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Director’s Note

No, AI Won’t Take Your Job—If Universities Do Theirs

Christopher Newfield

This title may seem odd as the British job service Indeed reports that entry-level job postings are down 7% this summer, to their lowest level since the 2020 pandemic.

It may seem odd coming from me, since I often argue that universities made a fateful conceptual and strategic error when they put themselves on the hook for graduate jobs and salaries, which are controlled by business. The value of a university degree is mainly non-pecuniary and public. Universities are really about intellectual development, new ideas, and social knowledge.

But universities must also do no harm to employability. Tragically, when they adapt their already narrow job focus to AI—instead of piling their money into full student development—they do that harm.

Read On...

Workshop: French Theory in British Culture

7th September 2026, 10:00 am - 7:00 pm BST.

BLOC, Queen Mary University of London, London

What was French theory? Why and how did this constellation of names and ideas, imported from diverse fields in twentieth century Paris, create such ruction, such antagonism in British cultural life? Names like Barthes, Derrida, Foucault and Kristeva were hot on the lips of academics, artists, musicians, and performers, from the British Film Institute to the New Music Express and every cultural space in between. French theory became a byword for progression, provocation, and maybe even a little pretentiousness, too.

Join our one-day programme, curated by ISRF Fellow Colm McAuliffe, on the reception of French Theory in Britain and its legacies with readings, discussions, and a rare screening of ‘The Late Show - Roland Barthes.’

Learn More & Register

Book Launch: Gifts from the Arms Trade

17th September 2026, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm BST.

MayDay Rooms, London

How did continuous warfare become normal in the 21st century? How did police in many countries start using military hardware to manage ordinary crowds? Jill Gibbon’s new book reveals part of the answer to these questions: massive arms fairs, the trade shows for military equipment, which combine displays of the world’s most lethal tanks, missiles, and fighter jets with cute promotional gifts. She reports on the combination of drones hanging from ceiling and penetration bombs on the floor, all wrapped in a fun atmosphere of corporate hospitality sealed with chewable candy.

Learn More & Register

Uzbekistan’s World Cup appearance is a moment of pride and shows off central Asia’s peaceful development

Nick Megoran

Uzbekistan is the first central Asian country to compete in the World Cup. Underlying their emergence to football’s largest stage is a fascinating tale of geopolitics and peace. Nick Megoran explains how the countries of the Ferghana Valley have worked to resolve border tensions after independence from the Soviet Union.

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How oil turned the motors of capitalism: a history

Imraan Valodia and Adam Hanieh

In this article, economist Imraan Valodia interviews ISRF Fellow Adam Hanieh about his latest book “Crude Capitalism: Oil, Corporate Power, and the Making of the World Market”. His book explores the expansive history of oil and capitalism from the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, founded by Britain in 1908, to the Paris Agreement in 2015.

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Weakest Link

Lorna Finlayson

How do departments determine which colleagues should be made redundant? Often the criteria used to make such decisions is vague and based on ‘merit’. Lorna Finlayson examines how attempts to measure academic performance undermine, discriminate and reduce staff to arbitrary metrics and targets.

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Lived Geopolitics. The Production of Unorthodox Scalar Connections through Trade

Claudia Eggart

Shuttle trading emerged as a viable, alternative livelihood, predominately for women, after the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. In this article, Claudia Eggart explores how large-scale geopolitical transformations are felt and negotiated at the local level, through the bodies of women shuttle traders.

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Podcast episode: ‘Ghosts of a Military Road (Evelina Gambino and Elisabed Gedevanishvili)’ by Material Crimes

In the latest episode of the Material Crimes podcast, Evelina Gambino and Elisabed Gedevanishvili explore a key road of the North-South Corridor linking Iran to Russia. Built in the 18th century, the road has been endlessly remade - shaped by war, trade and more. Underpinning its geopolitical significance are the stories of everyday people who live and work along the corridor.

Listen Here...

New publication: ‘Frontex continuing mission in Greece despite serious violations of migrants’ rights’ by Ludek Stavinoha and Franziska Grillmeier

ISRF Fellow Ludek Stavinoha co-investigates the growing violations of migrants’ rights in Greece. When reported to the Fundamental Rights Office of Frontex, it fails to prompt any action. As people continue to seek refuge and risk their lives, this article asks how long these violations will be tolerated.

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New publication: ‘Margaret Archer’s legacy to business and management studies: a bibliometric analysis’ by Ismael Al-Amoudi

What is Margaret Archer’s influence on business and management studies (BMS)? This article explores further and provides a blueprint for a methodological approach for other applied social sciences. By analysing citation patterns, Al-Amoudi traces the way Archer’s realist social theory is diffused across disciplines, while also drawing special attention to Archer’s later works and their relation to contemporary issues around technology and dehumanisation.

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New publication: ‘Raymond Williams and Structures of Feeling’ edited by by Niall Gildea and Louise Braddock

This book examines cultural critic Raymond Williams’ idea of ‘structures of feeling’ and its value in contemporary debates in anthropology, economics, literary studies, and more. Co-edited by former ISRF Director Louise Braddock, the volume includes contributions from Chris Newfield as well as ISRF Fellows.

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New publication: ‘Is religious illiteracy a problem in geographical education?’ by Nick Megoran

Is religious illiteracy a problem in geographical education in the UK? This article examines how physical and human geographers handle religion with a specific focus on the UK education context and school textbooks. Megoran shows why offering updated information on the co-existence of science and religion is fundamental to creating inclusive learning environments.

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Podcast episode: ‘Jeoffrey Sarpong Podcast’ Interview with Professor Sarah Hall Marie

This podcast interview between Jeoffrey Sarpong and Dr. Sarah Marie Hall discusses the struggles that many Gen Zers face: the seeming impossibility of building a future when it feels so out of reach. In defining and analysing current austerity conditions, their conversation saliently addresses how hopes for the future shrink as new generations struggle to afford basic necessities.

Watch Here...

New video: ‘Taming Egg Donors’ book launch with Anna Molas, Chandra Kala Clemente-Martínez, Laura Perler

How do those involved in Spain’s egg donation industry—donors, clinicians, and clinic staff—experience its pressures, medical interventions, and moral codes? Watch Anna Molas discuss her latest book on Europe’s largest egg donation industry with panellists Chandra Kala Clemente-Martínez and Laura Perler.

Tune In...

A one-day program curated by our Fellow Dr. Colm McAuliffe on the influence of French Theory in British Culture. Join us in readings, discussions, and a screening of ‘The Late Show - Roland Barthes.’

BLOC, Queen Mary University of London | 10:00am GMT, 7th September 2026 | Click Here to Register

Register to Attend

What was French theory? Why and how did this constellation of names and ideas, imported from diverse fields in twentieth century Paris, create such ruction, such antagonism in British cultural life? Names like Barthes, Derrida, Foucault and Kristeva were hot on the lips of academics, artists, musicians, and performers, from the British Film Institute to the New Music Express and every cultural space in between. French theory became a byword for progression, provocation, and maybe even a little pretentiousness, too.

This event examines how British cultural life shifted when French theory was introduced and asks how and why French theory was so fertile across so many disciplines? How did its uses and abuses create space for fresh forms of thinking about the way we live and experience the world? And is French theory really to blame for the dire state of the humanities in university life?

Oh, Theory Me! will feature contributions from novelist and artist Susan Finlay, acclaimed cultural critic Sukhdev Sandhu, musician and academic Caroline Kennedy, and more to be announced. It will also feature a rare screening of The Late Show: Roland Barthes, a BBC special from 1990 dedicated to the life of Barthes, perhaps the most famous of the French theorists.

The event is curated by the Independent Social Research Foundation and Dr Colm McAuliffe whose book on the reception of French theory in Britain will be published by University of Minnesota Press in 2027

Schedule

10:00am - 4:45pm - Talks & Discussions

5:00pm - 6:00pm - Screening: The Late Show - Roland Barthes (BBC, 1990)

6:00pm - 7:00pm - Drinks & Reception

Join us from 10:00am GMT on Monday 7th September 2026 at BLOC, Queen Mary University of London. Register Now.

Material Crimes is a podcast project dedicated to uncovering the “true crimes” of infrastructure.

The series explores how infrastructure is made by global systems of colonialism and capitalism, yet experienced and contested in local and everyday ways.

Working with researchers, activists and communities, the series threads together archives, interviews, music and the voices of those living at infrastructure’s sharpest edges.

Each episode follows the trail of a different infrastructural crime, with its own particular history. But whether the focus is a detention centre, a railway or a mine, in the Israeli military-prison complex or along a military road in Georgia, the stories in these episodes are always connected to global histories of conquest, resource extraction, and profit.

Listen & Subscribe on Spotify

Listen & Subscribe on Apple Podcasts

New episodes released weekly - beginning with Episode 1: Stop That Train

“But didn’t colonialism give them railways?” The “Cape-to-Cairo” railway was meant to stretch from Africa’s southern tip to Egypt in the north. It was the unrealised fantasy of an unruly cast of imperial hustlers, including most infamously Cecil Rhodes. As Dom Davies traces the legacy of this unfinished railway across Africa, he finds that tracks of colonial plunder, resource extraction, and white supremacy continue to haunt the continent.

Talking to Adam Elliott-Cooper, Megan Jones, Uhuru Portia Phalafala, Sara Salem, and Jonny Steinberg, Dom explores the violence of the Cape-to-Cairo railway as both a symbolic and material crime. Using songs and poetry of resistance, he also unravels how fantasies of a connected Africa energised successive generations of activists, from Black Consciousness poets to Rhodes Must Fall.

Episode 1: Stop That Train

Dom Davies is Reader in English at City St George’s, University of London. His research connects infrastructure to histories of empire and nationalism and explores its representation in literature and visual culture. He is also convenor of the Thinking Through Infrastructure Network (TTiN), which brings academics together with policy makers and organisers to ask how practices in the arts and humanities can build community and justice around sites of infrastructure failure.

Coming up in Season 3…

The ISRF has supported the production Material Crimes Season Three through a discretionary award to series’ co-creators and co-directors Maia Holtermann Entwistle and Sharri Plonski (Queen Mary University of London).

Season Three is mixed and sound designed by felix taylor and Carla Flores. Visuals, website and installation are designed by Frederick Kannemeyer. Nivi Manchanda (QMUL) provided production support and expertise.

Visit the Material Crimes Website

by Bethan Evans

Published on: July 1st, 2026

In an earlier blog post in this series, David Yates wrote about universities as victims of accelerated existence. In that piece, David sets out the many ways in which acceleration is damaging higher education institutions, governed by capital and a marketised model of education. The result is a state of permacrisis, cuts to spending and staffing, and a focus on task-oriented (rather than knowledge oriented) work with quantification of ‘outputs’ in both research and education remits. One consequence of this is a deleterious impact on staffing levels (through redundancies and increasing use of precarious contracts), hypercompetition between staff for contracts, funding, time and scarce resources, and as a result a decrease in staff health and wellbeing.

Academia is not alone here, but research in 2021 found that, in the UK, HE staff have lower wellbeing than average for other sectors across all of the Health and Safety Executive’s (HSE) psychosocial hazard categories and more than half of staff report working over 40hrs a week.

In this blog post I reflect further on the human impact of the current crisis in HE in the UK, drawing on data from ISRF-funded research done in collaboration with Dr Alison Allam and Dr Anna Ruddock. Our work explores the experiences of academics with energy limiting conditions. Energy limiting conditions (ELC) are long-term health conditions that involve energy impairment as a key symptom, which has a significant negative impact on all areas of a person’s life. Because the defining feature of ELC is the symptom and experience of energy impairment rather than a particular diagnostic label, the term covers many health conditions.

Managing energy impairment most typically involves ‘pacing’, avoiding boom and bust cycles of activity. Failure to do so often results in ‘payback’. This means that, for people with ELC, working longer hours to meet short deadlines, or frequently responding to urgent issues which disrupt the ability to plan work in advance, or which require pushing through exhaustion, risks significant relapse and worsening symptoms for a lengthy time. Multiple short deadlines and constant ‘firefighting’ are common in a sector operating in permacrisis. Whilst these conditions can lead to burnout in non-disabled colleagues, people with ELC are impacted sooner and the health and safety risks are significant. Such working conditions can also debilitate workers, for some leading to ELC.

I consider the experiences of academics with ELC as a means to reflect on two consequences of work within a sector driven by hyperproductivity and marketisation: first institutionalised ableism, and second the functioning of the sector as an ‘exhaustion economy’, one which frequently demands more energy than workers have to give. These things are connected because “In an age when even the “well” buckle under the demands of academia, the chronically ill or disabled are rarely able to jump the hurdles required.”

What follows are seven images, produced by the illustrator Stacy Bias, to visualise particular aspects of our research findings. These images capture the experiences of academics with ELC, revealing both institutionalised ableism and the operation of higher education as an exhaustion economy. On the latter, we might consider people with energy limiting conditions as ‘canaries in the coal mine’ as we are impacted sooner and more significantly by demands to overwork.

Intensified and unmanageable workload

Our research provides evidence of significant health and safety risks of current academic workplaces for people with ELC. In particular, 94% of respondents said that their work is either never or only sometimes manageable without making their symptoms worse. This is, in large part, due to high workload and cultures of overwork, with 66% of survey respondents saying that their workload had increased over the last three years. It’s worth noting here that this research was carried out prior to the current redundancies affecting the HE sector in the UK, which have resulted in higher workload for those staff remaining. Short deadlines, deadline bunching and little coordination between competing demands relating to teaching, research and admin intensify this overwork. This is dangerous for anyone, but particularly for people with ELC who risk significant relapse.

