Iris Volg

*JOB* join us at @gesis.org to work on new approaches for making data from online platforms usable for (computational) social science. Feel free to reach out to @sebstier.bsky.social or me for details about this position.

💡 Stellenausschreibung

Leiter*in der Forschungsabteilung „Transformation der Wirtschafts- und Sozialsysteme“ des IDOS in Bonn, verbunden mit einer Professur für Entwicklungsökonomik und Nachhaltigkeitspolitik(w/m/d).

www.idos-research.de/stellen-prak...

🔥 HUGE NEWS FROM THE WORLD'S HIGHEST COURT 🔥

Today the International Court of Justice (ICJ) confirmed that, under international law, countries MUST act now to avoid climate catastrophe. 🧵

@wy4cj.bsky.social

An unbearably sad statement from the Editorial Committee (SDJ) of the AFP news agency, please read:

"Without immediate intervention, the last reporters in Gaza will die.
AFP has been working with 1 writer, 3 photographers and 6 videographers, all freelance, in the Gaza Strip… /1

Suwayda Province is now under the control of forces loyal to Hikmat al-Hijri, following the complete withdrawal of the Syrian army and internal security forces.

These forces are currently attacking Bedouin tribes and committing severe human rights violations in the area.

How does filing complaints to the United Nations affect the human rights situation of civil society organizations? To learn more about this question, check out our publication (with the fantastic Hannah Smidt) in the British Journal of Political Science. (1/8)
www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Foto: Fassade der Mex. Botschaft mit riesigen einzelnen Fahnen in Regenbogen-Farben.

Was #Klöckner nicht will, kann die Mexikanische Botschaft in Berlin, ein paar Häuser entfernt von der #CDU- Zentrale, in großem Stil! 🌈

Philosophy professor & US Citizen Jonathan Caravello has been brutally detained & effectively disappeared for trying to help a legal observer remove a teargas canister from under their wheelchair during an ICE raid on a California farm.

…is a sentence I've now had to write. What… in the actual fuck

ConflLlama: Domain-specific adaptation of large language models for conflict event classification - Shreyas Meher, Patrick T. Brandt, 2025 We present ConflLlama, demonstrating how efficient fine-tuning of large language models can advance automated classification tasks in political science research...

Shreyas Meher and Patrick T. Brandt demonstrate how state-of-the-art language models can be efficiently adapted for political event classification, achieving up to 1400% improvement in accuracy while remaining computationally accessible.

Read more here: journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

Kommentar zur Klimapolitik: Der Frust der Forscher

"Wenn es der Menschheit nicht gelingt, den CO2-Gehalt der Atmosphäre schnell zu reduzieren, steht nicht nur der Wohlstand oder das Fortbestehen einzelner Staaten auf dem Spiel. Ganze Weltregionen werden unbewohnbar werden. Millionen Städte werden vom steigenden Meeresspiegel
1/2

❗ The 𝘞𝘡𝘉 𝘉𝘦𝘳𝘭𝘪𝘯 (@wzb.bsky.social‬) establishes a 𝘥𝘦𝘱𝘢𝘳𝘵𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵 for the 𝐬𝐭𝐮𝐝𝐲 𝐨𝐟 𝐝𝐞𝐦𝐨𝐜𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐲 and is looking for its future 𝐝𝐢𝐫𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐨𝐫 ❗

📣 Let all the excellent democracy researchers out there know! ⁣
⁣
wzb.eu/en/jobs/dire... ⁣

#Polisky
@epsanet.bsky.social @ecpr.bsky.social @apsa.bsky.social

🏳️‍🌈This Pride Month, we are proud to support an initiative that challenges the systemic invisibility in data.

Representation isn’t optional — it drives equity and action.
When entire communities are erased from datasets, injustice gets coded in.

We’re working to change that.

AEP Lecturer in Politics and Research Methods

Department of Political Economy at King’s College London is hiring 2 permanent lecturers (teaching-focused) in political science:

- Research methods: www.kcl.ac.uk/jobs/117268-...

- Comparative politics: www.kcl.ac.uk/jobs/117245-...

Application deadline: June 29, 2025

Defeating right wing extremists - this is how it's done!

Seeing lots of discussion about whether the U.S. military will go along or push back against orders to confront mass protests.

Here’s my take on what other cases and prior research tell us about what might happen.
1/

Demnächst dann wieder Mutterkreuz statt Abitur...
Was für ein brauner Sumpf.

Postdoctoral Researcher / Research Associate - Climate Politics (gn) full-time (40 hours/week)

🚨Climate politics job alert🚨

Interested in the opportunity to focus on your own climate politics research project for 1 year in a stimulating and supportive environment at a leading university in Berlin?

Open to postdocs & graduates.

hertie-school.dvinci-easy.com/en/p/en/jobs...

📣 Jobs, jobs, jobs!

Aarhus University’s Department of Political Science is hiring:

🔹 Assistant Professor
🗓 Deadline: 25 August
🔗 international.au.dk/about/profil...

🔹 Associate Professor
🗓 Deadline: 8 September
🔗 international.au.dk/about/profil...

The Peace Process and Constitutional Reforms in Turkey - Institute for Turkish Studies SUITS Policy Brief 2025:2 (May) examines the likelihood of pro-Kurdish reforms in Turkey and discusses the role that domestic and external actors could play.

