Simon Obendorf

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, writer, 1938-2025 The Kenyan won both acclaim and enemies for works that explored empire, power and language

'Discarding the language of empire was personal before it was political.'

Edmund White, novelist and great chronicler of gay life, dies aged 85 The American essayist, playwright and author of books including A Boy’s Own Story and The Married Man has died

A farewell symphony for our own boy and his many beautiful, sexy and necessary stories. For many queer folk, his novels were a guide to our cullture and history, well before we gained, through him and others like him, the courage to write our own chapters. www.theguardian.com/books/2025/j...

Celebrated Kenyan author and dissident Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o dies aged 87 Widely regarded as east Africa's most influential writer, Ngũgĩ’s fiction and nonfiction books traced his country's history from British imperialism to home-ruled tyranny and challenged not only the s...

What a loss to scholarship and activism, but what a mighty example of a life purposefully lived. So many of my students have relished engaging with his intellect and wisdom. www.euronews.com/culture/2025...

Why Gen X is the real loser generation Don’t cry for millennials or Gen Z. Save your pity for those in their 50s

Why Gen X is the real loser generation
economist.com/finance-and-...
from The Economist. Sigh.

YouTube video by University of Lincoln MA International Relations | Student Story | University of Lincoln

Study in a truly walkable city - the MA International Relations at the University of Lincoln - a perspective from the US: www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1c3...

African History Quiz I: Pre-colonial Years Can we study ourselves out of perdition?

This #newblogpost is a reflection on the nature and state of African history, a quiz and a reading list. My hope is that it is a reminder that the failure to study the history of humanity, is an act of self-destruction, and that African history is world history.
folukeafrica.com/african-hist...

Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence? Maybe not as we’ve known them. But, in the ruins of the old curriculum, something vital is stirring.

Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence? www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

Opinion | Musk Said No One Has Died Since Aid Was Cut. That Isn’t True. A journey through the front lines of global poverty shows that when the world’s richest men slash aid for the world’s poorest children, the result is sickness, starvation and death.

Anyone with knowledge of HIV, PEPFAR or development could have told Mr Musk he was wrong. But the callousness, disregard for life, rejection of expertise and capricious misinformation are the point. This would be shameful. If the man had the capacity to feel shame. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

War heroes and military firsts are among 26,000 images flagged for removal in Pentagon's DEI purge References to a World War II Medal of Honor recipient, the Enola Gay aircraft that dropped an atomic bomb on Japan and women and minorites are among the tens of thousands of photos and online posts ma...

The Pentagon has marked 26,000 photos for deletion to purge evidence of diversity.

The photos include the 1st black pilots in WWII, the 1st women to pass infantry training & the plane that dropped the Hiroshima bomb because it’s called the “Enola GAY”.

This is real. We’re living in a horror story.

'The financial strain on universities has driven leadership teams into aggressive cost-cutting, often prioritising key performance indicators such as grant income and publication metrics. Historically, these have been shaped by a male-dominated system'. 1/2

I already pay @theguardian.com £15 a month for a digital subscription. Now an extra £5 is demanded by this privacy-invasive, legally-dubious cookie paywall. I believe in paying for journalism. I don’t believe in newspapers running an extortion racket against those with legitimate privacy concerns.

Campaigners celebrate court ruling to ‘decolonise’ Kampala After a five-year campaign, landmarks and streets honouring British colonialists will be renamed to reflect Ugandan culture

"“I believe we can have our history, we can keep records, but not celebrate some crooks and historical figureheads” - Kampala’s lord mayor, Erias Lukwago. www.theguardian.com/global-devel...

The Psychic Lives of Statues From Cape Town to Bristol and Richmond, statues have become sites of resistance and contestation of our imperial past and postcolonial present. The Psychic L...

excited & looking forward to reading this promising upcoming book on the politics of memorialisation by @rahulraothariel.bsky.social

www.plutobooks.com/978074535076...