This is also compounded by institutionalised ableism, in many institutions written into the design of workload allocation models (WAM). Everyday tasks taking longer due to an impairment is an example of a substantial adverse effect in the definition of disability within the Equality Act, yet many WAM have no means to factor this in. In fact, whilst 89% of our survey respondents said that tasks take them longer to complete due to their ELC, only 7% said that this resulted in adjustments to their workload. Whilst additional time is often offered as a reasonable adjustment to disabled students, this is rare for disabled staff. As a consequence, disabled staff with non-adjusted workloads are being asked to work longer hours than non-disabled staff, whilst facing additional health risks from overwork.

In some cases, academics with ELC have been forced to move to part-time contracts and pay whilst still working full-time, due to the additional time it takes them to complete their work. This reflects a broader reliance on overwork in the sector, with workload models rarely reflecting the true length of time that tasks take, often not recording all aspects of academic work, and yet still recording workloads above 100% FTE. The sector is reliant on staff being able to overwork as staffing levels fall whilst expectations of hyperproductivity rise. This all has a significant impact on health and wellbeing.

Materialising overwork in campus spaces

The spaces in which academic work takes place also contribute to exhaustion. Marketisation and the associated removal of student recruitment caps and/or sale of campus property has meant an increased pressure on campus space. Inaccessible campus environments and timetabling systems make evident institutionalised ableism.

People reported being timetabled in rooms a significant distance apart for consecutive teaching sessions, in rooms inaccessible to them, or having no time to rest, eat or use the bathroom between teaching and/or meetings. Accompanied by intensified workload and higher expectations related to administrative work and research, this means there is little time between tasks or opportunities to pause, rest or think during the academic day.

Another consequence of the increased pressure on campus space is seeing, in many universities, individual academic offices being phased out and open plan offices phased in. Sensory sensitivities are common amongst people with ELC. As this image illustrates, time spent in open plan or shared offices therefore results in intense symptom exacerbation and pain. Many of our participants reported being unable to effectively do their jobs in open plan offices, which are too loud and busy for the levels of thought and concentration needed. Presenteeism also contributes to overwork and exhaustion.

One of our participants reported that they ‘pretend’ to work whilst in the office and then work all evening at home to make up for the time they’ve lost . Whilst this is particularly a problem for people with sensory sensitivities, participants also pointed out that shared or open plan offices work for almost nobody. We might see this shift in working arrangements as reflective of the accelerationist shift from academic labour as a pursuit of knowledge to labour oriented towards the completion of tasks which can be quantified and measured and an associated drive for faster and greater ‘output’ over care-full and slow scholarship.

Cultures of overwork and exclusion

Cultures of overwork also shape the formation of community within academic workplaces. Having an ELC can be very isolating. It often means that in order to be able to work, time outside work is spent resting or in significant pain due to symptom exacerbation. Many academic workplaces have cultures of networking and socialisation in the evening, often in pubs, times and places which may be inaccessible to people with ELC. People with ELC are not alone here, some neurodivergent people, people with caring responsibilities and other minoritised academics also find these cultures of socialisation exclusionary. This not only intensifies feelings of isolation, but participants reported being excluded from team grant applications, teaching collaboration or co-authored publications planned outside work time even where their expertise was the strongest fit.

Again, these issues reflect the acceleration of academic timescales and cultures of overwork which mean that work no longer fits within the working day. One of our recommendations is that networking and social events need to take place within working hours, and a reduction in overall workload is also needed to make time for these. Academics without ELC can also show solidarity to colleagues with ELC by ensuing that they are included in work even if they are not present in social spaces.

Survival of the fittest

Cultures of hyperproductivity and hypercompetition, common in marketised HE, create institutional structures which value quantity over quality and leave behind those who are excluded by these structures. In our research 79% of survey respondents said that having an ELC had a significant, negative impact on their career progression. This illustration visualises this as a broken career ladder.

Unrealistic expectations which require overwork in order to pass probation or be promoted were mentioned by many participants. Having to sacrifice research in order to meet deadlines for teaching and administrative work is also common for people with ELC with workloads that do not account for the additional time it takes to complete these tasks. However, we did speak to participants who, with an inclusive workplace and appropriate adjustments had thrived.

This isn’t impossible but requires better understanding of ELC and more inclusive workplaces. It also requires cultural shifts out of line with the neoliberalised academic workplace. Many of our participants spoke of feeling guilty for not being able to do as much as non-disabled colleagues. Solidarity within cultures of competition is often conditional and this results in cultures of fear in which people are reluctant to ask for the adjustments they need. A ‘race to the bottom’ culture of overwork is harmful for all.

This illustration imagines and compares a ‘day in the life’ of an academic with ELC, the top part for someone without reasonable adjustments and the bottom one for someone with reasonable adjustments. In particular, this illustration demonstrates the ways in which flexible and home working can make a significant difference to people with ELC.

An important point that this illustration is trying to make is that people with ELC bring valuable insights and experiences to academic work. With the right adjustments and inclusive workplaces people with ELC can be leaders in research, teaching and admin. Academia loses out if people with ELC are lost from academic careers.

Hypercompetition

One of the other things we were interested in in this research is how the experiences of academics with ELC can help re-imagine academic work to reduce exhaustion for everyone. What came up again and again in answer to questions relating to this is the need for a cooperative university not a competitive one. As previous blog posts in this series have documented, competition is baked into the current higher education system through marketisation. So much of academic work is competitive and this often intensifies cultures of overwork as people compete to demonstrate they have gone ‘above and beyond’ everyone else, with mistrust, resentment and guilt associated with colleagues seen to be doing less.

This is felt acutely by academics with ELC who cannot compete with others trying to meet these unreasonable standards. Often the only way that universities recognise staff is through awards which pit colleagues against each other. Instead, a vision of a collaborative university which supports people to be able to work together and ultimately to thrive rather than just survive is something to aim for.

How do we get there from the current crisis in HE which has, undoubtedly further intensified the ableism and exhaustion our research documents? As others in this blog series have suggested, a fundamental shift in the way Higher Education institutions are funded, managed and valued is necessary. We also need cultural change to create workplaces that centre cooperation, empathy and teamwork rather than competition.

This requires a diversity of voices and experiences in academic management as well as valuing alternative, slower forms of scholarship and different ways of doing academic labour. Listening to the voices of academics with ELC, it’s evident that without such changes, the current HE system will not only continue to further reinforce ableist systems but also reproduce debilitated and chronically ill workers.

For guidance on reasonable adjustments for academics with ELC see: https://exhaustioneconomy.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/ISRF-Report-Reasonable-adjustments-Final.pdf

This blog is part of the ISRF series Dispatches: Experiencing Academia’s Decline, a collection of reflections from academics and students navigating universities in crisis.

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by Nick Megoran

Published on: June 29th, 2026

A senior law enforcement officer in the Uzbekistani capital, Tashkent, was recently caught on tape demanding that officers fabricate reports about their success in rounding up ‘vagrants’. When an arbitrary target set for an arbitrary deadline looked like it would be missed, Abror Khudoyberdiev, of the Almazar District of Department of Internal Affairs, sent this panicked message to his inspectors: ‘Each of you register a vagrant. Bring a relative and register them as a vagrant. Register yourself as a vagrant.’

This ludicrous incident is typical of the unintended consequences of Outcomes-Based Performance-Management (OBPM) schemes. Unfortunately, as many UK academics can attest, it has become a common way for UK universities to ‘manage’ staff, resulting in great workplace stress. My own institution is no exception: in 2015 senior management attempted to foist a particularly obnoxious OBPM model on the university, the infamous ‘Raising the Bar.’ Fortunately, as our example also shows, these can be defeated by creative and concerted collective action.

Target culture and the public sector

Outcomes-Based Performance Management (OBPM) is the use of targets and measurement systems to monitor, evaluate, and improve individual employee and organisational outcomes. It has been used variously in Cold War East European command economies to manage industrial production, and in West European and US health and educational sectors. Cataloguing how it invites bias, cheating and gaming the system in order to avoid punishment, in his famous ‘Campbell’s Law’, Donald Campbell concluded that ‘The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.’

A classic example is the Blair government’s headline target of a patient being seen within four hours of entering an Accident and Emergency (A&E) unit. This sounds like a fine thing, and the government was able to use seemingly positive results to try and fool commentators and the public into thinking their reforms were working. But in a deep dive into what actually happened, Gwyn Bevan and Christopher Hood found extensive evidence of gaming the system. Hospital trusts drafted in extra staff to A&E and cancelled scheduled operations elsewhere for the period over which performance was measured; patients were made to wait in ambulance queues until managers were sure they could be seen within four hours of admittance; trolleys were redesignated as ‘beds’ by placing them in hallways, and the like. Like the hapless Tashkent cop forced to fabricate vagrancy reports, the goal of desperate managers becomes hitting targets to keep their jobs, not real delivery of socially useful goods: ‘what matters is what’s measured’, Bevan and Hood concluded.

‘Raising the Bar’ at Newcastle University

Education and educators have been particularly high up the league table of most tortured victims of OBPM schemes. ‘Teaching to the test’ is a well-known problem of high-school education. My university, Newcastle, stands as an example of the worst excesses of ‘The Metric Tide’. In 2015-16, it launched ‘Raising the Bar’ (RTB). A classic example of OBPM, it set academics a range of crude targets for annual grant capture, publications, and PhD supervisee completions as a way to align individual working practices with particular management goals. These goals were entirely products of a flawed imperative that equated success with the university’s position in league tables: for example, ensuring the university was in the world’s ‘top 200’ universities and having ‘at least 10 subjects (Units of Assessment) which are ranked top 50 in the world’.

The implementation of RTB was insidious. Heads of department were instructed to assess all staff against some fairly arbitrary metrics and flag them as ‘Green’ or ‘Red’ in a traffic-light system. Academics were not told their colour, but ‘greens’ were to be reassured about their position, and the ‘reds’ summoned to special RTB review meetings from which ‘inferences may be drawn by individuals.’ For ‘reds’ who didn’t improve, an accelerated ‘capability procedure’ would be implemented to coerce them into either signing teaching-only contracts or leave the university.

Managing staff performance against goals that are not in their power to fulfil – for example, winning rather than simply applying for grants – was crass and cruel. Unsurprisingly, RTB created great fear and anxiety in the institution. Union casework indicated that it unleashed a culture of bullying as staff were told informally that they ought to look elsewhere for work. These effects were experienced differentially: colleagues who recently had extended periods of maternity or sickness leave, or heavy teaching and service loads, were particularly disadvantaged. The Newcastle UCU branch produced posters highlighting the anger and distress RTB was causing:

Resisting RTB

Newcastle staff were repeatedly told by management that RTB was inevitable, and we just needed to ‘play the game’. But it’s a myth that we can ‘play the game’ without it reworking and re-languaging our fundamental sense of what scholarship is. So, we resisted, in four ways.

First, we articulated a collective grievance. We organised meetings across the university. We read the latest scholarship on the flaws of OBPM and drew on the expertise of colleagues who worked on the topic. We invited external speakers. Groups of academics in their own disciplines and in broader collectives (like the Newcastle University Women’s Network) wrote joint, open letters to university managers and governance bodies.

Second, we shaped the narrative. The posters displayed around the university, the coverage in local and national media, and working with students to ask their parents to complain to the university, all articulated a powerful critique of RTB as coercive, anti-intellectual and ultimately harmful to the university. A very long message sent from the Vice Chancellor to the Executive Director of Corporate Affairs, obtained by a subsequent Freedom of Information request, shows just how much this rankled senior managers:

As you know, the temperature is rising fast on the UCU local action, and I think the local campaign will get very active over the next week or so. I expect they will deploy all the tactics we have seen before and likely a few more: misinformation about ‘targets’, getting the students mobilised, a one-sided view of the ACAS negotiations, etc. Just over this Bank holiday weekend so far I have already received a number of emails from students (from English, this time) about the marking boycott, and I expect more to come. The parents will be next, probably followed by the press. I would expect a social media campaign too.

This indicates that university staff’s success in shaping the narrative irked university executives.

Third, we presented an alternative vision and vocabulary. A key strategy was not simply to oppose a harmful idea, but to articulate an alternative vocabulary of excellence in academia. Under the title ‘Improving Research Together’ (IRT), we launched a document recognising the desire to improve performance (who doesn’t want to do better research?), but to do so in a collegial and empowering way that recognised this desire by giving staff the freedom and resources to succeed. Opening with the words, ‘Newcastle University exists to further human understanding of the universe for the benefit of humanity’, IRT resisted RTB by restating the intrinsic value of public education. A Change.org petition calling on the university’s senior management to ‘end coercive performance management at Newcastle University’ and instead sign up to IRT garnered 2,701 signatures (accompanied by numerous critical comments) from academics worldwide within three days.

Fourthly and finally, we took collective action. University managers tried to mollify us with a proposed memorandum of understanding that softened the language but not content of RTB, so UCU branch members voted to take Action Short of a Strike in the form of a marking boycott beginning 3 June 2016. Management wrote to staff threatening to deduct pay at a rate of 100% but then backed down in the face of staff resolution and the increasingly bad publicity. On the next working day, Monday 6^th June, they agreed to withdraw RTB and, draw on the approach suggested in IRT to work with staff to develop a ‘collegial approach to improving research’.

