Tom Smith 🏳️‍🌈

Decolonial Travel Guide Tanzania Willkommen zu deiner dekolonialen Lernreise durch Tansania / Karibu safari yako ya kujifunza ya decolonial

Gunzert House, Bismarck Rock, Old Boma, Lugalo, Serengeti & Co.: Ein dekolonialer Reiseführer für Tanzania - dreisprachig, fundiert recherchiert und von Amani Abeid großartig illustriert! Als kostenfreier pdf-Download hier: decolonial-travel-guide-tanzania.com

In case anyone with a UK passport is watching Farage thinking "what he's saying won't apply to me", pay attention to what the far right is proposing in Germany, because where do you think British fascists are getting their ideas from?

Yeah that's horrid and I'm so sorry. I'm afraid even in the 2000s I remember some similar dynamics in my own SU. I fear some of these dynamics at universities may not have changed much...

Oh gosh, I hadn't heard about that, how awful. I also didn't know it was part of the university - let along voting at DUSU! Now many of the buildings have that creepy feel of abandoned halls of residence right next to Pugin chapels...

This is a brilliant exhibition of some amazing contemporary art inspired by Lafcadio Hearn - and if you haven't explored Ushaw College (I hadn't) it's a very cool site. Lots of good Victoriana. Congrats to Fraser (@durhamimh.bsky.social), Claire, Steven, Kieran and the Kwaidan exhibition team!

I have had both colleagues and students dismiss my work as my "hobby and interest". To translate for anyone for whom it isn't obvious: it's because I'm queer and my research is queer. And that is called homophobia.

I've said it before but it's been a while: Fuck UUK.

All very much deserved and sometimes it's good when others say nice things - the world needs more of that! 🥰

Go! Ushaw is also an amazing site just outside Durham, a former seminary where Hearn was at school in the 1860s, before he made a name as a writer in the US and Japan.

Room with vaulted Victorian wood ceiling with a brown display case in the foreground with the Kwaidan exhibition title image and Ushaw College logo, filled with books. In the distance, blue display boards are showing a series of prints and paintings stretching back into the long gallery.

Went to the launch of Kwaidan, an exhibition of prints by Irish and Japanese artists inspired by Lafcadio Hearn's ghost stories. Curated by Claire Marsland at Ushaw College, brought to Durham by Fraser Riddell @durham-university.bsky.social and conceived by Stephen Lawlor and Kieran Owens.

Congrats, this is amazing!! As for the text, show me the lies 🤷🏻‍♂️

Screenshot: „Die Jury für den Kurt-Tucholsky-Preis 2025 hat die eingegangenen Vorschläge gesichtet und sich auf folgende alphabetisch geordnete Shortlist für die Preisvergabe 2025 verständigt: • Aras, Maryam (Infos z.B. hier). • Frohmann, Christiane (Infos z.B. hier) • Mahmod, Miedya (Infos z.B. hier) • Präkels, Manja (Infos z.B. hier) • Thomas, Ruth-Maria (Infos z.B. hier)“

A genuine joy to share our shortlist for the Kurt-Tucholsky-Preis 2025. Congratulations to Maryam Aras, Christiane Frohmann, Miedya Mahmod, Manja Präkels, and Ruth-Maria Thomas! tucholsky-gesellschaft.de/kurt-tuchols...

#Berlin Wir feiern trotzdem! 🥳

Morgen (Samstag, 23.08) ab 14:00Uhr am Hausvogteiplatz

Kommt zahlreich! 🫶🏾

#AntonWilhelmAmoStraße
#Amofest

Die ersten Schilder hängen schon….

Ahhhh! Letter from America is my favourite single of theirs, with particular fondness for the line "from Wester Ross to Nova Scotia". The version from the movie Sunshine on Leith gets me every time.

3/3: The files show soldiers building ordinary queer lives on and off base. Queer GDR subjectivities here aren't necessarily oppositional or radical. Many present themselves in the files as committed socialist soldiers, their military skills and queer networks mutually entangled and reinforcing.

2/3: The Stasi and army show an almost obsessive interest in queerness. They recount and fabricate queer stories and occasionally even facilitate queer intimacies. They put considerable resource into attempts to understand and control queerness.

TLDR version 1/3: These are documents designed to punish and repress queerness. But queer desires and intimacies still emerge from these oppressive sources when we close-read the documents for narrative voice, circular dynamics and moments of suggestion and innuendo.

This has been a long time in the works since I first hit the archives in 2014. Thanks to the editors, to Birgit Limbach at the old BStU, and to Dora Osborne, Jamele Watkins and @saraharens.bsky.social who've probably long forgotten they helped me think thru archive ideas years and years ago...

