Bethlehem Tekola

A new academic year has begun, but UK universities are still struggling to respond to AI - Impact of Social Sciences Mark Carrigan argues university staff are still struggling to develop coherent, contextual and disciplinary responses to AI’s impact on teaching and learning.

👀 ICYMI: "While 92% of undergraduate students are using Generative AI, only 36% said they had been offered support by their university"

#AcademicSky #HigherEducation

Universities teaching literature students how to cope with long novels Critics blame GCSE English for deterring teenagers from the subject, describing the literature syllabus as boring and repetitive

I think we’re really going to have to do a lot more of this. A massive deprogramming so that people can read more than ten words at a time without anxiety.

www.thetimes.com/uk/education...?

Nearly 100 years after her death, Oxford’s first female Indigenous scholar honoured Mākereti Papakura died weeks before handing in her thesis at Oxford university documenting the life and customs of her tribe, work that is still used by Māori today

Nearly 100 years after her death, Oxford’s first female Indigenous scholar honoured www.theguardian.com/world/2025/o...

Stunning!

Ignore the matching feet and beak. Ignore the larger than life pose. Nothing extra ordinary there, anyone can do it. But the splash of dazzling velvet across the face ... that is what makes you a fashion icon.
African Pygmy Kingfisher
📍Bahirdar, Ethiopia
🪶 #nature #fashion #colors

Impact in Qualitative Research: Jo Law on Messy, Emotional and Necessary Ethical Research with Marginalised Populations | QUAHRC Jo Law is a qualitative research assistant at the Qualitative Applied Health Research Centre at King’s College London, working on the qualitative component of the EDEN project, which examines the use ...

Messy, emotional, and necessary: PhD student and research assistant Jo Law reflects on ethical #QualitativeResearch with marginalised groups in this month's #ResearchImpact blog:

www.quahrc.co.uk/podcasts-blo...

@kingsioppn.bsky.social @bethlehem.bsky.social

"Conducting research with marginalised populations is inevitably messy. It involves compromises, contradictions, and continuous negotiation between competing demands. As participants let me into their lives on the promise that their voices would be heard, the responsibility was profound."

This!

Long Covid has now overtaken Asthma in the US, as a cause of chronic health disease in children. There is currently no cure. Yet no action is being taken and Violet Affleck is very much on point.

Pan-Africanism, Afrofuturism and Decolonisation: A reading list Knowledge will be the first frontier of our freedom.

This is an essay, a reading list and a poem on why I think Pan-Africanism, Afrofuturism and Decolonisation can be insightful tools for realising visions of flourishing future worlds for all.
folukeafrica.com/pan-africani...

Unequal pressures: how disadvantage shaped young people's education… School closures during the COVID-19 pandemic didn’t just disrupt learning, they revealed and intensified deep inequalities that continue to shape young people’s lives today. While some children…

Unequal pressures: new #qualitative work from the QUAHRC team explores how young people from different backgrounds had very different #Covid experiences, and why this is still relevant to widening inequality

www.kcl.ac.uk/how-disadvan...

OpenAI admits AI hallucinations are mathematically inevitable, not just engineering flaws In a landmark study, OpenAI researchers reveal that large language models will always produce plausible but false outputs, even with perfect data, due to fundamental statistical and computational limi...

"In a landmark study, OpenAI researchers reveal that large language models will always produce plausible but false outputs, even with perfect data, due to fundamental statistical and computational limits."

www.computerworld.com/article/4059...

How do researchers study experiences that are "too shattering to put into words"? MAshNup method uses art-making, metaphor analysis, and narrative techniques to help participants explore difficult experiences in ethical, sensitive ways.

Read the article here: doi.org/10.1332/3050...

Inside the world of Kenya’s ‘shadow scholars’ paid to write essays for UK students Highly educated Kenyans working for essay mills ghostwrite academic work that students pass off as their own

Inside the world of Kenya’s ‘shadow scholars’ paid to write essays for UK students

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

I have always hated the way smart speakers and chatbots mimic amicability and draw people in to talking to them as if there is a person there.