Mobilising for lasting change

Outcomes-Based Performance-Management schemes are beloved by university managers because they seem to offer simple pathways to institutional improvement. In reality, they corrupt and distort education and can cause great distress for those working on the frontlines of research and teaching.

Although academics have subjected such schemes to extensive critique, we have generally been pessimistic about our ability to resist them, preferring instead to offer mitigation strategies and grudgingly accept the inevitably of the relentless march of neoliberalism in academia. The defeat of RTB showed that successful mobilisation against what Stefan Collini called ‘the logic of punitive quantification’ is an available option. It also led to an immediate improvement in university culture. More staff joined the union branch and activists successfully ran for Senate as a way to try and hold senior management to better account in the future.

A decade later, Newcastle, like many other universities, has been caught in a funding crisis. But there has been no management attempt to roll out another OBPM system across the university, and some school or departmental initiatives along these lines have been resisted.

But perhaps the greater challenge has been the internalisation of the type of values and distorting practices that RTB sought to instil through external coercion. Many of us working in higher education voluntarily subject ourselves to unnecessary metrics exercises. For example, we create Google Scholar profiles to generate flawed ‘H-indexes’ or cultivate followings and profiles on neoliberal platforms like Academia.edu which monetise academic visibility and transform researchers into self‑branding, target-hitting entrepreneurs. We boast on our websites about the cash values of grants we have won. In doing so, we make the same error as RTB – mistaking the end product of innovative research for the means to undertake it.

In a shrinking higher education sector marked by precarity and uncertainty, we face a real dilemma of how to respond to incentive structures that encourage academics to think of scholarship not as a vocation but as competitive career. We need to figure out ways to fight the battle against target culture in our own practices as well as on the picket lines.

This blog is part of the ISRF series Dispatches: Experiencing Academia’s Decline, a collection of reflections from academics and students navigating universities in crisis.

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Director’s Note

Top Seven AI Trends for the Summer Break

Christopher Newfield

For some reason, British universities don’t know how to end their academic year. As a result, I’ve found myself giving four papers at UK academic conferences in the last half of June, which should never happen, and at least one more in the 2^nd week of July. The summer World Cup will end before the British academic year does. British academia forgets that summer is to give people time to stop the old thoughts so that they can have new ones. The ISRF is no better: we’re launching a (very good) book, Generative Justice, on 16th July.

Luckily, other countries of the northern hemisphere have more sense. The 2025-26 academic year has been over for weeks in the US, Canada, Mexico, France, etc., or will end soon in the knowledge that it won’t start again until late October (Germany). So those academics are in a position to assess what happened to AI’s reputation over the course of their year.

ISRF’s research group, “Reframing AI,” is finishing a Green Paper this summer on the impact of Large Language Models (LLMs) on university-level learning and writing. It’s not easy: some AI trends are from Venus and others are from Mars.

Read On...

Book Launch: Generative Justice: Beyond Crime and Punishment

16th July 2026, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm BST.

Barnard’s Inn Hall, London & Online

Building on practical experience drawn from innovative projects and communities in many diverse settings, Generative Justice brings together academics, practitioners, educators, and justice-involved people to begin the work of fundamentally rethinking our conception of justice. Co-edited by Fergus McNeill, Mary Corcoran and Beth Weaver, this collection is a rich body of alternative approaches to justice work, ones that foreground relationality, recognition, care, and solidarity rather than punishment or retribution.

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What Does It Feel Like to Live Under the Threat of Redundancy?

Glen O’Hara

Restructuring is often touted as a necessary solution to the financial crisis that numerous British universities face. For academic and professional staff, this means contending with the risk of redundancy. What does it mean to live under a constant cloud of uncertainty? Glen O’Hara shares more in this contribution to our Dispatches series.

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What Makes Public Engagement So Difficult (and Why It Still Matters)

Eric Royal Lybeck

Universities often encourage academics to work with local communities. However this work, veiled in risk assessments and reputational management, mask the realities of genuine engagement. In this contribution to our Dispatches series, Eric Royal Lybeck argues for the slow, frustrating and uneven practice of meaningful civic engagement.

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Letting Universities Fail Won’t Solve the Higher Education Funding Crisis

James Brackley & David Yates

The latest Education Committee report underlines the dire financial realities that UK universities are navigating. While the report proposes solutions, it fails to address a fundamental driver of the current crisis - the marketisation of higher education. James Brackley and David Yates explain further.

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Target culture and how to defeat it

Nick Megoran

Universities across the UK have been subjected to Outcomes-Based Performance Management, a system used to evaluate academics against arbitrary targets and goals. Nick Megoran outlines how staff at Newcastle University took collective action to resist such efforts.

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The exhaustion economy: Seven illustrations of life at UK universities

Bethan Evans

Bethan Evans draws from the experiences of academics with energy limiting conditions to explore how the marketisation of UK universities impacts staff. Doing so illustrates how the current university landscape not only institutionalises ableism but also functions as an ‘exhaustion economy’, one which frequently demands more energy than workers have to give.

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Upcoming event: ‘Neurodivergent Affirming Space Research & Definition’ with Kate Fox & George Watts

On 16th July (6:30-7:30pm, Zoom) Kate Fox & George Watts share some initial findings from the research project into Neurodivergent Affirming spaces they & Dr Helen Kara have conducted. This will involve sharing a Zine and some poems and then opening up for chat.

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New publication: ‘Special Issue: Locating the Geopolitical’ Co-edited by Rozafa Berisha and Claudia Eggart

How do wars, strategic alliances, and global rivalries take shape in everyday life? Co-edited by Rozafa Berisha and ISRF Fellow Claudia Eggart, this special issue seeks to locate the geopolitical by tracing how global power is grounded in the settings where people live, work, move, and imagine their futures. Through the concept of “contact zones,” the contributors show that the geopolitical is not simply imposed from above but co-produced through everyday practices, affects, and encounters.

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New publication: ‘Not-so-digital platforms? Non-use, (in)appropriate technologies, and offline dimensions of digital agricultural services for smallholders in rural Africa’ by Fabio Gatti, Oane Visser, Mary Lorine Obala, Emelia Atabo, Sam Nicholas Atanga

While digital agricultural tools are seen as transformative, the reality for small holder African farmers is more complicated. This paper argues that the lack of engagement with such tools is not primarily due to infrastructure or individuals. Rather, it reflects the limitations of the platforms which prioritise scalability and control over adaptability and farmer agency.

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New publication: ‘Writing the anticolonial: between postcolonial and decolonial geographies’ by Stephen Legg

Spaces of Anticolonialism: Delhi’s Urban Governmentalities by Stephen Legg is the first book-length account of anticolonialism in Delhi. Across Old and New Delhi, It explores the subaltern geographies and struggles in conversation with the elite spaces of the Indian National Congress to examine the dual cities as one interconnected, anti-colonial political landscape. In this article, Legg reflects on the research, analysis and writing process that went into the development of the book.

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New publication: ‘Ephemeral Lives Versus Colonial Afterlives: Building Decolonial Urbanisms Through Two African Culture Festivals in Athens’ by Anna Papoutsi & Antonis Vradis

This paper examines how African migrantised and diasporic communities in Athens contest the city's dominant colonial imaginary through cultural festival practice. Papoutsi & Vradis argue that Athens has been constructed as a racialised chronotope: a frozen, whitened tableau anchored in classical antiquity that renders contemporary racialised presences peripheral, temporary, and illegible.

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How do the harms of crime and criminalisation impact interpersonal, community, and social relationships? How and when can those relationships be reimagined, rebuilt and repaired as part of healing, recovery and the search for justice? And can solidarity, rather than retribution, become the foundation of our approach?

Barnard’s Inn Hall, London & Online | 6pm BST, 16th July 2026 | Click Here to Register

Register to Attend

The criminal justice systems of ‘advanced’ liberal democracies tend to both individualise and dichotomise: criminal or law-abiding, guilty or innocent, victim or offender, responsible or not responsible, us or them. This flattening of human and social complexity forecloses forms of healing, rehabilitation, and recovery that concentrate on the relational and structural aspects of justice.

Building on practical experience drawn from innovative projects and communities in many diverse settings, Generative Justice brings together academics, practitioners, educators, and justice-involved people to begin the work of fundamentally rethinking our conception of justice. The result is a rich body of alternative approaches to justice work, ones that foreground relationality, recognition, care, and solidarity rather than punishment or retribution.

Editors Fergus McNeill (Professor of Criminology and Social Work at the University of Glasgow), Mary Corcoran (Professor of Criminology at Keele University) and Beth Weaver (Professor of Criminal and Social Justice at the University of Strathclyde) will be joined by Anne Fox, Chair of Trustees at Unlock; and Ella Simpson, Senior Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Greenwich.

A Q&A will follow, moderated by Christopher Newfield, ISRF Director of Research.

Join us from 6pm BST on Thursday 16th July 2026 at Barnard’s Inn Hall, London. Register Now.

1. Director’s Note

2. Upcoming ISRF Events

3. Dispatches

4. Blog

5. Fellows News

Director’s Note

Research for Alternative Futures

Christopher Newfield

ISRF has just finished its annual board meetings in Amsterdam, and they reminded me of my great luck in this job because I again had no bad news to report. The Fellows, the team, the partnerships, the focused research are all in such good form that I felt a bit foolish laying out the details to our academic and foundation boards.

However, the real world issues that the Fellows engage with are challenging and often getting worse. This is also true of the focused research we are organising internally, which cover British universities, machine v. human learning, political economy and race, and redesigning finance for climate justice (REDFIC). I routinely obsess about turning these issues around – reconstructing British universities, ending AI-driven cognitive loss in universities and society, confronting racial capitalism and getting the accelerated transition back on track.

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Book Launch: The Matter of Architecture: Geology, Buildings and Us

3rd June 2026, 6:15 pm - 8:00 pm (BST). In person.

Architectural Association Bookshop, London

In his important new book, The Matter of Architecture (Reaktion, 2026), Paul Dobraszczyk approaches geology as the architecture of our planet, arguing that what we build has always been dependent on what Earth has already made. Yet, what we produce now will also become the geology of the future: billions of tonnes of concrete, plastic, brick, metals and other fabricated materials that are quickly piling up to eventually become new geological strata.

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Book Launch: Taming Egg Donors: The Egg Donation Reproductive Market in Spain

17th June 2026, 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm (CEST). In person & online.

Sala de la Caritat, Biblioteca de Catalunya, Barcelona & Online

How do those involved in Spain’s egg donation industry—donors, clinicians, and clinic staff—experience its pressures, medical interventions, and moral codes? In her new book, Dr Anna Molas offers a fresh perspective on Europe’s largest egg donation industry. Drawing on rich ethnographic work and adopting a feminist lens, Molas shifts attention away from donors’ intentions towards the lived experiences of donors and practitioners alike.

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Why it’s time to end the marketisation of UK Higher Education

James Brackley

The marketisation of universities in the UK has failed to meet its aims of improving the quality of education while reducing prices. James Brackley examines how the focus on metrics, profits and audits has worsened conditions for academics, university staff and students.

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Dispatch From a Middle Manager

Anonymous

At many British universities, issues from low student recruitment to staff demoralisation are met with the same answer - restructure, centralise and de-personalise. This push towards ‘efficiency’ has had the opposite effect - leading universities into further financial and institutional crisis. How do we fight back?

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The University: Another Victim of Accelerated Existence?

David Yates

For some, the rapid development of new technologies signals a trajectory towards accerlerationism - an unfettered embrace of capitalism and technological progress. What does that mean for the university? David Yates explains further in this contribution to our Dispatches series.

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Pedagogical State Apparatus

Lars Cornelissen

The theory of constructive alignment is a one size fits all template that shapes course curricula across Europe. In this contribution to our Dispatches series, Lars Cornelissen argues that this theory is not a neutral guideline. Rather it is centres a particular philosophy of learning and teaching which forecloses any alternative pedagogies.

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The Matter of Architecture: Geology, Buildings and Us

Paul Dobraszczyk

Paul Dobraszczyk’s newest book “The Matter of Architecture” explores the relationship between our built environment and Earth’s minerals. In doing so, Dobraszczyk mines architecture for its geological meaning, demonstrating how our built environment is linked to the material fabric of Earth.

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Echoes from Sumatra: A Glimpse of Indonesia’s Political Economy of Disasters

Angelika Fortuna

The damage caused by Cyclone Senyar on the island of Sumatra was not only a catalyst for discussions on how to seriously address the climate crisis. As Angelika Fortuna argues, it also illustrated the impact of political and economic decisions that prioritise foreign investments over people and the environment.

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New publication: ‘Special Issue: Raced Finance’ Guest editors: Ilias Alami, Ali Bhagat and Vincent Guermond

While the discipline of international political economy recognises the importance of racial oppression and inequalities, it is often viewed as separate from financial power structures. This special issue explores the intimate, integral and co-constitutive links between the hierarchies of finance and race. In doing so, it engages with the concept of raced finance, examining how it shapes our understanding of race, finance, and capitalism.

