Dr Rhys Steven Jones

It was Reality TV week for our first-year students and I had the pleasure of screening a group viewing of the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills' infamous Amsterdam trip - cinemas need to start screening iconic reality TV episodes they'd make a fortune!

Although I'm horrified to see a massive landscape picture of my head here, this is a really important piece about the maturation of scholar-led, non-profit publishing. As I write, chaos is coming but there are enormous opportunities to quit the big 5

www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-v...

Priscilla’s look in this episode is DRAG, incredible

Filming Capital

our issue of SAQ on "filming capital" is up! contributions from @lingzhang.bsky.social, @ernestpjl.bsky.social, @benjamincrais.bsky.social, @annakornbluh.bsky.social, patrick marshall, cassandra guan, alberto toscano

bad news for haters of the good!

www.dukeupress.edu/filming-capi...

OLH annual report 2024-2025 We're delighted to be publishing our 2024-25 annual report, which outlines the fantastic successes of the entire OLH team over the past financial year from 01 August 2024 to 31 …

It is so heartening to see @openlibhums.org (and its publishing model that prioritises research integrity over profit!) growing at such a challenging time for the humanities.
We all need to start thinking more carefully about where we publish our work...

www.openlibhums.org/news/865/?fb...

AGAINST AI

teachers!

excited to share a new website at this late date of Aug 15 to try to help us collectively prepare for back to school in the interpretative humanities classroom assaulted by the AI grift, so we don't have to go it alone.

take a look, share, + most importantly: CONTRIBUTE
against-a-i.com

I don't think we can put the toothpaste back in the tube at this point. But I think we can maybe get to a point where we recognize that AI, like toothpaste, is best used in scant amounts for specific, relatively infrequent tasks, rather than slathered indiscriminately all over everything.

There Is (Still) No Ethical Use of AI In March 2024, I wrote a post declaring “There Is No Ethical Use of AI”. My point was not that you should not use AI. Personally, I try never to use it, but it’s getting more and more difficult as so ...

It seemed time to update my post from March 2024 titled "There Is No Ethical Use of AI". Lots of links to essays, research articles, podcasts on the glory of AI's destruction of the environment, destruction of culture, destruction of our brains...

matthewcheney.net/blog/there-i...

A.I.-Driven Education: Founded in Texas and Coming to a School Near You

“latest in a longline of computerized fads that plunk kids in front of screens+deny them crucial socialization skills, suppressing their ability to think critically”
Https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/27/us/politics/ai-alpha-school-austin-texas.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

So jealous!

Picnic at Hanging Rock is so bloody good - I didn't realise it was an adaptation!

Sale of the Amsterdam University Press (AUP) film, media and communication list to Taylor & Francis – Resignation of series editors and editorial board members It is with great dismay that we, the undersigned, learned that the film, media and communication list of Amsterdam University Press (AUP) has been taken over by Taylor & Francis, a subsidiary of Infor...

The time has come to reinvent academic publishing. Over the last years conglomerates have bought up once respectable publishers and turned them into rent extraction machines, generating obscene profits from tax-payer funded research and unremunerated academic labor./
mediastudies.hypotheses.org/6850

I'm an "A.i." abolitionist.

No consumer-facing LLMs or generative "A.i." in anything.

Sure, machine learning in science and a few other limited applications is fine.

But consumer-facing LLMs and generative "A.i." that are based on theft, push disinfo, and can be manipulated by billionaires?

No.

“conspiracy is degraded cognitive mapping”

GenAI cannot produce something original, it can only regurgitate what has already been written somewhere else by someone else - the humanities essay will survive and continue to be necessary as an assessment form precisely because of this reality.

I’m not based in the US and can’t speak to the assessment model there, there have always been students that have plagiarised / cheated and not been caught - the loss will be felt in the fact that by cheating they have actively de-skilled themselves and will struggle in further study / the workplace.

Thanks for sharing, I’ve read this article and had read your previous post, the point I’m making is that genAI does not produce ‘excellent’ writing, it produces a certain kind of average writing. So the situation of brilliant students living in fear doesn’t correlate with my experience as a marker!

In my experience of marking student’s work genAI doesn’t produce writing that is “too good”, it produces writing that is sleekly average and generic, so it’s not so much a Damocles sword as we may think. It’s mainly frightening for students that are cheating!

Two things can be true at once, ChatGPT does overuse em dashes and a lot of our undergrads don’t tend to use them in that way - so their presence (along with lots of other things) can indicate genAI use. I don’t think the implication is that every use of the em dash is genAI… but LLMs do love them!

I gotta say I find a lot of AI discourse around higher ed very confusing. "if ChatGPT can write your essays is college even worth it?" did people think math teachers were assigning problem sets because *they* couldn't figure out the answers?

"Over four months, LLM users consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels. These results raise concerns about the long-term educational implications of LLM reliance and underscore the need for deeper inquiry into AI's role in learning."

Absolutely heartbroken to learn that Professor Simon James has passed away after a short illness. Simon was a stalwart union rep in the English Department, and a personal friend to many of us in the branch. We'll miss his humour, his passion, and his dedication to making things better for people.

TSQ Transgender Studies Quarterly Volume 12, Number 2, May 2025 Toward a Trans[]Crip Theory Special Issue. Editors J. Logan Smilges and Slava Greenberg Image of dancing people in wheelchairs by Micah Bazant

Each of the articles in this special issue theorizes the [] between trans and crip in distinct yet interconnected ways, expanding on the dynamic tension between difference and alignment.

I’ll be introducing them throughout June.

@dukepress.bsky.social

🚨Five Labour MPs visited Israel on a trip sponsored by Labour Friends of Israel last week.

They met with Israeli president Isaac Herzog who said the "entire nation" of Gaza was collectively responsible for 7 October.

World Picture! We're hosting in Amsterdam this year so I'm slightly biased, but love the journal and the conference - relatively small so the conference experience is really lovely, and super theory-oriented worldpicturejournal.com

Submit an abstract! Tell your friends!

Joshua Clover (1962-2025)

UK’s first trans judge appeals to European court of human rights over supreme court ruling Victoria McCloud brings action against UK for infringement of her human rights after ruling on biological sex

YESSS COME ON!!!

www.theguardian.com/society/2025...