Great to read a scholarly exploration, using dear old Gigerenzer and Grice to set out the problem 🌟

Iceland Embraced a 4-Day Workweek in 2019 – Now, Nearly Six Years On, All Gen Z Forecasts Have Materialized In 2019, Iceland made headlines as one of the first countries to implement a four-day workweek, not by passing a blanket law, but through agreements

"In 2019, Iceland made headlines as one of the first countries to implement a four-day workweek...Nearly six years later, the results are clear: this bold move has proven to be a game-changer, not just for the workforce, but for society as a whole."

www.wecb.fm/iceland-embr...

Are you, might you become, or do you know a transnational scholar from the Global South? Or do you work with one or more? If so, this insightful, creatively written book will be of interest. It's part of the series I co-edit with @patthomson.bsky.social www.routledge.com/Insider-Guid...

No other word has done more damage to the craft of writing in recent years than “content”. Even if you’re using the word “content” ironically, or as a cute little joke, don’t. When someone calls writing “content” they’re pissing on someone’s hard work & passion. “Content” is Technosatan’s henchword.

A turaco in flight displaying it's fiery red outer feathers

It's #Flyday folks!
Ruspoli's Turaco in flight.
Borena, Ethiopia
🪶 #birds

Ethical Review in Practice Call for Chapter Proposals Working title: Ethical Review in Practice Editors: Lucy Pickering and Helen Kara Research ethics approval is a key part of the process for many researchers. The small but…

Call for chapters: Ethical Review in Practice, edited by Lucy Pickering and me. Do you have a particularly good, bad, or mixed experience with a research #ethics approval body that you would like to share? If so this call may be of interest: helenkara.com/writing/ethi... please share widely!

I’m so pleased to share that the launch issue of the Journal of Creative Research Methods (JCRM) is now live! 🎉

👉 bristoluniversitypressdigital.com/view/journal...

Huge thanks to my wonderful Co-Editors in Chief Su-Ming Khoo, Harriet Shortt & Sophie Woodward.

#CreativeMethods #JCRM

To bell hooks and not being happy till we are all free What bell hooks taught me… in her own words and a few of mine.

Doing teaching prep in terror at how soon summer will be over. A reminder that a pedagogy of love is possible. It INVITES our students to be the best of who they can be in the classroom and beyond it. A pedagogy of love DEMANDS the same thing of us teachers.

folukeafrica.com/to-bell-hook...

YouTube video by Virginia Braun Dr Braun(love) - or: how I learned to stop worrying and love GenAI (yeah nah)

Here's a talk I gave as a keynote for the BPS @qmip.bsky.social conference (July 2025) - the result of @vicclarke.bsky.social & I recognising we needed to "dive in" & grapple with the beast that is GenAI & qualitative/(reflexive) thematic analysis
www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zFQ...

My new project! Funded by @isrfoundation.bsky.social, with lovely colleagues @katefoxwriter75.bsky.social and @autgeek.bsky.social First time I've ever had funding for research 🥳 #Neurodivergent #AcademicSky #LivedExperience #CreativeResearch

Good choice!😊

First up we have @ginnybraun.bsky.social discussing the impact of Gen AI on qualitative research. Is this something we can ignore or do we need to develop a position on the use of Gen AI? Is AI our friend or not to be trusted?

#qmip2025 @qmip.bsky.social

When I started my PhD, I had never heard of epistemic decolonisation. Then I came across 2 books that changed my life. One was "Decolonizing Methodologies" by Linda Tuhiwai Smith; the other was "Decolonising the Mind" by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o.

Rest in piece Prof. Ngũgĩ, may your works live long.

Developing a structured daily routine for writing and research www.raulpacheco.org/2018/11/deve...

One of the biggest challenges I faced as a graduate student and still face now as a Full Professor is knowing how to structure my time given that time in academic work is so unstructured.

#RPVSky

Mental health: Large rise in NI universities' spending since Covid-19 Figures received via FOI requests reveal an average over 40% increase in the amount of money allocated.

Large rise in NI universities' mental health spending since Covid www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

This is mirrored across the sector and worth unpacking as I know this is an area where people have a lot of strong opinions currently. Here's a quick thread 🧵 please add your thoughts.