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Director’s Note

Notes Towards a Social University

Christopher Newfield

“Now all the ways in which you would have traditionally, historically, for two and a half thousand years understood something like the value of higher education: you haven’t got that anymore.”

This sentence appears mid-way through an epic three-part podcast by Alan Finlayson and Jeremy Gilbert called “Universities in Crisis.” Together the episodes ran for around six hours on Gilbert’s Culture, Politics, Power podcast; the transcript runs almost 60,000 words. This series is one of the best outlines I’ve seen of the British university’s strange and special history. It also offers excellent principles for the next university, principles that overlap with some of mine as well as with those of our working group, Reconstructing the British University, here at ISRF. The project has generated a dozen Dispatches from academic staff about their experiences while caught in an increasingly unworkable higher education system.

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Book Launch: Constitutionalising Anarchy

23rd October 2026, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm BST.

Bishopsgate Institute, London

In their important new book, Constitutionalising Anarchy, Ruth Kinna and Alex Prichard reconstruct 150 years of anarchist constitutional theory. They argue that anarchy is the rejection of arbitrary power, not the absence of any constitutional or legal order. In fact, anarchists have had a great deal to say about constitutional power. In conversation with a rich tradition of anarchist constitutional thought, Constitutionalising Anarchy forges the theoretical tools to reconceptualise constitutional power as a decentralised, bottom-up, everyday practice of non-domination.

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Mid-Career Fellowships Award Announcement

Lars Cornelissen

In July of this year, ISRF awarded seven projects submitted to the eighth Mid-Career Fellowship competition. Learn more about our eight new Fellows and their research which explores a range of topics: from lovers rock reggae music to how the energy transition unfolds in Europe’s semi-peripheral economies.

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Gifts from the Arms Trade

Jill Gibbon

Pens shaped like drones, toy bombs, rubber missiles and miniature tanks—all can be found at arms fairs, which are tightly guarded international trade shows for military equipment. Jill Gibbon’s latest book takes readers behind the scenes to explore how the marketing of weapons functions as a way to obscure the destruction of war.

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New Publication: Policing Souls, Redeeming Nations: Evangelical Activism and the Far-Right Counterpolitics of Emotions in the Brazilian Police by Rodrigo D E Campos and Nicolai Gellwitzki

This article explores how Evangelical chaplaincy organisations are fundamentally transforming the Brazilian police from the inside out. Drawing on ethnographic work with PMs de Cristo (Officers for Christ), the authors introduce the concept of the “counterpolitics of emotions” to explain how these grassroots actors capitalise on the severe mental health crisis and precarity within the police force and reshape the emotional norms that sustain liberal institutions.

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Intelligence History Book Prize 2026 winner: ‘Spying on Muslims in Colonial Mozambique, 1964-74’ by Sandra Araújo

The Intelligence History Book Prize is awarded to research on intelligence history that encourages further exploration of the past, from antiquity to contemporary history. This year’s prize was awarded to ISRF First Book Fellow Sandra Araújo. Her book focuses on Muslim communities and their response to counterinsurgency and armed nationalism during the colonial war in Mozambique. Congratulations Sandra!

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New Publication:“Idyllischer Gartenzwergkapitalismus”: A Distinct Ordoliberal Environmental Framework? by Isabel Oakes

Drawing on works from ordoliberal thinkers, primarily Alexander Rüstow and Wilhelm Röpke, this article examines their engagement of nature. In doing so, Oakes explores how their ideas around the environment were embedded within their civilisational critique of modernity, functioning as a normative benchmark for social and cultural order.

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New Publication: Unruly subjects: Migration, solidarity and resistance in Greece by Luděk Stavinoha

Tracing the daily lives of migrants on the Aegean islands, Stavinoha explores the pockets of resistance and solidarity that emerge between grassroots organisers, migrants and volunteers. The book highlights their attempts to challenge racialised borders and create alternative futures.

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New Publication: The Rise of Germany’s Far Right Reflects a Systemic Crisis by Gábor Scheiring

The rise of the far right in Germany is often explained through the lens of eastern German political culture or as a broader cultural backlash. Scheiring argues that such narrow explanations fail to recognise that their resurgence is symptom of a deeper, systemic crisis in Europe’s social model.