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New publication: ‘Care, Justice, Protest and the Politics of Creative Work: Towards a Multi-Scale Theory of Cultural Activism’ by Kristina Kolbe

This article brings care politics, creative justice and political protest emerging from creative work in dialogue with inequalities in the sector. Arts and culture can be a catalyst for more equitable futures. In order to truly harness this, the labour conditions and precarity in the cultural industry must be addressed.

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Podcast episode: ‘Jeoffrey Sarpong Podcast’ Interview with Anthony Pickles

In this episode, Anthony Pickles and Jeoffrey Sarpong discuss various forms of gambling from prediction markets to sports betting apps. Their conversation examines why gambling rates are rising among young men, its connection to economic mobility and in addition, the gamification of politics.

Tune In...

by David Yates

Published on: May 27th, 2026

Contemporary life appears to move faster than ever. Technologies such as personal computers, cell phones and the internet allow for a degree of connectivity that continues to stretch the possibilities of what is achieved in a working day. At the same time, patterns of work and life are disrupted, changed into new ways of working and increasingly squeezed leisure time, with the ability to work almost anywhere, at any time, and the promise of greater productivity and progress not only on an individual or institutional scale, but also globally. We are currently experiencing an accelerated existence, and one that is being further accelerated by contemporary ‘alt-right’ politics, the rise of influential ‘tech bro’ companies, threats to democracy, and the race for the next age of technological supremacy. The version of posthumanism that is currently presenting itself is neither desirable (perhaps by definition), nor ethical.

In this piece I consider some of the effects of accelerated existence for universities, and in particular, how this current political and economic ideology is damaging the traditional role of the university. The deterritorialising effects of market-based change, rather than offering potential benefits to institutions, have confined them to a marketised model of education that is now governed by capital. Accelerationist influence runs through the contemporary British university, to the extent that it shapes almost every decision and is eroding the very ethos of the university: the study of the universe in all its forms.

What do we mean by accelerationism? Here I turn to the school of thought taken to the extreme by Nick Land. The general idea behind this form of accelerationism is that capitalism is the ultimate deterritorialising force, enabling progress. Forces that seek to restrain capitalism in any way e.g. critique, regulation, protest, fiscal policy etc. should be removed, as they slow down the inevitable progress that capitalism brings. Instead, capitalism should be ‘accelerated’, the forces it enacts multiplied, boosted, in order to take humanity to a level that ultimately will become posthuman, where the connection between humans and technology is indistinguishable. Such processes are of course hugely violent, and this cost is one that (under this form of accelerationism) should be borne, for the progress that ensues is worth the pain. We are tasked with ‘powering through’ the struggle, rather than seeking to resist it. The growing pursuit of accelerationist principles threaten universities in a number of ways, and I seek to discuss these in the following paragraphs.

What is the university?

Let’s start with arguably the primary focus of the university as an institution: education. The standard undergraduate degree of three years is much more than a lengthy training course. University for me was a coming of age, and a chance to experience a degree of freedom and becoming that I had never encountered before in life. In the day, I was a scholar, studying and growing my knowledge, exploring literature to build my assignments, and discovering that a much wider reality existed outside of what I could perceive. In leisure time, I was a sportsperson, playing football (soccer), cricket, golf and darts competitively. Appearing in the local newspaper meant that I was known in the local town through sporting achievement. At night, I was a socialite, frequenting pubs and bars, chasing cheap drinks and camaraderie. The lived experience of university, in its whole, was something untouchable, something that remains an experience that I still treasure.

From my position of an academic however, I see this freedom and potential changing become increasingly threatened. For a start, the levels of debt that most students must take on in order to experience university are a strongly discouraging force. Questions of ‘why should I bother going to university when I can train on the job?’ sum up the way university is misrepresented: a gateway to employment and higher earning potential. ‘Employability’ is now a core responsibility of institutions, forced through rankings and measurement mechanisms. Education is now pitched as a means to an end, rather than an end in itself; a transaction to be completed, ticked off on life’s ‘to do list’, rather than enjoyed and lived through. In a more extreme version of the above, we could consider the ‘alt-right’ perspective pushed by (amongst others) ‘Turning Point USA’ — that university is a waste of money, and the prospective student would be better off starting a business. Obviously, these perspectives fail to account for the vast number of business failures, but this isn’t the most important thing: such narratives remain powerful, writing themselves into lived realities through media representations and ensuing ‘truth’ formations.

Where degrees must ‘prove their worth’ based on graduate outcomes measured in highly capitalist realist measures of success (graduate salaries, employment rates etc.) then the universal nature of higher education will be threatened. One way in which this is observable is the current spate of course closures and the shrinking of the UK higher education sector. The Queen Mary University and College Union branch has been tracking course closures, redundancies, and threatened subject areas throughout the 2020s, observing that course cuts are most common in languages, arts, and the humanities; aspects of education that are not easily linked to business and employment such as economics, accounting and finance, or business and management for example. With a drive towards these areas, the university effectively betrays its essence, becoming a production line serving (primarily) the interests of private capital and business, severing its links with the wider world, and sabotaging its existence in the process.

The accelerated university

This alignment to capitalist realism is no coincidence, nor is it a novel observation. What is different however is the pace of change and the constant disruption to how universities operate. With COVID-19 as a pivotal example, universities feel as if they are in a state of permacrisis. Despite overall sectoral funding being at record highs (primarily due to increased tuition fees and student recruitment), universities across the country are executing severe and damaging cuts to their spending, sacrificing many of their functions simply to maintain the status quo of high executive pay (when compared to other charitable/not for profit organisations), and non-current asset investments such as ‘space age’ looking buildings. This narcissistic addiction to image development, in line with largely 1960s views of what looks ‘futuristic’ in terms of architecture and aesthetics, further shows the ideological element of accelerationist thought — white, clinical, open plan areas combined with glass frontages and synthetic cladding. Again, the need to appear in line with what a potential student (and their parents/guardians) view as desirable simply serves to recruit. Any consideration of the wishes of students while studying is translated into administrative procedures, feedback forms, and a notion of ‘student experience’ that is fully captured and accounted for by administrative management.

The swing towards accelerationist ideology is affecting what is actually taught to students as well. The most prominent case, documented in the book ‘Shaping for Mediocrity’, details an account of how critical management studies faced attacks in a reorientation towards business and private interests. This ideacide was not limited to the case in point however, with several other studies documenting similar occurrences within management/business schools in the similar time period. Deskilling is rife throughout the sector, where despite claims of ‘research-led’ teaching, institutions often align themselves to one another with vanilla style courses, sometimes in the pursuit and maintenance of professional exemptions/accreditations. The university effectively becomes one dominated by sameness, as opposed to diversity; conformance rather than constructive dissention.

Speed is a key component of the accelerationist philosophy that also feel ever present within UKHE. Several UK universities directly market themselves on the opportunity to complete their degrees within two years, accelerating the ‘process’ of obtaining a degree. Others offer the opportunity to enter their degrees at different points in the year, effectively repurposing the summer period as one where teaching revenues can be maximised and greater volumes of students can be pushed through their education at increased pace. The variety of modules that are offered on a degree programme also has shrunk in my time in UKHE. Drawing from my own personal experience, I studied Financial Accounting, Management Accounting, Marketing, Microeconomics, Macroeconomics, Management Skills, The Business Environment, Computers and Technology, Pure Mathematics for Business, and Statistical Analysis, all in the first year of my undergraduate degree! Movements towards exclusively 20 or 30 credit modules has undoubtably restricted the variety of education available to students, despite the assertion that such restructures are simply a matter of rearranging credits, not sacrificing content. If the efficiency savings from such initiatives are the motivation for institutions to increase the credit bearing of each module, then the indivisible remainder here is: ‘how can all of this be assessed at the same depth and breadth as before?’. The answer is that it cannot, and administrative convenience and economy is being prioritised over the quality of education on offer.

Towards an accelerationist future

As a final point on the consequences of accelerated higher education, there is the cost to stakeholders to consider. Staff report being more stretched than ever, industrial action is being undertaken across the sector, and precarious labour forms one of the foundational mechanisms for not only dealing with volatile student numbers, but also constant restructuring and damaging action taken by management. Academic labour has been transformed, from one that valued the role of academic freedom in the pursuit of knowledge, to one dominated by task orientation and quantification. Whether it’s the next ranked publication to be submitted for the Research Excellence Framework (REF) exercise, or the latest revamp of the curriculum that comes with seemingly unending amounts of labour in the name of the institution appearing relevant and ‘futureproof’ - the human cost is rarely accounted for. Instead, we can observe a suppression of academic freedom and erosion of the democratic structures that previously acted as restricting mechanisms against concentrations of power. Fear culture is something that we hear of in universities more than ever, where challenging authority feels as the equivalent as marking one’s academic career for death. To intellectually challenge a course of action can result on one being labelled as ‘negative’, or worse, face bullying tactics and be pushed out of an institution in favour of ‘yes men’ who sail with the wind, either not seeing the storm ahead or being ideologically blind to it in the pursuit of their own personal goals.

One thing for sure is that British universities are on a fast-moving trajectory, and one that is not positive for the human experience. The addiction to constant progression, narcissistic conformance with a constructed ‘cutting edge’ image, and forces pushing towards a totalitarian capitalist realism in terms of the role of the university and its operation – all erode the value of education as the curiosity-driven pursuit of knowledge. History, culture, arts, justice, accountability; all face threats from the accelerationist institution and its proponents. Governments, regulators and other institutions must take action to protect and conserve what we know is important based on the quality of life associated with such disciplines, before we reduce higher education to a transactional, politically disengaged machine that ignores the diversity and richness of the world.

This blog is part of the ISRF series Dispatches: Experiencing Academia’s Decline, a collection of reflections from academics and students navigating universities in crisis.

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by Lars Cornelissen

Published on: May 27th, 2026

After six years away from the classroom, in 2025 I took up a lecturing role at a British university. Having never had the chance to do one, I enrolled for a Post-graduate Certificate in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (PGCertHE). A ‘teaching the teachers’ programme that upon completion leads to Fellowship of Advance HE, the UK’s Higher Education academy, the PGCert introduces (typically early-career) lecturers to the basics of pedagogical theory. Though billed as a broad overview of various existing approaches to teaching and learning at university level, when it comes to curriculum design, the PGCert foregrounds one approach in particular: a theory called constructive alignment.

Most academics working in European higher education will have some familiarity with the theory of constructive alignment. A one-size-fits-all template for how to design university courses, constructive alignment is the principle that when designing curricula, lecturers should ensure that learning activities and assessments are structured so as to ensure students meet predetermined learning outcomes. More simply put, if students are expected to finish a course having learned fact x or skill y, classroom activities and assessments should firmly encourage students to actively practice x or y.

When summarised in these terms, constructive alignment appears to be both intuitive and nonintrusive. The straightforward notion that learning activities and assessments should bear a meaningful relation to the knowledge we expect students to have gained by semester’s end seems, on the face of it, unobjectionable.

But appearances can deceive. Constructive alignment is more than a mere guideline, a neutral toolkit that can help educators design their curricula. It is informed by a comprehensive theory of teaching and learning, indeed a pedagogical vision, that carries several practical implications when applied in course design.

Theoretically, constructive alignment presupposes that students are in the classroom to achieve a certain range of predetermined objectives, that all learning is oriented towards those objectives, and that the extent to which a student has achieved them can be accurately measured in a grading system.

Practically, constructive alignment sets strict expectations for curriculum design. It requires that learning outcomes, and indeed the curriculum as a whole, need to be predefined, tightly designed, and unalterable, leaving little to no room for adjustments over the course of a unit, whether in conversation with students or in response to unexpected classroom dynamics, shifting historical conditions, or other unpredictable variables.

In short, a neutral toolkit this is not. It is easy to see that in prescribing a particular philosophy and practice of curriculum design, constructive alignment also forecloses alternative pedagogies and practices. It leaves no room for pedagogies that see learning as a relation of mutual empowerment or a journey of subjective self-determination, nor for teaching practices that are more adaptive in the face of emergent classroom dynamics or affects.

A mandatory practice

All of this is made more acute by the fact that in many national contexts today, constructive alignment is effectively mandatory. Across the Bologna area, and indeed in many other parts of the world, constructive alignment is a central cog in a complex bureaucratic machinery aimed at quality assurance, regional standardisation, and teacher certification.

This started in 2015, when the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) released new guidelines for its sector-wide European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS). This is the institutional structure that ensures that all university programmes taught throughout the Bologna area are benchmarked against a standardised metric, which takes the form of credits.

In principle, the ECTS is intended to ensure full transferability of credits across national and institutional contexts, which tend to differ from each other. To achieve this, it was deemed necessary to ensure that all institutions that fall under the Bologna Process follow similar curriculum design practices. This much was recognised in 2003, when the EHEA built the concept of ‘learning outcomes’ into its guidelines for member institutions. The idea was that to ensure continental standardisation, all university curricula should be designed on the basis of clearly described, predefined, and measurable learning objectives.

The 2015 guidelines further elaborated this idea. Bringing constructive alignment into the mix, in the section on ‘learning, teaching, and assessment’ the 2015 ECTS Users’ Guide solemnly declared that:

The academic staff responsible for delivering the programme and its components should ensure consistency between the learning outcomes stated in the programme, the learning and teaching activities and the assessment procedures. This constructive alignment (Biggs, 2003) between learning outcomes, learning activities and assessment is an essential requirement for educational programmes.

(The reference here is to John Biggs, the Australian educational psychologist who coined the term ‘constructive alignment’ in a 1996 paper and who thereafter did much to theorise the concept. His work on the subject remains highly influential.)