New policy brief from @golafs.bsky.social & me for SUITS:

Turkey may be at a turning point. With the PKK disbanded and constitutional reform back in play, the stakes—for both peace and democracy—are high.

We look at what’s changed since 2011, and what’s now at risk.

www.su.se/institute-fo...

Studie über junge AfD-Neuwähler: "Wenn sie hingegen den Eindruck gewinnen, dass ihre Stimme für die AfD als Proteststimme wirkt, indem andere Parteien unter Druck geraten und deshalb AfD-Positionen übernehmen, fühlen sie sich wahrscheinlich in ihrer Wahlentscheidung bestätigt" @dpzberlin.bsky.social

Grenzkontrollen: Wozu der ganze Aufwand? Die Stimmung an der Grenze ist schlecht: Polizisten sollen Flüchtlinge abweisen, finden aber oft nur Bagatellfälle. Teils müssen sie ihre Arbeit gar selbst unterlaufen.

Sie sollen Flüchtlinge abweisen, doch es kommen keine. Unter deutschen Grenzpolizisten ist die Stimmung schlecht. Manchmal müssen sie ihre Arbeit sogar selbst unterlaufen, berichtet @tilsteff.bsky.social von der sächsisch-tschechischen Grenze.
www.zeit.de/gesellschaft...

Rep. Al Green:

“Have you no shame? God created every person in this room. Are you saying that God made a mistake? This is not about God. It’s about men who choose to discriminate against other people because they have the power to do so.”

Rechts vor Links: Junge Nazis in Deutschland Rechte Gewalt nimmt kontinuierlich zu und die Täter werden immer jünger. Sie die Baseballschlägerjahre zurück? Was könnte rechtsextreme Jugendliche stoppen?

Mehr Polizei, härtere Strafen und strengere Gesetze würden die Gewalt nicht stoppen.

„Was wir gelernt haben, ist, dass es wichtig ist, Gegenkulturen zu stärken.“

Also das Gegenteil von dem, was unsere Politik grad macht.
Die Mittel für genau das kürzt.

www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/rechtsextrem...

Erneuter Skandal im #Solingen-Prozess: Erst wurden wichtige Beweise zum rassistischen Brandanschlag zurückgehalten, dann die rechte Tatmotivation durch einen Beamten vertuscht, sowie NS-Material beim Verdächtigen ignoriert. Das ist systemisches Versagen der Ermittlungsbehörden auf ganzer Linie.

'How come I can’t breathe?': Musk's data company draws a backlash in Memphis The company’s turbines — enough to power 280,000 homes — run without emission controls in an area that leads Tennessee in asthma hospitalizations.

Poisoning the air of a Black community for a fucking chatbot.

Das Titelbild der Vogue mit Margot Friedländer

Sie wird uns für immer eine laute Stimme im Kampf gegen den Faschismus bleiben… 🕊️😢

U.S. Government to Stop Tracking the Costs of Extreme Weather

NOAA announced that will stop tracking "billion dollar disasters," which have been increasing since its record began in 1980.

Without the database, researchers, insurers and government agencies will be "flying blind." And it's not easy to replace.

@nytimes.com

www.nytimes.com/2025/05/08/c...

Wegen Trump: Zentralbibliothek Medizin baut Alternative zu US-Datenbank auf Ein deutsches Informationszentrum will eine Alternative zur PubMed-Datenbank in den USA entwickeln, um die Informationsversorgung in der Biomedizin zu sichern.

Germany's central medical library, ZBMed, is building an alternative to PubMed. It will be open source, based on MeSH & associated data standards, built to be sustainable in case PubMed becomes unreliable - with APIs & MeSH maintenance. Open meeting called! 1/2 www.heise.de/news/Wegen-T... #MedLibs

In the three years since Ron DeSantis set out to rid Florida’s universities of woke ideology, my campus changed significantly. Professors suddenly worried about what they could say and teach. Some started avoiding terms like “racism.” One student recently told me that when someone used “intersectional” in class, the instructor told her not to use that word.

One colleague told me that he stopped assigning an article about lynching and white evangelicalism for fear that those terms could raise red flags. Another said she was censoring her language not just in class and on campus but also on personal social media. Several professors have been subjected to efforts at entrapment. Last year a man posing as a student tried to encourage Muslim faculty members to criticize Mr. DeSantis and Israel. A similar incident happened to me. In October 2024 my department chair called me into his office to tell me that someone claiming to be a student in my Religion and Science class had complained that I spent 20 minutes talking about specific candidates, including who I was voting for and why. I was stunned. That never happened in that class or any other; it is antithetical to the way I teach. Fortunately

Brutal account of what it’s like to teach at the University of Florida right now in the NYT—extraordinary climate of fear. People afraid to say intersectional and talk about lynchings. Fake students trying to entrap Muslim faculty or just making things up altogether. www.nytimes.com/2025/05/07/o...

infas erhebt die Daten für das Nationale Bildungspanel #NEPS im Auftrag des @lifbi.bsky.social. Noch bis zum 30. Oktober läuft der Call for Modules zum Thema „KI-basierte Systeme in Bildungskontexten: Nutzungsmotive, Wissen, Vertrauen“: nachrichten.idw-online.de/2025/05/05/c...