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9th Early Career Fellowship competition (ECF9)

Launching 30 November 2026

Scholars within 10 years of their PhD award are eligible to apply for support to complete a one-year piece of original research. Applications will be due 29 January 2027. To learn more about our Early Career Fellowship competitions, visit https://isrf.org/competitions/ecf8. Please note that the application form may be subject to change.

In December 2025, the ISRF launched its eighth Mid-Career Fellowship competition. Having received a number of strong proposals, the Selection Panel met in July 2026, and voted to make seven awards:

Dr Rune Bennike (University of Southern Denmark)

Energy Transition in the Seesaw: Labor Regimes, Semi-Peripheral Development, and Moral Economies Between Deindustrialization and Decarbonization

This project reframes discussions of a just energy transition. Analysing connections between deindustrialization and decarbonization in Europe’s shift towards renewable energy, it advances a critical, empirically grounded theorization of transitional labour regimes, semi-peripheral development, and moral economies. To do so, the project brings together extensive ethnographic and archival material collected in the Sulcis region of Sardinia over the past three years. Some of this material provides the basis for pipeline articles, yet only its combination in a book-length publication allows the necessary scope to ground the theoretical ambition and shape an agenda-setting contribution to the field.

More Info: https://isrf.org/projects/energy-transition-in-the-seesaw-labor-regimes-semi-peripheral-development-and-moral-economies-between-deindustrialization-and-decarbonization

Professor Lara M. Coleman (University of Sussex, UK)

Insurgent Humanism

In response to climate breakdown, international complicity in genocide, and revival of Monroe Doctrine US imperialism, movements from across Latin America, southern Africa and the Levant have converged around profoundly humanistic principles. Against the current of much contemporary critical theory, this grassroots internationalism echoes the militant Third-Worldism of the twentieth century in its persistent appeals to ‘humanity’, and humanistic interpretations of international law. It is, however, also embedded within struggles of workers, indigenous peoples, and dispossessed communities that are themselves sites of rich critical thought - and sometimes explicit commitments to rethinking ‘the human’ in opposition to ideas of humanity at the heart of law and development discourse.

More Info: https://isrf.org/projects/insurgent-humanism

Dr Mariagiulia Giuffré (Independent Scholar) & Professor Triestino Mariniello (Liverpool John Moores University, UK)

Genocide Obligations from Below: Civil Society and the Operationalisation of Prevention and Cooperation Duties

What happens when States fail to discharge their primary duties to prevent genocide and cooperate to end it? In answering this question, this project develops a novel legal theory of genocide obligations mobilised “from below” through the work of Civil Society Organisations (CSOs). While international law formally assigns these responsibilities to States, the project argues that CSOs increasingly play a decisive role in triggering, shaping, and operationalising them in practice, especially where state-led enforcement mechanisms falter.

More Info: https://isrf.org/projects/genocide-obligations-from-below-civil-society-and-the-operationalisation-of-prevention-and-cooperation-duties

Dr Stella Milani (University of Florence, Italy)

Beyond the Script: Decentring the Vulnerability Paradigm Through Comics-Based Participatory Research with Unaccompanied Migrant Minors in Italy

In contemporary asylum governance, ‘vulnerability’ operates as an administrative idiom of protection and a classificatory technology: it sorts cases, organises priorities, and authorises differential treatment by determining what counts as a recognisable need. While critical scholarship has mapped the institutional architectures through which vulnerability is produced and operationalised, we still lack fine-grained accounts of how such classifications are negotiated, resisted, and reworked by those at the margins of epistemic authority—whose accounts are routinely met with scepticism and whose public voice is structurally constrained.

More Info: https://isrf.org/projects/beyond-the-script-decentring-the-vulnerability-paradigm-through-comics-based-participatory-research-with-unaccompanied-migrant-minors-in-italy

Dr Lisa Palmer (University of Birmingham, UK)

Love Inside Babylon - The Cultural Politics of Lovers Rock Reggae Music in Britain

This research critically examines lovers rock, the distinctly Black British Caribbean genre of romantic reggae that emerged in London’s mid-1970s sound system and pirate radio scene. Palmer argues that this music—often dismissed as a sentimental, apolitical counterpoint to the overt protests of roots reggae—was in fact a vital site where the cultural politics of Rastafari, love-politics, blackness, gender, sexuality, and the erotic converged. Against a backdrop of economic decline, far-right ascendency, and urban uprisings from St Pauls to Brixton, lovers rock articulated a politics of Black diasporic revolution dreaming, permitted erotic intimacies and an anti-colonial collective consciousness that demands scholarly attention.