The upshot of the 2015 guidelines was that the theory of constructive alignment effectively became mandated. Henceforth, for institutions to be Bologna compliant, they had to ensure that all their curricula are constructively aligned.

It fell to national quality assurance agencies to ensure such compliance. In the UK, the HE Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) fulfils this role. It reviews institutional practice, provides guidance, and regularly publishes new editions of its official quality code. In 2018, its quality code on assessment explicitly referenced constructive alignment. Its most recent quality code, released in 2024, also integrates constructive alignment, albeit not by name.

Teaching the teachers

It is not just institutions that are expected to adopt constructive alignment. Individual lecturers, too, face this pressure. Here the PGCert programme is key.

When I applied for my lecturing role, the job description listed Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA), or the ‘commitment to obtain FHEA within three years of initial appointment’, as an essential selection criterion. Today, almost all job descriptions include this criterion, which implies that completion of a PGCert programme is not optional but has become a de facto job requirement throughout most of the sector.

It is at these PGCert programmes that university lecturers are instructed in the theory and practice of constructive alignment. They read Biggs, are exposed to the wider theory, practice how to design learning outcomes, and are observed and assessed on how well they have aligned their courses.

My own PGCert is a good example of this. During a key session on curriculum and session design, constructive alignment was front and centre. One of the learning outcomes for that session was to apply the principles of constructive alignment to session planning. The theory was unambiguously presented as the gold standard in university pedagogy.

Pedagogical state apparatus

All of this is tremendously concerning. Across the Bologna system, university lecturers are required, by governmental fiat, to practise a particular method of curriculum design, one which prescribes certain pedagogical practices and principles even as it forecloses alternatives. The state requires them both to be instructed in constructive alignment and adhere toconstructive alignment.

The fact that constructive alignment is, at best, anchored in an outdated theory of teaching and learning, one that is glaringly out of sync with recent advances in pedagogy, social theory, and even the science of learning, is, in some sense, beside the point. The problem is that no theoretical framework should ever be mandated by the state.

Indeed, in what other area of higher education would we accept state intervention in curricula or the official promotion of one theory and the foreclosure of others? If, tomorrow, the state was to declare this sociological method or that legal theory to be the correct one and require all university staff to revise their curricula accordingly, it would without doubt be accused of outrageous overreach. Unions would be up in arms, staff would be scandalised, learned societies would declare a crisis, BlueSky would be ablaze—all rightly so.

Yet this is effectively what has happened with the theory of teaching and learning. In the name of standardisation, transferability, and measurement, the Bologna Process has committed each of its member states to mandate one pedagogical theory at the expense of others. It has regulated pedagogy.

This poses a severe violation of academic freedom. Higher education, by any meaningful accounting of its first principles, must, within limits, be free from state interference on matters of theory and method. When this is endangered, universities are drawn closer into the orbit of state reason, torquing their institutional mission and pressurising their independence. It becomes harder to judge where statecraft ends and university management begins: surely a critical threat to the sector’s very purpose.

Democratic deficit

As it happens, the EHEA is currently in the process of revising its official ECTS guidelines. In March 2026, a draft version of the new ECTS Users’ Guide, to be formally published in 2027, was circulated to members of the Bologna Follow-Up Group (BFUG).

The new draft has retained, almost verbatim, the passage instructing members to implement constructive alignment across all programmes. The chief difference is that constructive alignment has been incorporated into the guide’s ‘key features’ section, which now includes the line: ‘Learning, teaching and assessment methodologies and approaches must be suitable and fully aligned to facilitate the achievement of the defined learning outcomes.’ This directive was absent from the key features section of the 2015 version.

In 2024, the EHEA assembled an ad-hoc advisory group to oversee the process of revising the ECTS Users’ Guide. The advisory group consists of a couple of dozen members, most of whom are senior administrative staff—civil servants, internationalisation officials, or quality assurance advisors—while only a small handful are research-active academics. Two members of the group are employees of a management consultant agency, while a third is a self-employed consultant.

It would appear that in this area, as most everywhere else in higher education, sweeping decisions are made by unelected and unaccountable advisors, aided by management consultants. This is both a symptom and driver of the severe democratic deficit the sector is experiencing.

Convenient alibi

When it was first mooted in the mid-1990s, constructive alignment was presented by its torchbearers as a means to ensure effective learning in the face of the ongoing massification of higher education. The idea was that with careful and diligent curriculum design, university teaching could cope with ever-larger classes, an increasingly diverse student body, and ballooning administrative burdens without suffering in quality.

Things worked out differently. Instead of a remedy, constructive alignment became an alibi for massification, its self-conception as a one-size-fits-all template for curriculum design a perfect tool in the hands of a managerial class intent on squeezing workloads and in quest of a more docile workforce. It provides discursive cover for growing class sizes and widening admission criteria. But it likewise allows managers not only to standardise and centralise curriculum design but also to regulate teaching staff through certification requirements.

It is striking that the aggressive rollout of constructive alignment across European higher education has been met with so little analysis, let alone resistance. Perhaps academics were too busy holding back the converging tides of neoliberalisation, precarity, and austerity to even notice it was happening. The crux, however, is that the regulation of pedagogy was interwoven with these other assaults on the sector from the start, each of them, as it were, destructively aligned.

My hope is that many others who, like me, are forced into adopting it can feel in their gut that constructive alignment is neither a neutral toolkit nor an especially persuasive theory. This seems as good a basis as any to mount a long-overdue critique. Better late than never when our very academic freedom hangs in the balance.

This blog is part of the ISRF series Dispatches: Experiencing Academia’s Decline, a collection of reflections from academics and students navigating universities in crisis.

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by Anonymous

Published on: May 20th, 2026

I am a full professor and current head of department at a small university in the UK. My day-to-day work life is shaped by the following forces:

1. The Repetition Compulsion

Restructuring academic departments and schools as well as professional and IT services has become the norm in UK Higher Education. Entering its third restructure in less than a decade my university serves as an illustrative example. The initial restructuring programme six years ago was meant to solve the financial shortfall due to declining student numbers. As was the subsequent restructure implemented two years ago. And lo and behold, the latest restructuring is also being justified as the only solution to the university’s financial shortfall due to declining student numbers. But it is not just the supposed problem (financial crisis) and the proposed solution (restructuring) that repeats itself again and again across the sector. It is also the (failed) strategic logic: increasing ‘efficiency’ through staff redundancies and the consolidation of departmental-specific administrative services within centralised, de-personalised, and already under-staffed professional service ‘teams’.

These restructures have not solved a thing. Instead, they have wrought havoc, leading to additional declines in student numbers as well as the demoralization of an overworked and exhausted workforce—all while the real (or manufactured) financial crisis persists. But unlike other sectors that learn from past mistakes—and sometimes even hold those who make disastrous decisions accountable—senior management teams in UK universities respond by introducing yet another round of restructuring. These managers are never held to account and, in fact, are often promoted for cutting jobs and creating chaos. The story of the Vice Chancellor who devastated one university only to be hired to devastate another is also part of the compulsion to repeat.

Alas, the repetition compulsion extends to conversations with senior management. Staff make the same (convincing) arguments about why we don’t need another restructure; why more change will cause further disruption and dysfunction, hampering not helping recruitment; why we need to use in-house expertise rather than the exorbitantly expensive consultants who have little to no knowledge of higher education; why the university should not be run like a business; and why ensuring staff well-being and building trust are essential for good governance and student recruitment. Senior management respond with the same (unconvincing) mantras: the university is in financial deficit; we cannot afford not to cut costs; restructuring cuts costs; and cutting costs is the only way to save the university. These conversations almost always conclude with staff insistence that we cannot ‘cut’ our way out of the crisis, and that there is a logical fallacy in the claim that cutting jobs will save jobs. Though, mysteriously, restructures and cost cutting do seem to save senior management’s jobs and their six figure salaries.

2. The Rubber Stamp + Infantalisation

Academics’ authority and autonomy as educators have been eroding for some time, while research time, once a pillar of university life in higher education institutions, is becoming a luxury. Increasingly, academic staff are simply given directives and told what to do—often under a pretence of ‘consultation’ and requests for staff input, which are time consuming but are, more often than not, simply ignored. On one level, we are being transformed into ‘rubber stamps’, while on a deeper level we are witnessing the infantilisation of the academic workforce.

Exemplary in this regard is Academic Senate, the body supposed to have the ultimate authority on all matters academic and pedagogical—matters that should be debated and determined by those with experience and expertise: namely, academic staff. At most UK universities, however, these bodies have become little more than rubber stamps for various top-down senior management initiatives, where people with little if any teaching or research experience put forth proposals, produce ‘systems’, and introduce one-size-fits-all moulds for teaching and assessment, and where any disagreement or energetic debate is frowned upon.

Senate members frequently receive hundreds of pages containing proposals for significant policy changes and other initiatives that impact the day-to-day operations of the university less than a week before the meeting. Members are then expected to approve all of these reports and policies within the span of a few hours. Questioning and criticising these different policies are, at best, deemed ‘wasting time’, and, at worst, insubordination.

The neoliberalization and managerialization of UK universities, where we are expected to rubber stamp top-down initiatives, have led to our infantilisation. These processes have undoubtedly played a key role in the erosion of the universities’ academic community and intellectual life, undermining scholarly authority. But the demise of academic authority also has to do with the fact that there are fewer white men with grey hair among academic staff these days. The Rubber Stamp approach and the infantilisation of staff seem to have become increasingly dominant in exact proportion to the numbers of women and racialised staff and students entering the university. University leadership, not surprisingly, remains mostly white, male and grey haired.

3. The Shared Mailbox (with a little help from AI)

Given that the number of dedicated professional staff has been systematically cut and most administrative services have been centralised and de-personalised through restructures, academic staff now spend a lot of time filling in online forms—from IT support to reserving rooms for events. The time consumed by these tasks is considerable because there is often a duplication of labour. We first fill in the form and then, as instructed on the website, we send it to a shared generic mailbox. We then wait. And wait some more. The shared mailbox often becomes a black hole. So, in order to ensure that we receive a reply, we also need to send a request to the person responsible for the specific task. But to find the specific person’s name and personal email takes serious detective work. When we do eventually find the right person and tell them that we have sent the form to the shared address, we are often asked to fill out the form again and send it directly to them.

Managers say these ‘systems’ merely need fine tuning. But the real reason for this duplication of labour is that professional staff are under resourced and so overburdened that they simply do not have capacity to monitor and respond to everything sent to the shared mailbox. The turnover is huge in professional services, and there are often multiple part-time staff who work on alternate days.

Frequently the shared mailbox is the first contact prospective students have with the university. One cannot help but wonder how students feel when they either a) simply do not receive a response or, b) are directed to the university’s student AI systems. Shared mailboxes and AI are paradigmatic of the ‘systems’ and ‘efficiency’ senior managers praise. In reality, they epitomise what Hannah Arendt called ‘the rule by Nobody’; the new management model in the sector, a form of impersonal, technocratic domination where accountability vanishes.

4. Talk Back and Take Back

Many of us have a good idea of what initial steps need to be taken in order ‘to fix’ our sector—to begin with: a return to public funding (British government spends less than half the average of OECD countries on higher education), student caps, reinstating and expanding democratic processes within universities rather than the ever more managerial and bureaucratic top-down corporate model. This takes us full circle, back to the compulsion to repeat.

As UK universities face their worse crisis in modern history, we need to repeat the perennial question of how we can collectively take back the university so that it serves us, our students, the public, and future generations. But we need to repeat this question differently.

First, through a combination of effective industrial action, collective refusal to take part in rubber stamping exercises, and holding campus assemblies to create coalitions between students and staff, alongside social media campaigns to expose and even embarrass the hell out our institutions, we need to continue to resist the processes that are making us redundant, literally and figuratively. We need to talk back and take back.

Second, but just as importantly, we have to confront head-on the changing role of Higher Education in the 21^st century. Reimagining the university will have to be part of the strategy of repeating differently. With information (and dis/misinformation) at students’ fingertips, when AI can now write essays (and mark them!), and when disciplinary borders—once much clearer—are collapsing, pedagogy and research are not only being altered but are also undergoing an identity crisis. We need the time and space to ask questions about what we are training our students to become. Managers speak exclusively about employability, completely discounting the university’s crucial role in helping to cultivate informed and engaged democratic citizens. Maybe—just maybe—we need to radically transform our conception of higher education—pivoting away from the idealization of knowledge and truth toward developing young people’s conceptual, critical, affective and practical capabilities that better equip them to nurture rather than destroy human and non-human life and the planet.

The most difficult challenge is translating what we know needs to be done—resisting and collectively reimagining—so that we get to where we need to go. This translation is increasingly urgent and may well be the only way we can disrupt what seems to be the sector’s death drive.

This blog is part of the ISRF series Dispatches: Experiencing Academia’s Decline, a collection of reflections from academics and students navigating universities in crisis.

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by James Brackley

Published on: May 20th, 2026

After decades of reform, UK higher education is now among the most aggressively marketized higher education systems in the world. As this system visibly crumbles around us, with mass course closures and redundancies, it is time for the proponents of marketisation to take ownership of the crisis UK HE now finds itself in. And, more importantly, it is time for the government to start taking the alternatives to marketisation seriously.

