bsky.social for making this a reality. 🙏🏾

so happy about this, Maha! so well deserved for all the thought, care & good work the @equityunbound team has done ❤️

The nomination is absolutely lovely and so, so true:
“In a world of overwhelming content and increasing educational precarity, MYFest offers something different: a space of possibility. It is a deeply human, thoroughly open practice—responsive to community, designed for care, and grounded in equity

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
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YouTube video by Institute for Advanced Study RARE/EARTH: The Geopolitics of Critical Minerals and the AI Supply Chain

We explore these dynamics in our workshop report: www.ias.edu/sites/defaul...

And we invite you to watch the public event which preceded the workshop: “RARE/EARTH: The Geopolitics of Critical Minerals and the AI Supply Chain” held at IAS on June 2, 2025 www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxVM...

congratulations Tressie! so grateful for your light right now.

I wrote this thread because I sat at my desk and thought, "Fuck it, we're cooked." But then I remembered something I say in my book that "writing is feeling" and I managed to rekindle just enough spirit to get going on the work and that work will continue to stoke the fire. I want that for students.