More Info: https://isrf.org/projects/love-inside-babylon-the-cultural-politics-of-lovers-rock-reggae-music-in-britain

Professor Anna Stavrianakis (University of Sussex, UK)

Unfinished Business. Weapons, War And Empire In The 21st Century

The world stands at what UN Secretary-General António Guterres calls a “pivotal juncture.” In 2025, military spending reached a world-historic high, while only one in five of the UN Sustainable Development Goals will be reached by 2030. The arms trade is the crucial link connecting state spending, corporate weapons production, and the wars, violence, and inequality that follow, driving death, displacement and disease.

This book project offers a novel, creative and accessible account of the arms trade and its significance for global (dis)order.

More Info: https://isrf.org/projects/unfinished-business-weapons-war-and-empire-in-the-21st-century

Dr Deniz Yonucu Kesici (Newcastle University, UK)

Entangled Racisms: How Multiple Racisms Fuel the Far-Right in Diverse Societies

Why do some segments of migrant-background populations support political projects that are explicitly anti-migrant and racist? In Germany, nearly one in five citizens with migration backgrounds expresses support for the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), a far-right party with a hardline anti-migrant stance.

Studies on the European far-right rightly foreground racism as a key structuring force. But they rely on largely Eurocentric genealogies and therefore struggle to account for why racialised actors sometimes participate in the circulation of racism. This project addresses this blind spot by developing entangled racisms as a new conceptual framework for understanding how multiple racisms interact in diverse societies to fuel the far-right.

More Info: https://isrf.org/projects/entangled-racisms-how-multiple-racisms-fuel-the-far-right-in-diverse-societies

Congratulations to all eight of our new ISRF Mid-Career Fellows, and - as ever - a huge thank you to the hundreds of reviewers who make an invaluable contribution to our assessment process.

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Director’s Note

Must Creatives Run Screaming from the University?

Christopher Newfield

That seems to be the assumption in Dave Eggers’s new novel Contrapposto, a portrait of artists as young but also middle-aged and old men and women. It’s one of Eggers’s best novels, and is devoted to non-tech creativity as a work practice and way of life. But it is phobic about universities and I’m trying to work out why.

Eggers is a prominent U.S. writer and also builder of literary institutions. He founded McSweeney’s Publishing House in 1998, two years before the publication of his breakout novel, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000). Contrapposto’s author bio describes him as “the cofounder of 826 National, a network of youth writing centers, and Voice of Witness, an oral history book series that illuminates the stories of those impacted by human rights crises.” McSweeney’s Internet Tendency is as strong as ever and runs a prominent humour column among other things—for example, “I’m the Guy Who Destroys Antique Books After We Scan Them Into Our Company’s Insatiable AI Platform.” Tech and AI distinguish themselves in this novel by their total absence.

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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

Freeports Exposed: Corruption, Harm and the Politics of Rule-Shifting

Alexandra Hall

This report, by Dr Alexandra Hall, examines the realities beneath the language of “levelling up”, competitiveness and renewal. It argues that UK freeports must be understood not simply as experimental economic tools, but as an increasingly common spatial strategy in which legal, political and institutional norms are selectively reworked.

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The Two-Tier University

Eva Nanopoulos

Many academics working in UK universities face increasingly narrow career pathways, from teaching only contracts to conducting ‘strategic’ research. In this contribution to our Dispatches series, Eva Nanopoulos interrogates how the university’s two-tier system divides staff, reinforces precarity and extracts more labour from academics.

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Negotiating the cuts: Reflections on a University Statutory Redundancy Consultation

Anonymous

Plans for university restructuring and cuts follow the same pattern - an announcement of voluntary severance schemes, followed by risk of redundancy letters and then a 90-day consultation period. What happens during these negotiations? Our latest dispatch explores further.