To many in the sector watching this slow but seemingly inevitable crisis unfold, these conclusions may seem almost self-evident. But let us introduce the case. The term marketisation is often used loosely, however, in this context we refer to the architecture of rules, regulation, metrics, rankings, performance measures, and audit rituals that reconstitute ‘education’ and ‘research’ into commodities that can be priced, traded, or exchanged. Crucially, this hard fought process of commodification of education and research allows for competition between institutions for research funding and student numbers. In the sterile, imagined world presented in most introductory economics textbooks this competition achieves the wonderful trick of both improving quality while reducing prices. Asserting this supposed truism, Lord Browne of the 2010 Browne review on the future of funding UK Higher Education, confidently claims in his foreword that “competition generally raises quality”.

The problem with this claim, however, is that the current HE system in the UK fails to achieve several of the necessary assumptions made in economics textbooks. For home tuition fees, for instance, we have a broken pricing mechanism under which almost all institutions in England charge the maximum possible fees. Students, when they apply for courses, are routinely swamped with metrics based sales pitches that, at best, only reinforce already dysfunctional measures of educational quality. Moreover, the cost of living crisis and exploitative rents often price students out of university education outside of their hometowns. Research income, meanwhile, operates almost exclusively as a quasi-market, with complex, bureaucratic, and systemically biased evaluation exercises standing in for consumer choice.

Despite these (rather obvious) issues, the marketisation of UK higher education, and the shift towards a predominantly fee based system, has ground on for decades. Research from the early 2000s already documents the negative effects of an extensive commercialisation of degree programmes. Meanwhile, elaborate performance management and surveillance systems, a growing reliance on competitive grant capture, the Research Excellence Framework (REF) and its predecessors have only been further extended by the more recent exercises such as the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF), the Knowledge Excellence Framework (KEF), and the Monitoring and Evaluation Framework (MEF). Not to mention the growing emphasis on the various university rankings and league tables. Market proponents do love an acronym.

For more than two decades, various studies have shown this to have been a highly costly and often dysfunctional obsession with audit and measurement – with studies finding that this regime produces standardised ‘safe’ research, undermines academic freedom, encourages careerist approaches to research, causes stress and job insecurity, and is variously discriminatoryunder equalities legislation. Under the leadership of a business-minded managerial class, such practices also impose a strict economisation of almost every aspect of university life, by which we mean that at almost every moment students and staff are encouraged to evaluate the value of their work in terms of measurable outputs that deliver economic returns to the institution.

This subjectivisation of staff and students, to this performance obsessed market culture, is important as it provides the unspoken rationale for a narrowing of accountability and a foreclosure of debate over how institutions are run.

This brings us to some of the more recent aspects of marketisation that have built upon this architecture of performance measurement to precipitate the current crisis. Following the Browne review, the UK government tripled home fees in England in 2012 to £9,000 while correspondingly cutting direct teaching grants. In 2015 they would then remove ‘student number controls’, freeing institutions to recruit uncapped numbers onto low-cost high-fee courses, before opening the sector to a ‘new wave’ of private providers under the Higher Education and Research Act 2017.

Meanwhile, the lack of a cap on the fees that could be charged to international students meant the universities could leverage the prestige and history of UK HE to charge often exorbitant fees to international students. Marketing relatively low-cost courses across Business, Management, Computer Science, Politics and Law, among others, universities aimed to maximise profits at the expense of their students.

This opening-up of the market did lead to an intensification of competition, but not on the basis of the quality of education provided in any meaningful sense. Instead, universities aggressively invested in their physical estates, grew their marketing budgets, engaged consultants, increased the pay of their executives, casualised the workforce on increasingly precarious employment contracts, and opened speculative new overseas campuses. Flush with cash as student fees more than offset cuts to direct government funding, universities leaders then bet the lecture hall (literally) on these good times continuing. Between 2010/11 and 2020/21, UK universities almost trebled their debt, from £5.57 billion to £15.17 billion, often with risky debt covenants attached. They adopted ‘lean’ treasury management strategies, entered into revolving credit facilities, outsourced international recruitment to growing private companies such as KAPLAN and INTO, and subsidiarised their activities into increasingly complex group structures.

Ironically, this business-like group think among university leaders saw universities become much riskier institutions during the financial good times, leaving universities with a risk exposure that would, for many, become untenable when those good times came to an end.

This more or less brings us to our present position. The massification of education that took place under the post-2010 fee based system meant that almost all UK universities adopted a ‘business model’ in which heavily internationalised low-cost high-margin courses were cross subsidising newly ‘loss making’ subjects and research. In the financial good times this was overlooked, but as the international student market tightens, as home fees remain largely frozen, and with the traditional block grant a fraction of what it once was, institutions across the country are making ‘difficult decisions’. On the hook as they are for ambitious debt covenants (effectively financial performance targets) that are no longer achievable.

Perhaps most depressing in all of this is that the proponents of this free market experiment – what Andrew McGeettigan rightly referred to in 2013 as ‘the great university gamble’ – still seem to think they got it right. Via various eugenicist and classist metaphors, mass course closures are reframed as the market filtering out the weak and failing (often post-‘92) institutions are discussed in light of more (presumably working class) students needing to focus on apprenticeships. We need to question, so we are told, what and who a university education is really for.

Aside from the moral, political, and social objections we could make to such arguments, they also simply don’t stand up when analysed through the lens of marketisation itself. Marketisation, we were told in the 2000s, was to fund widening participation. Marketisation, we were told in the 2010s, would bring untold riches to the UK economy. But the reality, and the legacy, is one in which the historic diversity of UK education and scholarship that made it so attractive on the world stage in the first place is now under existential threat. UK universities are sliding down international rankings. Student-staff ratios are rising. Courses are closing. Meanwhile, many lower and middle ranking institutions (often with a much better record of serving their local communities than the Russell Group institution across town) face break up or closure.

The solution? We don’t need higher fees, we need to break the UK Higher Education market. We need to fund, plan, run and assess UK institutions democratically, for the public good. What that looks like is where the real conversation needs to start.

This blog is part of the ISRF series Dispatches: Experiencing Academia’s Decline, a collection of reflections from academics and students navigating universities in crisis.

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by Glen O’Hara

Published on: May 5th, 2026

Universities’ distress, and more-than-shaky future, are now taken for granted. They are also likely here to stay. Less attention has been given to where we’re going, an important oversight or silence given that the country is by default choosing to completely revolutionise its Higher Education offer.

That’s a critical lapse. Without looking ahead to our likely endpoint, we can’t really see what we’re doing. Blundering around in the dark, while making benighted decision after befuddled mistake that makes our destination, which would be obvious if you just switched on the lights for a moment, is no substitute for a clear-eyed view of the near future. Especially because universities’ day-after-tomorrow is rapidly taking shape.

Here’s how our present winner-takes-all race to the bottom is going to shake out, mainly because universities have been ‘set free’ to seize each other warmly by the throat. A small elite will emerge, probably in two groups. The first will be an ‘international’ class of global universities, which attract most of their students from a world market and which aren’t really part of any Higher Education ‘system’, or indeed Britain, at all. There will be a lot of scrambling to get into this group, and a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth when most don’t make it, but really only Oxbridge and a tiny number of others can or will clear the many hoops of reputation and reach involved.

Underneath that gold or platinum level, most big Russell Group universities will thrum away in the Championship below the Premier League of the ‘international’ group. These ‘national’ universities, for the most part famous nineteenth century redbricks in big provincial cities, will look for the most part like they always did. They’ll continue to offer an all-in experience, with students going away to halls and shared houses to perhaps even study Arts and Humanities subjects. These large players may become more and more friendly with regional and city mayors, England’s new regional administrations and the Welsh and Scottish governments, though the situation in those two latter countries will continue to get worse than it is in England, and more quickly.

Academics in those two constellations will likely protest about the imposition of a balkanised, divided university sector. But in reality they have very little say and even less power, their authority having long ago been stripped away by central university bureaucracies. They will also be acutely aware of just how lucky they are, and the potential penalties for making a fuss. Just as some continue to jet around the world to conferences like David Lodge’s fictional professors during the 1970s, all the while professing to support the environment, the planet and alternative economics, they will offer professions of solidarity without really being able to do anything.

On the other hand, a whole middle-ranking tier of ‘regional’ universities is going to be ripped to shreds and then either dumped in a hole or put back together in atrociously careless ways. By the end of that grim experiment, the majority of the sector, and most of the institutions students actually attend, will look like a Frankenstein’s Monster that doesn’t even make it to that august level of autonomy. Here there will be a mix of local and national students, and some remnants of the old university idea: a scattering of Arts, Humanities and Political Science departments will survive in this part of universityworld.

Lower down the old-fashioned scale of authority and prestige, post-‘92 universities who don’t make it into the ‘regional’ group will either become local colleges of HE (if they’re fairly successful and solvent) or be rammed together in a load of cut-and-shut shotgun marriages masquerading as ‘mergers’. These won’t actually be mergers. They will be nothing more or less than buckets of the dying smaller fry, dredged up from the bottom of the ocean and slopped around into mud sculptures on sunny beaches – all the better to dry out and crack up.

No doubt successive governments have thought all this pretty clever. This way, they get to make the whole sector smaller with little political pain on their part. They can dump responsibility on bad managers, risk-taking, too much borrowing. The dark side of Higher Education’s pain and toxicity will dribble out on the local and regional news, all the better for voters not to join the dots. The rundown will look piecemeal, disorganised, random.

There’s some method to that madness. It was probably an error that we tried to pretend that all universities could do everything, all the same, all the time. The coming demographic bust of the 2030s will make it even harder for most universities to struggle on. They have to be downsized in some manner, and the present move towards an ‘international’, ‘national’, ‘regional’ and ‘local’ split is one way to do that. It’s not as rational as a planned reorganisation, but then politics isn’t rational. If it wants to duck responsibility no government can possibly be explicit about its intentions until the process is irreversible. Who really wants to take the blame?

It would, however, probably be better to take a more systematic approach to Higher Education – at least if we look at this from a public policy rather than a political point of view. Where should our universities be sited? How many people should go to what type? What subjects should stay in or go to each part of the country, to make sure everyone can study them? These are fundamental questions that should not be left to hasty and piecemeal decisions in each separate university.

The strategy of deflection will not be entirely successful in any case, even on its own terms. We’re talking tens of thousands of jobs here, and many universities are either in or next to Labour seats such as Uxbridge (majority 587), Loughborough (majority 4,960), Newcastle-under-Lyme (majority 5,069) and Lancaster (majority 9,253). The economies and social lives of those seats are profoundly intertwined with the mass university system New Labour in office helped to build. The fallout from downsizing or failure won’t fall entirely on Labour and its supporters, but the debris will give them a light dusting anyway.

Most people won’t be happy with this outcome. You won’t be able to take many subjects, from Music to Chemistry, across huge swathes of the ‘regional’ and ‘local’ universities. That will mean many poorer Britons can’t study them at all. Taxpayers will wonder where on earth their money is going, as the government spends untold billions every year on a what was once a shiny and exciting ideas machine but which is for the most part being ripped up and swapped out for an unconvincing scarecrow with a sign saying ‘university’ swinging from its neck. Creative industries, design, theatre, the arts, cinema: all will be noticeably smaller, and sadder. Many parts of traditionally ‘Labour’ parts of the country will suffer badly, further locking that party into a spiral of decline.

But on the other hand, most voters never experience Higher Education. Like most of us, the majority have only a dim memory of it as something fun when they were young or a quick insight from Open Days for – and visits to – their children. No doubt politicians in London, Cardiff and Edinburgh can for now get away with the Great Inequity of “world-class education for you, ‘uni’ for you, college for you, training for you”. But far more importantly, something about the country, its contract with young people, indeed a sense of place and our potential shared futures will have been lost: something wonderful.

This blog is part of the ISRF series Dispatches: Experiencing Academia’s Decline, a collection of reflections from academics and students navigating universities in crisis.

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by Lorna Finlayson

Published on: April 24th, 2026

Academic and professional services staff at the University of Essex were on strike in March, as part of a second wave of local industrial action over management proposals to cut 400 jobs and to shut down its Southend Campus. A strike in these circumstances is better than no strike, certainly. One of the few ways the situation facing Essex and many other UK universities – which differ only in being at different stages in the same process of terminal decline – could be even worse than it is, is if there were no resistance at all from students and staff.

But another strike is also another opportunity to observe academics behaving badly, and they rarely disappoint. There is the full-on, full-bodied scabbing, of course. Rates of unionisation are higher than ever, but many paid-up union members think nothing of crossing picket lines (presumably regarding union membership mainly as a cheap source of legal advice). There are the cyber-scabs: those who see a strike as an opportunity to catch up on work emails. And then there are the pay-as-you-go strikers – a large proportion of union members, it seems – who like to keep a foot on either side: strike one day, scab the next. That way, you can keep the docking of pay to a symbolic snip, and still bask in the warm glow of solidarity, knowing that you have done your bit for the collective. This is a bit like feeling virtuous for only cheating on your spouse two days a week – but then academics are not exactly known for their marital fidelity, either.