Lost and found - Mekong Review For a relatively slim volume, Lio Mangubat’s Silk, Silver, Spices, Slaves: Lost Tales from the Philippine Colonial Period, 1565–1946 covers a broad swath of Philippine history.

An insightful review of Mangubat’s enaging and wide-ranging book on Filipino colonial history. I can also wholeheartedly recommend the the podcast on which it is based mekongreview.com/lost-and-fou...

Report: The Impact of the U.S. Foreign Aid Freeze on LGBTQIAN+ Organizations in Southeast Asia Advocating for human rights for sexual and gender minorities throughout Southeast Asia

Important work from the ASEAN SOGIE Caucus on the implications for queer and trans folk in SE Asia of the US aid withdrawal/suspension. aseansogiecaucus.org/latest/asc-n...

Fantastic to be invited to speak on decolonial futures for Kurdistan by the Politics Society at the University of Lincoln. Thanks to all the students, colleagues and alums that attended and sparked such a great conversation.

It’s always a highlight of my year to chair the Lincoln Model United Nations General Assembly - so many great speeches and wonderful to see our students using the skills and knowledge they’ve picked up over a semester’s hard work. Thanks to @lincolnshirecc.bsky.social as always.

Practising in an evaluative culture: an autoethnographic study of pedagogical practice in higher education The prevailing culture in UK higher education is one of evaluation and performativity (Ball 2012). This study uses an autoethnographic approach to explore how working in an evaluative culture influ...

'Findings suggest that overtime, my academic identity has become characterised by resistance, a desire to be creative and work with autonomy to counteract the evaluative culture of higher education.'

#AcademicSky

An interesting new study by Jane Pye. 👇

doi.org/10.1080/1356...

Celebrating the Scholarship and Activism of Dédé Oetomo — New York Southeast Asia Network Join NYSEAN and NYU’s Masters Program in International Affairs for a conversation with Dédé Oetomo , a campaigner for LGBT rights in Indonesia and a scholar on gender issues, and Gina Chua , a ...

www.nysean.org/events/celeb...

A Lexicon for Bridging Decolonial Queer Feminisms and Materialist Feminisms

Our Lexicon for Bridging Decolonial Queer Feminisms and Materialist Feminisms is now published in Arabic & English. kohljournal.press/issue-11-1 🌈🎓

Being anti-colonial in your values and decolonial in your actions is the only way to continue living the radical potential of queerness.

Aníbal Quijano and the Decolonial Turn - Nelson Maldonado-Torres, 2025 This review article proposes that Aníbal Quijano’s conceptualization and elaboration of the coloniality of power can be understood as part of a third major mome...

New as Online First: Nelson Maldonado-Torres, 'Aníbal Quijano and the Decolonial Turn' - emphasizes the role of decolonial collectives in the formation of combative decolonial attitudes. journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...

Now on YouTube: The talk by Kimani Njogu, co-written with Alamin Mazrui, on "Ngũgĩ and the Quest for a Paradigm Shift: Between Language and Translation". The discussant is Christian Mair. Enjoy!
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vjra...

Heloise Weber on Global Development Inequalities & Injustices - GLOBAL SOUTHS HUB In this edition of our Meet the Editor’s series, we speak with TWQ Academic Editor Heloise Weber. She currently works in the School of Political Science and International Studies at the University of ...

“To be truly meaningful, [decolonisation] has to be about critiquing power and knowledge, exploring how power is constituted in knowledge, and how that enables structures of domination to be upheld.” Interview with our amazing UQ colleague Heloise Weber.
globalsouth.org/2024/11/helo...

The nostalgia of the colonised - Mekong Review Taiwan is constantly forced to assert its own identity and presence. Yet this struggle hasn’t made it impervious to colonial hangovers.

On the nostalgia of the colonised and the ambiguous contours of post/de-colonisation in the Taiwan-Japan relationship. Thought provoking stuff. mekongreview.com/the-nostalgi...