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How Ukraine’s strikes on Russian warehouses became a problem in Kyrgyzstan

Claudia Eggart

Ukraine’s attacks on the Russian e-commerce platform, Wildberries, has had far reaching implications for traders across Central Asia. Claudia Eggart explains how small and medium sized business owners in Kyrgyzstan are grappling with the trade disruptions.

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UK Freeports: From Exception to Rule?

Alexandra Hall

Freeports are at the centre of the UK’s post-Brexit industrial policy. While these Special Economic Zones (SEZs) encourage economic development, they also actively alter legal and institutional norms. Alexandra Hall explains how these rule-shifting governance arrangements fragment oversight, redistribute accountability and prioritise investor certainty.

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Kyrgyzstan’s Dordoi Bazaar: a world made from shipping containers and a city within a city

Claudia Eggart

The Dordoi Bazaar in Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, is one of the country’s most important economic engines. It’s more than just a shopping market as hotels, medical centres, a fire station and a mosque line the bazaar. Claudia Eggart speaks to women traders about how they build community and navigate Dordoi’s vast economic life.

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New Publication: The Ethnic Dimension of the Greek Civil War: Conflicting Memories and Political Identities in Western Greek Macedonia by Raymondos Alvanos

Modern Greek history continues to be deeply marked by the country’s civil war (1946-1949). Through a series of oral history interviews with the local residents and secondary sources, this study investigates the ethnic dimension of the war and its impact on the memories and political identity of the communities in the Kastoria region of northern Greece.

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New Publication: When authoritarian capitalism fails at development: what Hungary’s accumulative state and the exhaustion of Orbánism teach us by Gábor Scheiring

What is the connection between authoritarian capitalism and its failure to incentivise development? Scheiring offers a new interpretation to this question by drawing on the concept of the accumulative state. Examining the case of Orbánism in Hungary, this article explores how the accumulative state builds institutions and intervenes in markets but focuses on short-term interests to sustain itself.

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New Publication: Anticarceral Feminisms, Penal Violence Against Women, and the Limits of Human Rights: Grassroots Knowledge from Ecuador by Silvana Tapia Tapia

As prison violence and endemic violence against women (VAW) continues in Ecuador, this article draws attention to the work of anticarceral feminists as they oppose and negotiate international human rights. Using participatory research methods, Tapia Tapia’s anticolonial feminist critique explains how rights-based frameworks can perpetuate a penal system that causes racialised and gendered harm.

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New Publication: Defense Dividends by Alfredo Saad-Filho and Jack Taggart

What is the role of private finance in today’s European arms race? This article explores the evolution and increased involvement of the private financial sector in the arms industry, both nationally and internationally, and the growth of the military-financial apparatus hybrid.

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Podcast Episode: ‘Jeoffrey Sarpong Podcast’ Interview with Dr Lars Cornelissen

Jeoffrey Sarpong and Lars Cornelissen discuss the intellectual history of neoliberalism and how race is intimately tied to its theory and praxis. From the history of colonialism to the rise of neoliberalism as a political power, this episode examines how the neoliberal worldview is structured and ways in which to build a new world.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

More Information

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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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.

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.

More Information & Registration

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...

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.

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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.

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.

More Information & Registration

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.

Tune In...

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.

Learn More and Register

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.

Learn More and Register...

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.

1. Director’s Note

2. Live Competition

3. Upcoming ISRF Events

4. Blog

5. Fellows News

6. Competitions 2025

   

Director’s Note

Ducking and Facing the British University’s Great Contraction

Christopher Newfield

I was very pleased with our workshop, “Reconstructing the British University,” that ISRF held on 24-25 November in York. It was completely engaging from start to finish as we discussed our papers about our unhappy object of attention.

We reviewed work on the British university’s broken budget model, whose study has been led by James Brackley for the last eighteen months (see his paper with colleagues who were also in York). We talked about a dysfunctional managerialism defining the system. We reviewed material on staff stress and overwork under what often feels like management’s structural disrespect for academics, their knowledge, and their work. We analysed student struggles with tuition costs, debt, and adequate university investment in their studies.

Read On...