First page of my chapter with title Desire, Sex and Surveillance: Queer Methods and the Stasi's Files on the East German Military by Tom Smith. Opening paragraph reads: Researching East Germany’s armed forces, I often encounter reminders of how queerness can be overlooked in memories around straight-centered institutions, when people remain incredulous or advise that “back then it wasn’t an issue.” Josie McLellan has also commented on straight East German interviewees’ lack of awareness about queer compatriots. As decades of scholarship have shown, however, queerness was widely discussed and negotiated by queer and straight people throughout the lifetime of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Straight people spent time and effort developing policies and processes within the state’s institutions to understand, limit, and regulate queer sexuality, although archives often say more about what institutions failed to know. Queer East Germans were active participants in socialist institutions, shaping them in small, everyday ways. They may even have intended for traces of queerness to recede from view. As José Esteban Muñoz reminds us, the ephemeral nature of queer evidence has often had a protective function. Against the backdrop of the GDR’s heterosexual norms around how lives unfold, queer methods allow insights into traces of intimacy and community in official documents, showing soldiers developing queer East German subjectivities and life trajectories through their military service.

Cover of Socialist Subjectivities: Queering East Germany under Honecker. White and green lettering on black background. Editors Scott Harrison, Jeff Hayton and Katharine White. Picture showing glass window reflecting Berlin architecture while someone on a ladder mounts advertising for the 40-year anniversary of the GDR on the window.

Contents page with intro by Scott Harrison, Jeff Hayton and Katharine White. Articles listed by Mary Fulbrook, Markus Wahl, Katharine White, Tom Smith, Catrina de Rivera, Kyrill Kunakhovich, Scott Harrison, Larissa R. Stiglich (continued in next image)

Second half of contents page listing articles by Mor Geller, Briana J. Smith, Jeff Hayton, Julia E. Ault, Timothy Scott Brown and an epilogue by Eli Rubin.

V late bc summer, but am excited my article "Desire, Sex and Surveillance" is out in the fab volume Socialist Subjectivities @uofmpress.bsky.social.

It's a queer methods piece from my archival work on East German queer soldiers in the Stasi files.

Open access: press.umich.edu/Books/S/Soci...

Solidarity with trans friends and colleagues around today's ruling. This judicial activism has ignored the principal function of laws in Scotland and England created to protect minorities. A real blow to human rights in the UK and we now have to push the government to legislate better. 🏳️‍⚧️

Exit polls showing the AfD in second place

And once again we see ow, when a formerly centre right party adopts the language & ideas of the far right, it doesn’t “win back” those voters, but rather strengthens the far right. In voters’ minds, doing so legitimises their position: why vote for an imitation when you can vote for the “real” thing

Wir sind drin! Die Linke wird in der kommenden Legislaturperiode wieder in Fraktionsstärke im Bundestag vertreten sein!

Wir danken euch für euer Vertrauen, eure Stimmen und das unglaubliche Engagement in den letzten Wochen!

A coalition between CDU and AFD is an extreme, undesired event even for CDU voters. 81% of CDU voters, above the overall 70% of voters, are opposed to seeing the AFD take any form of state power. It is important to remember that.

Preliminary thoughts on the German election results so far:
1) Chasing the far right vote by demagoguing on migration has brought the CDU/CSU it's second worst performance in history. It's in first place, but it's a weaker result than anything Merkel posted.

Nicht-Wählen als revolutionärer Akt ist peinlich. Gerade weil diejenigen, die unter rechten Parteien am meisten zu leiden haben, kein Wahlrecht haben. Simone Dede Ayivi tazKolumnistin sagt: Raft euch!

Genau, Schwester!

Hintergrund: Schwarz-Weiß Bild des Gedenkens auf dem Marktplatz in Hanau, Menschen halten Schilder mit den Gesichtern der Ermordeten. Darauf die Schrift: Wir gedenken: Gökhan Gültekin Sedat Gürbüz Said Nesar Hashemi Mercedes Kierpacz Hamza Kurtović Vili Viorel Păun Fatih Saraçoğlu Ferhat Unvar Kaloyan Velkov

Wir gedenken:

Gökhan Gültekin
Sedat Gürbüz
Said Nesar Hashemi
Mercedes Kierpacz
Hamza Kurtović
Vili Viorel Păun
Fatih Saraçoğlu
Ferhat Unvar
Kaloyan Velkov

Sie wurden vor fünf Jahren, am 19. Februar 2020, bei dem rassistischen Anschlag von Hanau ermordet.
#KeinVergessen

In a world of diverse cultures and languages you cannot do global humanities with integrity in English only. As the chair of @englishassociation.bsky.social l stand with colleagues in Modern Languages @cardiffuniversity.bsky.social and across the UK.

Did you know that we offer a funded scholarship for Sep 2025 entry to one of our two full-time Masters degrees, open to UK-domiciled applicants from groups under-represented in the School and who can demonstrate academic excellence? Read more here: www.st-andrews.ac.uk/modern-langu...

Cardiff cuts: ‘They don’t grasp what university means for Wales’ Academics warn of ‘culture of fear’ at pre-eminent Welsh institution amid plans to axe courses and hundreds of jobs

The planned MFL cuts placed the university in “direct contradiction” with Welsh govt policy and international strategy. The cuts undermine Cardiff’s role in supporting the linguistic diversity that is critical for the regional economy, the teacher pipeline, and for international partnerships.

Cardiff’s closure of modern languages will tongue-tie its humanities The global examination of culture is not possible without languages at degree level, say Wendy Ayres-Bennett, Charles Burdett and Emma Cayley

Please help support our colleagues in languages at Cardiff by challenging the decision to exclude them from the category of ‘global humanities’ @ucflangs.bsky.social @artsandhums.bsky.social www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/card...