It doesn’t end there, though. Scabbing is an art like everything else, and as always, academics are determined to excel. Enter the ‘scaboteur’. Why be a common scab, when you can go one better and stop a strike before it starts? The tactics of the academic scaboteur are the same every time. A bold but common opening move is to say (as loudly as possible): “I can’t afford to strike!” This claim would be most plausible if made by precarious, fixed-term academics or graduate students, but as I’ve noted before, they are not the ones most likely to be heard making it. There is a kind of inverted ‘scabs’ triangle’ at work here, whereby the people crying poverty are found disproportionately among the ranks of the permanent and (even after years of pay-erosion) relatively well-remunerated. Sure, most academics may not be among the 1%, but you do have to wonder where their salary is going if striking for a week or two has become an unaffordable luxury. Do they have undisclosed coke habits? Fabergé egg addictions?

In any case, as the academics in question are frequently reminded, there is a strike fund (which, unlike funds for students in financial need, operates on the basis of trust). No good, apparently: the strike fund takes WEEKS to come through – by which time these unfortunate colleagues and their children will surely have starved. It’s considered bad form to pry into people’s financial affairs – unless those people are really poor, or young, or both, in which case it’s de rigueur (benefits claimants and applicants for student hardship funds can expect to have their bank statements scrutinised). So the scaboteur’s bluff is unlikely to be called, but it’s hard not to suspect that some of our esteemed colleagues are simply fibbing.

Even supposing for sake of argument that there are some genuine cases, academics who, due to whatever combination of circumstances, have found themselves in too tight a spot to be able to take even a short-term hit without intolerable hardship and who therefore see no alternative but to scab, then the least they could do is to scab quietly. That, however, is the last thing on the scaboteur’s mind. The objective is to leverage hardship, real or imagined, against striking in general. On this argument, striking is not only detrimental but elitist, actually, because some people can’t afford to go without pay. Well, you know what else means not getting paid, for a lot longer than a few days? Being made redundant. But in the meantime, the scaboteur’s logic is that if not everyone can or will strike, nobody should. This logic reaches its inventive acme in the argument that for some to strike – or to strike too hard or too long – is for them to make scabs of others. “I would have to cross a picket line,” as one union member put it ominously, “and I would never want to do that.” We would, as you might say, have scabs on our hands.

If a strike cannot be delayed or prevented altogether, the scaboteur’s tactics move toward mitigation. The argument from economic necessity looms large here too: people may be able to afford to strike for one week, but not two (how the miners managed, we can only imagine). Here, the argument is often supplemented with another, subtler one. “I personally would love to vote for an all-out, indefinite strike,” goes this line, “but we need to take people along with us.” In other words: I am radical; they are not. It’s an argument all too familiar from recent political history at the national level. “I would love to vote for a left-wing party, but the public won’t support it” is – we should all know by now – code for: “I hate it with every ounce of my being and will do everything in my power to make sure that the public do not have the opportunity to support it or anything like it.”

Still, in the context of the university, it’s an argument with a kernel of truth. The academics who don’t go to union meetings are typically even more spineless than those who do. But as with the argument that “elections are won from the centre” (or lately, that they are won by pandering to the racist right), it rests on a completely unevidenced assumption. In the university case, the assumption is that those who are reluctant to engage in industrial action can be brought on side if only we water it down enough – and that the increase of ‘density’ will be sufficient to make up for the loss of volume (a one-day strike with a really good turnout is worth more than a week-long strike with worse participation). It was on the basis of an argument of this sort that a meeting of Essex UCU in advance of the March strikes voted overwhelmingly in favour of the most moderate of the proposed options: “pulsed waves of targeted action”. It sounds like an electric toothbrush and is about as threatening to management. All signs are that the redundancies will go ahead as planned.

This blog is part of the ISRF series Dispatches: Experiencing Academia’s Decline, a collection of reflections from academics and students navigating universities in crisis.

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What might architects do with or learn from the resources our planet creates? Can critical architecture recover a more equitable relationship to the mineral world? Or are we destined to continue to exploit the planet’s lithosphere as a resource for our consumption?

Architectural Association Bookshop, London | 6:15pm BST, 3rd June 2026 | Click Here to Register

Register to Attend

In his important new book, The Matter of Architecture (Reaktion, 2026), Paul Dobraszczyk approaches geology as the architecture of our planet, arguing that what we build has always been dependent on what Earth has already made. Yet, what we produce now will also become the geology of the future: billions of tonnes of concrete, plastic, brick, metals and other fabricated materials that are quickly piling up to eventually become new geological strata.

From caves and crystals to volcanoes and earthquakes, The Matter of Architecture mines geology to find a more sympathetic way of building.

Paul Dobraszczyk is an architectural writer, photographer and artist based in Manchester, UK, and a lecturer at The Bartlett School of Architecture, London. He was an ISRF Independent Scholar Fellow 2016 for the project Dead Cities: Urban Ruins and the Imagination of Disaster.

Paul will be joined by Nishat Awan, Professor of Architecture and Visual Culture at the UCL Urban Laboratory, whose research focuses on the intersection of geopolitics and space, including questions related to diasporas, migration and border regimes; and Adam Walls, Lecturer of History & Theory of Architecture at UCL, a historian of fire, light and atmosphere working at the intersection of queer theory, critical whiteness studies and new materialisms.

A Q&A will follow, moderated by Lars Cornelissen, ISRF Academic Coordinator.

Join us from 6:15pm BST on Wednesday 3rd June 2026 at the Architectural Association Bookshop, London. Register Now.

How do those involved in Spain’s egg donation industry—donors, clinicians, and clinic staff—experience its pressures, medical interventions, and moral codes? Which complex power dynamics underlie this fertility market? And what can the Spanish case tell us about reproductive and fertility markets more widely?

Biblioteca de Catalunya, Barcelona & Online | 6:30pm CEST, 17th June 2026 | Click Here to Register

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In her important new book, Taming Egg Donors: The Egg Donation Reproductive Market in Spain, Dr Anna Molas offers a fresh perspective on Europe’s largest egg donation industry.

Drawing on rich ethnographic work and adopting a feminist lens, Molas shifts attention away from donors’ intentions towards the lived experiences of donors and practitioners alike. The result is a subtle but powerful account of the gendered, racialised, and classed power dynamics that cut across this industry and that, combined, serve to ‘tame’ women’s bodies in service of logics of extraction.

Anna Molas, Lecturer in Anthropology at Monash University, is a social anthropologist and ethnographer whose work focuses on reproduction, health, and society. She was an ISRF First Book Fellow 2023.

Anna will be joined by Chandra Kala Clemente-Martínez, President of the Associació de Persones Adoptades a Catalunya, author of Volver a los orígenes (Bellaterra Edicions, 2022); and Laura Perler, postdoctoral researcher in the Social and Cultural Geography research group at the University of Bern, author of Selektioniertes Leben(Edition Assemblage, 2022).

A Q&A will follow, moderated by Chris Newfield, ISRF Director of Research.

Join us from 6:30pm CEST on Wednesday 17th June 2026 at the Biblioteca de Catalunya, Barcelona & Online. Register Now.

1. Director’s Note

2. Upcoming ISRF Events

3. Blog

4. Fellows News

Director’s Note

Dispatches from British Academics

Christopher Newfield

ISRF has formed a research group called “Reconstructing British Universities”: I discussed its context and approach in my December Note. I’m very happy to share that we are launching a series of dispatches from the front lines of the UK higher education crisis.

Featured in this month’s Dispatches are reflections from two members of our group. Glen O’Hara gives an overview of the problem of the absence of academics from the discussion of their own sector. Lorna Finlayson discusses the ways in which academics weaken their own forms of resistance to harmful interventions.

Over time, the Dispatches are heading towards the development of an alternative funding model for British universities. Whatever the particular topic, each individual essay emerges from a faculty member’s personal experience within their destabilised sector, while guided by their professional expertise. Each comes from the frontline experience of an academic who has devoted their adult life to universities. It may seem obvious that academics would already be powerful voices in analysing and steering academia. But in Britain they are not.

Read On...

Book Launch: The Matter of Architecture: Geology, Buildings and Us

3rd June 2026, 6:15 pm - 8:00 pm (BST). In person.

Architectural Association Bookshop, London

In his important new book, The Matter of Architecture (Reaktion, 2026), Paul Dobraszczyk approaches geology as the architecture of our planet, arguing that what we build has always been dependent on what Earth has already made. Yet, what we produce now will also become the geology of the future: billions of tonnes of concrete, plastic, brick, metals and other fabricated materials that are quickly piling up to eventually become new geological strata.

Learn More & Register

Book Launch: Taming Egg Donors: The Egg Donation Reproductive Market in Spain

17th June 2026, 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm (CEST). In person & online.

Sala de la Caritat, Biblioteca de Catalunya, Barcelona & Online

How do those involved in Spain’s egg donation industry—donors, clinicians, and clinic staff—experience its pressures, medical interventions, and moral codes? In her new book, Dr Anna Molas offers a fresh perspective on Europe’s largest egg donation industry. Drawing on rich ethnographic work and adopting a feminist lens, Molas shifts attention away from donors’ intentions towards the lived experiences of donors and practitioners alike.

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Scabology

Lorna Finlayson

What happens when academics decide to go on strike? In this contribution to our Dispatches series, Lorna Finlayson explores the politics of negotiation and the role of the ‘scaboteur’, someone who aims to prevent a strike before it starts.

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What’s the future for our universities?

Glen O’Hara

The UK’s current higher education environment is in turmoil as courses close, resources are cut and staff face the constant threat of redundancy. When the dust settles, how will the higher education landscape change? Glen O’Hara explores further in his contribution to the ISRF’s Dispatches series.

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New publication: ‘State Histories: The Politics of Teaching the Past in Iran’ by Yasamin Alkhansa

There is a growing global trend of governments attempting to impose historical narratives that serve national interests. Yasamin Alkhansa's latest book explores such efforts through school textbooks in Iran under the Pahlavi and Islamic Republic. Alkhansa conceptualises history textbooks as the state’s autobiography, central to the legitimacy and production of political myths.

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New publication: ‘From foreclosure to potentiality’ by Santiago del Río, Sarah Marie Hall, Elizabeth Ackerley and Laura Fenton

This article advances the concept of ‘foreclosed futures’ to argue that protracted periods of austerity are not just a phase of precarity which delays adulthood but rather an enduring denial of ontological security which is embodied and emotionally navigated by young adults. Engaging further, the authors explore the geographical, political and social dimensions of ‘foreclosed futures’.

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New publication: ‘Dirty Green Money: The Systemic Fraud of the ESG Investing Industry’ by Thomas Raymen

This article presents the first criminological holdings level analysis of the financed emissions, carbon intensity and capital flows of “green” investment funds. It illustrates how the EU’s Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) investing industry is systemically fraudulent, channeling capital towards the most carbon-intensive companies and sectors. It is a phenomenon that goes beyond 'greenwashing’; creating a regulatory regime that supports and legally sanctions misleading sustainability claims.

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Podcast episode: ‘Péter Magyar “behaves like a tank”’ Gábor Scheiring in conversation with Tim G. Jones and Pepijn Bergsen

What does the post-Orbán transition tells us about Europe’s far-right landscape? Gábor Scheiring joins the Twenty-Four Two podcast for a discussion on Hungary’s most recent elections, incoming prime minister Péter Magyar and the possibilities of restoring liberal democracy and pluralism in the country.

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1. Director’s Note

2. Upcoming ISRF Events

3. Fellows News

Director’s Note

You Can Get There From Here

Christopher Newfield

Discussions of radical change to our economic system eventually confront the use of force. No one in our March workshop, Redesigning Finance for Climate Justice (REDFIC), wanted our running theme of “Coercing Climate Finance” to lead to civil war. And yet at some point in any debate about, for example, how to transform credit policy to speed up decarbonisation, which would include a central bank making loans on petroleum investments unaffordable, someone would say, “This kind of thing always involves shooting people. They don’t give up their assets otherwise.”

Such comments produced some leery chuckling in the workshop. But no one let anticipations of crushing backlash from the financial sector steer the discussion. To project onto everyone, we generally wanted radical changes in today’s global financial system and also wanted them to come through democratic deliberation. The power of finance and the weakness of democracy make it hard to imagine this combination—the democratic redesign of finance. But that is the task.

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Book Launch: States of Transition: From Governing the Environment to Transforming Society

10th April 2026, 5:00 pm - 7:00 pm (BST). In person & online.

Barnard’s Inn Hall, London

In States of Transition (CUP 2025), Peter Newell discusses the limits of today’s policies in ways that reveal their potential for much more powerful effects. While existing efforts at regulation are essential, they also support the same industries they seek to curtail, leaving needed transitions incomplete. He describes states as dynamic sites of continuous improvisation and struggle, with their prospects far more open and hopeful than we often assume.

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Book Launch: The Matter of Architecture: Geology, Buildings and Us

3rd June 2026, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm (BST). In person & online.

Architectural Association Bookshop, London

In his important new book, The Matter of Architecture (Reaktion, 2026), Paul Dobraszczyk approaches geology as the architecture of our planet, arguing that what we build has always been dependent on what Earth has already made. Yet, what we produce now will also become the geology of the future: billions of tonnes of concrete, plastic, brick, metals and other fabricated materials that are quickly piling up to eventually become new geological strata.

More Information & Registration

Book Prize Shortlist: ‘Spying on Muslims in Colonial Mozambique, 1964-74.’ by Sandra Araújo

The Pol­ly Cor­ri­g­an Book Prize recognises scholarship within the realm of intelligence and security, written by women scholars and/or about women. Among this year’s shortlisted books is ISRF First Book Fellow Sandra Araújo’s book Spying on Muslims in Colonial Mozambique, 1964-74. Araújo’s book focuses on Muslim communities and their response to counterinsurgency and armed nationalism during the colonial war. Congratulations Sandra!

