Joe Jukes

Screenshot of a paper abstract in TIBG by Saskia Papadakis (2025) entitled: 'Postimperial melancholia and the English North–South divide: Reading the life stories of Northern women of colour in London' The trope of the English North–South divide has come to frame a plethora of national crises in recent years, with the supposedly white working-class North understood as having been ‘left behind’ by London's ‘metropolitan elite’. Bringing together geographies of England's socio-spatial inequalities, emotional geographies, and postcolonial understandings of Englishness, this paper theorises the contemporary English North–South divide as a form of ‘splitting’, a psycho-spatial strategy born out of postimperial melancholia. In an attempt to contain the contradictory impulses towards helplessness and omnipotence produced through Britain's former global supremacy and its imperial decline, dominant imaginaries of England separate ‘good’ and ‘bad’ feelings and locate them in either the North or London, with implications for socio-spatial inequalities within the nation. Reading life stories recorded with women of colour from the North of England who are living in London through Avtar Brah's conceptualisation of England as a ‘diaspora space’, this paper destabilises binarised imaginaries of North and South. Contributing to geographies of race, class, and nation, this paper demonstrates that, through an attentiveness to individual biographies, identities, and experiences, the binaries of migrant and native, past and future, North and South, are rendered untenable.

#OpenAccess in Transactions:

'Postimperial melancholia and the English North-South divide: Reading the life stories of Northern women of colour in London' by @sazpaps.bsky.social

doi.org/10.1111/tran... #geosky

“The only way to make Southern Italy hospitable to queerness is to work through the stereotypes and nurture spaces of queer joy that already exist.”

@frammaturo.bsky.social @londonmetuni.bsky.social on heteronormativity, essentialism and lost queer histories.

#OnlineFirst buff.ly/wfarPjw

Mark's fundraiser for Switchboard Help Mark Small raise money to support Switchboard

I'm running the Athens Marathon to raise money for @switchboard.bsky.social 😁🏃‍♂️🎽🏅🇬🇷

Chuck us a few quid?

www.justgiving.com/page/keep-ru...

I've been working on a queer history walking tour with OutStories this past year and we're almost ready to launch it!

If you're in Bristol, Bath and surroundings - watch this space 💙

Can’t help but reflect on the *5 years of strikes* we did to defend our pensions, on this, the day USS announce their £10 billion surplus.

Does anyone have any sources or reading suggestions for the following nugget of queer history?

"ABOLISH MARRIAGE" was a slogan that circulated around 2013/2014 as far as I remember (I used it!). It brought radical queers together in resistance to the trend towards marriage equality. Any leads? xxx

Congratulations to my colleague @cescatp.bsky.social on her recent publication!

Cesca's environmental scan of 50+ online sperm donation sites will support our ongoing research here at LBU.

Interested in family-making beyond the fertility industry? Read here: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

when i'm asked to review the revised version

Callout: Storying the Future: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Queer Storytelling Storying the Future: Queer Storytelling and Unsettling TImes Date: Wednesday 10th September, 2025 Location: University of Sheffield, UK Organisers: Dr Ames Clark and Dr Eleanor Wilkinson, School of...

CfP for an exciting workshop I'm co-organising at the Uni of Sheffield - Storying the Future: Queer Storytelling and Unsettling Times.

(More info below but workshop 10th sept, deadline for EOI 6th aug)

tinyurl.com/qstorytelling

That’s a wrap on 2024–25 for the Centre for Transforming Sexuality and Gender! 💥

Our AGM celebrated our research, shared highlights, welcomed our Paul Cottingham Trust Scholar & our dissertation prize winner!

Huge thanks to all our amazing members & contributors, you make CTSG what it is. 💜

Congratulations Dan!

would also recommend comically tall placards to avoid tired arms on sweltering days 👒

Happy Pride from Bristol! I spent it marching with my queer swimming group and sweating on the OutStories community stall.

OutStories is an intergenerational collective gathering and sharing Bristol’s LGBTQ+ histories.

Want to find out more? View our interactive map: outstoriesbristol.org.uk/map/

Sounds very cool!

I’m a queer Palestinian. Stop using my identity as cover for the destruction of Gaza | Jad Salfiti Rightwingers in Israel and the US claim they are defending LGBTQ+ rights while Gaza’s people are killed. Don’t dare do this in our name, says British-Palestinian video producer and journalist Jad Salf...

“If the goal is for queer Palestinians to live in an open, tolerant society, then they need first to survive Israel’s aggression. There can be no Pride under occupation.”
- @jadsalfiti.bsky.social

maybe doctors could save money by treating fewer patients | maybe firefighters could save money by choosing the fires they put out more judiciously | maybe the bbc should save money by limiting broadcasts to 4 hours per day. in fact why don’t we all do the most cost-effective thing & simply give up

Joe is wearing a pink t-shirt and a blue overshirt. They appear as a reflection in a window. Through the window, wooden benching can be seen. Elsewhere in the reflection there are lots of verdant trees, bushes, invasive species and a car park.

happy solstice for tomorrow, friends 🌞🧡

Untangling hope labour from care labour: LGBT+ people navigating equality, diversity and inclusion work in higher education This article reports on the ‘Whose Rainbow?’ project, exploring LGBT+ staff and students’ conflicted relationships to Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) work in UK Higher Education (HE). Drawi...