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New publication: ‘Neighbourhoods and the far right: What is to be done?’ by Ana Santamarina and Anthony Ince

This article builds upon an ongoing scholarly discussion on the far right, from everyday institutions that constrain or enable them to digital spaces. The authors argue that responding to the far right is not simply a question of subculture politics or particular moments of confrontation. Rather, an antifascist response should be practiced as a transversal political culture embedded in struggles over housing, belonging, care and everyday coexistence.

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New publication: ‘Confronting the dilemmas of humanitarian borderwork: NGO engagements with Australian offshore detention’ by Eleanor Davey

Examining Australian offshore detention in the Pacific, this paper explores the ethical and strategic challenges that humanitarian organisations face when navigating policies designed to deter unauthorised migration. Such policies foster dynamics that make sustained humanitarian support untenable and raise questions about the implications for organisations wishing to reduce the harms caused by deterrence measures.

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New publication: ‘More-than-human loss: Exploring the intersections of Indigeneity, conflict transitions and memory in Cambodia’ by Peter Manning and Duong Keo

There are many assumptions about Indigenous communities, memory and temporality that this article aims to complicate. Drawing on interview data from two Indigenous communities in Cambodia, the authors argue that memory is a central site for articulating Indigeneity through forms and claims of absence that specifically emerge from the remaking of the material and epistemic scaffolds of Indigenous life.

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Upcoming event: ‘Read the Ting: Sonic-visual literary clash’ hosted by UCL Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment

Join Academic Advisory Board member, Joy White, with Elijah and Janine Francois for an exchange of theory and practice centred on Black music culture, world building and spatial imaginaries. Framed through sonic, social and spatial ecologies, this event explores how sound shapes community, memory and collective futures in East London.

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1. Director’s Note

2. Live Competitions

3. Blog

4. Fellows News

5. Competitions 2026

Director’s Note

Coercing Climate Finance

Christopher Newfield

ISRF are starting the month with a workshop called “Redesigning Finance for Climate Justice.” It culminates the first year of finance seminars led by the economist Daniela Gabor.

Throughout we have been aware that we were fighting an uphill battle. For eight or nine years after the Paris climate accord was signed in December 2015, politicians felt a duty to take climate change seriously, at least in what they said. That period has come to an end.

Global finance hasn’t opposed the climate Great Retreat, pushed by the world’s most belligerent climate change denier, Donald Trump. His actions include the dismantling of green industrial policy in the U.S., a re-withdrawal from the Paris climate accords, and continuous lobbying against EU climate rules. He seems determined to use the rest of the U.S. carbon budget on military mayhem and murder. From all this, top executives and many national leaders understood that they could drop the mask and evade whatever climate commitments they didn’t like.

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Flexible Grants for Small Groups (FG12)

Deadline: 5pm GMT (6pm CET), Friday 13th March 2026

The Independent Social Research Foundation wishes to support independent-minded researchers to explore and present original research ideas which take new approaches, and suggest new solutions, to real world social problems.

The Foundation intends to award on a competitive basis, to candidates of sufficient merit, a number of grants providing flexible support (for instance: relief from teaching and/or administration, research and travel expenses, fieldwork and practical work) for a period of (up to) one year for the activities of a small research group.

Further Information & Application

Pourquoi la mise en œuvre de la durabilité échoue souvent, même quand tout le monde est d’accord

Lucas Amaral, Juliane Reinecke, Michael Etter

Businesses looking to introduce sustainability initiatives face a range of challenges - from adjusting their institutional structures to changing individual behaviours. Lucas Amaral, Juliane Reinecke and Michael Etter examine how such issues reveal the ways in which sustainable practices take shape, are deployed, and transform on a daily basis.

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Sierra Leone’s harsh new laws to protect women and girls are causing harm in the wrong places

Luisa Schneider

Efforts to progress on gender equality in Sierra Leone have led to the passage of laws designed to protect women and children from gendered violence. Luisa T. Schneider argues that these reforms can actual harm young people and fail to reflect the social realities of marginalised communities.

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Call for Papers: ‘Markets as Infrastructures’ edited by Claudia Eggart and Hasan H. Karrar

This special issue approaches markets as infrastructures in order to examine how abstraction and materiality are not opposites but rather mutually sustained through social, technical, and political labour. The editors are particularly interested in contributions that connect long-term, in-depth, or participatory insights on market forms and practices to theoretical approaches in critical political economy, decolonial studies, and world system theory.

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New publication: ‘Non-Hegemony’ by Ilias Alami, Tom Chodor, Jack Taggart

Multilateralism continues to be challenged and dismantled as leading states take unilateral actions while ignoring traditional institutions and forums. This article traces the shift away from multilateralism to the crisis of the neoliberal order. In doing so, it explores the emergence of a non-hegemonic world and the strategies that states employ to pursue their interests within it.

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New publication: ‘Protein’ by Samantha King and Gavin Weedon

Protein has often been touted as the answer to a range of issues, from malnutrition to building muscle and exercise recovery. Its recognition as a star nutrient is not based on people’s dietary needs. Rather, it is shaped by political, social and ecological forces which influence how we understand food, health and our diets. Samantha King and Gavin Weedon unravel the myths surrounding protein and examine its enduring relevance in the cultural imagination.

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New publication: ‘Humanitarian frontiering: Competition, markets, and governance in refugee cash assistance programs’ by Lauren L. Martin and Hanna A. Ruszczyk

Distributing humanitarian aid through cash assistance programmes created two frontiers: a race to build digital infrastructure and crisis-specific negotiations between international NGOs, governments, banks, financial service providers and at times, displaced communities. Through the concept of humanitarian frontiering, this article examines how these market-driven interventions continually connect humanitarian and other economic regimes and encourage the accumulation of expertise and resources.

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12th Flexible Grants for Small Groups Competition (FG12)

Live now: deadline 5pm GMT, Friday 13th March 2026

Funding support for small groups (2-10 scholars) to complete a piece of research or undertake face-to-face joint group work.

1. Director’s Note

2. Live Competitions

3. Bulletin

4. Blog

5. Fellows News

6. Competitions 2026

Director’s Note

The University Unruined

Christopher Newfield

What are the practical means by which academic staff can get direct control over budgets and programme planning?

The current situation is that their programmes can be closed and their posts removed at will by management. UK academics, and also tenured US faculty members, find their expertise dwelling on an inferior epistemic and political plane to that of senior managers. Professors are unable to enforce, legally or financially, their professional judgement within their own departments, and even less so in more general university policy.

Recovering professorial authority: this was January’s theme, which I mainly worked on at US campuses. I spent two very interesting weeks as the resident professor at Duke University’s Franklin Humanities Institute, and then spoke at Swarthmore College and Johns Hopkins University on my way to Santa Barbara for my mother’s 96^th birthday.

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Flexible Grants for Small Groups (FG12)

Deadline: 5pm GMT (6pm CET), Friday 13th March 2026

The Independent Social Research Foundation wishes to support independent-minded researchers to explore and present original research ideas which take new approaches, and suggest new solutions, to real world social problems.

The Foundation intends to award on a competitive basis, to candidates of sufficient merit, a number of grants providing flexible support (for instance: relief from teaching and/or administration, research and travel expenses, fieldwork and practical work) for a period of (up to) one year for the activities of a small research group.

Further Information & Application

Counterpoints: Power and Its Discontents

Baindu Kallon

The latest edition of the Bulletin brings together contributions from a small group of fellows convened at a ISRF Congress in June 2025. Inspired by the concept of the counterpoint, this Bulletin challenges dominant discourses to offer more nuanced understanding of contemporary social, political, and cultural issues.

Featuring contributions from Margot Verdier, Anthony Pickles, Yasamin Alkhansa, Milan Babić, and Beatriz Aragón.

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On School History Textbooks

Yasamin Alkhansa

In this Bulletin contribution, Yasamin Alkhansa traces how governments attempt to rewrite history through school textbooks. While focused on Iran’s theocracy, Alkhansa warns that such practices are not restricted to authoritarian governments, but rather part of a growing global trend to impose historical narratives that reflect national interests.

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Iran protests have put the country’s political system on trial

Arash Beidollahkhani

The recent eruption of protests across Iran signal a significant challenge to the country’s ruling elite. Early Career Fellow, Arash Beidollahkhani, outlines the political, economic and social conditions that have led to this defiant call for change.

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New publication: ‘Childhood and Social Reproduction in Palestine: They Didn’t Know We Were Seeds’ by Mai Abu Moghli and Rachel Rosen

Social Reproduction Theory explores how the daily renewal of human life is integral to capitalism. This chapter uses the theory as a lens to look at Israel’s mass murder of Palestinian children in Gaza. In doing so, it aims to illustrate the brutality of Israel’s settler colonialism and its attempt to undermine Palestinian social reproduction at every turn.

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Podcast episode: ‘Spaces of Anticolonialism Delhi’s Urban Governmentalities’ Stephen Legg in conversation with Saumya Dadoo

Stephen Legg joins the New Books Network podcast for a discussion with host Saumya Dadoo on Legg’s most recent book. Spaces of Anticolonialism: Delhi’s Urban Governmentalities is the first book-length account of anticolonialism in Delhi, as the capital of Britain’s empire in India. It provides a bottom-up analysis of subaltern geographies and struggles, across Old and New Delhi, in dialogue with the elite spaces of the Indian National Congress to explore the dual cities as one interconnected, anti-colonial political landscape in the two decades before independence.

Tune In...

12th Flexible Grants for Small Groups Competition (FG12)

Live now: deadline 5pm GMT, Friday 13th March 2026

Funding support for small groups (2-10 scholars) to complete a piece of research or undertake face-to-face joint group work.

1. Director’s Note

2. Live Competitions

3. Blog

4. Fellows News

5. Competitions 2026

Director’s Note

AI and the Future of Human Learning

Christopher Newfield

I’ll remember AI in 2025 for three main developments: faltering use-cases, the investment bubble, and the learning crisis.

Now finally enjoying the dubious dawning of 2026, our research group, “Reframing AI,” is meeting this week to work on the relation between machine and human learning. So I’m starting my ISRF month with the question, what do we have to say about human learning that can help redirect machine learning towards enhancing human intelligence rather than threatening it?

Last year, research about the effects of chatbot uses of Large Language Models (LLMs) on cognition was more numerous than in previous years. The news was not good for people who don’t think intelligence should be offloaded to foundation models.

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Mid-Career Fellowship competition (MCF8)

Deadline: 5pm GMT (6pm CET), Friday 30th January 2026

The Independent Social Research Foundation wishes to support independent-minded researchers to explore and present original research ideas which take new approaches, and suggest new solutions, to real world social problems.

Applicants will normally hold a full-time or part-time salaried position – which may be permanent or fixed-term – at an Institution of Higher Education and Research. Candidates should be more than 10 years post-PhD award at the time of application. The awards are intended to provide full relief from all teaching duties and all associated academic administration for a period of (up to) one year.

Further Information & Application

Flexible Grants for Small Groups (FG12)

Deadline: 5pm GMT (6pm CET), Friday 13th March 2026

The Independent Social Research Foundation wishes to support independent-minded researchers to explore and present original research ideas which take new approaches, and suggest new solutions, to real world social problems.

The Foundation intends to award on a competitive basis, to candidates of sufficient merit, a number of grants providing flexible support (for instance: relief from teaching and/or administration, research and travel expenses, fieldwork and practical work) for a period of (up to) one year for the activities of a small research group.

Further Information & Application

Racism never went away – it simply changed shape

Lars Cornelissen

With the rise of the far right in the UK and increasing racist rhetoric, politicians have warned against the return of attitudes that had long disappeared from British society. Lars Cornelissen argues that this narrative is much more complex - racism has never left public life. Rather it has assumed different shapes across time.

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Cutting through the noise

Milan Babić

The most fundamental crisis of all – the breakdown of the biophysical conditions for modern human life – is continuing and accelerating. How can we not only cultivate our pessimism of the intellect, but also foster an optimism of the political will against all odds? In this Bulletin contribution, Milan Babić suggests three avenues that might help with this task.

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New publication: ‘What Happens When Borders Reopen? Dematerialising the Uzbekistan-Kyrgyzstan Boundary’ by Nick Megoran and Zalina Enikeeva

After many years, the border between Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan were re-opened in 2016 to promote trade, cooperation and movement between the two countries. This article, co-authored by ISRF Mid-Career Fellow Nick Megoran, explores the economic and political consequences of border dematerialisation.

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New publication: ‘Republics in the Commonwealth hiding under the Crown? A historical perspective’ by Manjeet Ramgotra

This blog post traces the transition across the British empire from Commonwealth Realms to republics. In doing so, Manjeet Ramgotra examines how the legacies of colonialism informed the question of republicanism as countries gained independence.

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8th Mid-Career Fellowship Competition (MCF8)

Live now: deadline 5pm GMT, Friday 30th January 2026

Scholars more than ten years post-PhD are eligible to apply for support to complete a one-year piece of original research.

12th Flexible Grants for Small Groups Competition (FG12)

Live now: deadline 5pm GMT, Friday 13th March 2026

Funding support for small groups (2-10 scholars) to complete a piece of research or undertake face-to-face joint group work.