The first 'Whose Rainbow?' project publication!

Whose Rainbow? explored LGBT+ staff & student experiences of rainbow symbolism & EDI schemes in HE.

In this paper, we think specifically about the extra labour required of LGBT+ people (to survive!) in HE.

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

unbelievably kind 🥰 Totally echo the recommendation of this whole Special Issue

Exploring Young Trans and Non-binary People’s Strategies and Spaces for Navigating Marginality in the United Kingdom: A Novel Resilience, Resistance, and Restoration Framework Amid recent, unprecedented sociopolitical scrutiny and hypervisibility of young trans people in the United Kingdom, this article considers how trans youth develop individual and collective mechanis...

Amidst the bleakness, I've just published an article exploring how young trans people are dealing with life in the UK @geographers.bsky.social. Do read to understand more about how trans youth are navigating & thriving in these times. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

White webpage with black text. This displays the article title ‘New directions for asexual geographies’, and the Abstract: ‘ Thinking geographically involves empirically contextualizing and critically contesting the situatedness of relational life. Thinking asexually, meanwhile, means fundamentally questioning the givenness of social and sexual life and seeking alternative arrangements. We suggest that these two approaches, taken together, constitute a frontier of queer knowledge. Pointing in four scholarly directions for ‘asexual geographies,’ we argue that thinking geography asexually, and asexuality spatially…’

I’m so happy that my new article, written with the incredible @rachelbayer.bsky.social, is out now in Sexualities.

We write as some of the first geographers of asexuality + suggest four ‘new directions’ to think ace lives and space together. Check it out - it’s open access!

doi.org/10.1177/1363...

We, members of the academic and administrative staff in institutions of higher education in Israel, call on you to act immediately to mobilize the full weight of Israeli academia to stop the Israeli war in Gaza. Israeli higher education institutions play a central role in the struggle against the judicial overhaul. It is precisely against this backdrop that their silence in the face of the killing, starvation, and destruction in Gaza, and in the face of the complete elimination of the educational system there, its people, and its structures, is so striking. Since Israel violated the ceasefire on March 18, almost 3,000 people have been killed in Gaza. The vast majority of them were civilians. Since the start of the war, at least 53,000 people have been killed in Gaza, including at least 15,000 children and at least 41 Israeli hostages. At the same time, many international bodies are warning of acute starvation – the result of intentional and openly declared Israeli government policy – as well as of the rendering of Gaza into an area unfit for human habitation. Israel continues to bomb hospitals, schools, and other institutions. Among the war’s declared goals, as defined in the orders for the current military operation “Gideon’s Chariots,” is the “concentration and displacement of the population.” This is a horrifying litany of war crimes and even crimes against humanity, all of our own doing. As academics, we recognize our own role in these crimes. It is human societies, not governments, that commit crimes against humanity. Some do so by means of direct violence. Others do so by sanctioning the crimes and justifying them, before and after the fact, and by keeping quiet and silencing voices in the halls of learning. It is this bond of silence that allows clearly evident crimes to continue unabated without penetrating the barriers of recognition. We cannot claim that we did not know. We have been silent for too long.

The Black Flag Group of some 800 academics in Israel is calling upon the heads of Israeli universities and colleges to mobilize the full weight of Israeli academia to stop the Israeli war in Gaza

Research Commission: Mapping Queer Creative Health | Job QUEERCIRCLE is looking for a freelance researcher for a 6-month project exploring the intersection of LGBTQIA+ communities and creative health across Greater London.

This looks like an amazing opportunity for a queer/sexualities geographer with mapping expertise!

www.artsjobs.org.uk/jobs/search/...

when I get a permanent position 🥲

the vibe I bring to the function 🥳

I truly love this headshot, captured by Cherine Fahd at the Hunt-Simes Institute in Sexuality Studies at @sssharc.bsky.social

This Summer I’m organising a queer geographies writing retreat + can’t wait to bring the same energy to our community there

BREAKING: Labour will formally recognise trans women as ‘men’ tomorrow. It means trans women will be banned from all women shortlists and all Labour women’s groups. Revolting. The party’s relationship with LGBT+ is over.

Happy Somerset Day 💛🐉

“We, speaking from a discipline steeped in complex, ongoing histories of exclusion, have a collective duty to attune our research & teaching to challenge gender fascism & work toward the liberation of those who will bear the brunt of the admin’s violence”

Written about US, equally relevant for UK

The Geographical Journal | RGS Research Journal | Wiley Online Library In this commentary, we explore the implications of the 2024 US elections for four key areas of trans lives: the body, public space, legal geographies and mobility. While we focus on the United States...

earlier this year, i had the pleasure (& the pain!) of writing a on the state of trans politics in the US with some wonderful colleagues. we conclude that these political attacks are nothing less than an effort to erase trans people from public life. open access link here:

doi.org/10.1111/geoj...