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

Book Launch: Neoliberalism and Race, by Lars Cornelissen

Tuesday 9th December 2025, 6:00pm-7:30pm (GMT). In person & online.

University College London

Neoliberalism and Race uses historical methods to reconstruct neoliberal ideas of race and position them within the broader field of racist ideology. Using archival sources, Cornelissen identifies relationships between the neoliberal tradition and fascist race theory, the British Colonial Office, and the transnational eugenics movement, each of which markedly impacted neoliberalism’s trajectory.

This launch will be co-hosted with the UCL Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation.

More Information & Registration

The Politics in Political Gambling

Anthony Pickles

Fuelled by the ideology of political gambling as a pure form of intellectual brinksmanship, gambling interests gain access to the state via individuals on their way into power and profit from that continued association. In this Bulletin contribution, Anthony Pickles examines how gambling shapes the political landscape and corrupts politics in the UK and the US.

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States of transition? From Governing the Environment to Transforming Society

Peter Newell

States play a key role in facilitating the transition to a more sustainable world. However they are deeply embedded in contested social, political, cultural and economic systems. Peter Newell’s new book examines state power within broader social relations to explore the possibilities and challenges of building a ‘transition state’.

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COP30: Children and young people at climate talks: seen, photographed, but not allowed to decide anything

Florencia Paz Landeira, Alicia O’Sullivan, Aoife Daly and Katie Reid

The global youth climate justice movement uses protests, strikes and court cases to block fossil fuel expansion. But do they have any say in what their governments do to address climate change, or a voice at the annual COP climate change conferences, where the world’s leaders make important climate decisions?

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Why Is There So Much Research About Us Without Us?

Helen Kara and George Watts

While there is continued support for engaging ‘experts by experience’ in research, the stigma around neurodivergent people makes it difficult for them to be openly involved in the process. Helen Kara and George Watts outline why neurodivergent led research is essential to building trust in communities and affirming neurodivergent ways of being.

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New publication: ‘From predicting dissent to programming power; analyzing AI-driven authoritarian governance in the Middle East through TRIAD framework’ by Arash Beidollahkhani

This paper explores the adoption of AI driven technologies by authoritarian regimes in Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Using a novel analytical model, this paper examines how such tools enhance governance efficiency while simultaneously reinforcing political repression.

Learn More

Podcast episode: ‘Colonial Terror: Torture and State Violence in Colonial India’ Deana Heath in conversation with New Books Network

ISRF Mid-Career Fellow, Deana Heath, joins podcast host Roland Clark for a conversation on Heath’s most recent book. Focusing on India between the early nineteenth century and the First World War, Colonial Terror explores the centrality of the torture of Indian bodies to the law-preserving violence of colonial rule and some of the ways in which extraordinary violence was embedded in the ordinary operation of colonial states.

Tune In

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)

Launching January 2026

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

11th Flexible Grants for Small Groups Competition (FG11)

Application window closed on 10th January 2025

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

8th Early Career Fellowship Competition (ECF8)

Application window closed on 14th February 2025

Individual scholars and pairs are eligible to apply for a one-year fellowship to complete a significant piece of new research.

11th Independent Scholar Fellow Competition (ISF11)

Application window closed on 31st October 2025

Independent scholars not employed at a university or research institution can apply for a one-year fellowship to complete a significant piece of new research.

1. Director’s Note

2. Upcoming ISRF Events

3. Blog

4. Fellows News

5. Competitions 2025

Director’s Note

Labour’s White Paper Fails Higher Education

Christopher Newfield

The university’s core activities are teaching and research. UK universities lose two billion GBP a year on teaching UK students and over six billion GBP by conducting research (on about £18.5 billion in gross revenue, Table 5). This is because home fees have been frozen for years and thus deflated, and research funders cover in the aggregate only two thirds of the full costs of research. As a result, nearly half of UK universities projected deficits for 2024-25.

Rather than persuading government to fix these losses at their sources, universities sought to cover them with large margins on the high fees paid by overseas students, those migrants the British public loves to hate. This made up for half of the shortfalls. That, combined with “other (non-commercial) activities”, still left a deficit across all universities of over £2.3 billion in 2023-24, which has since likely gotten worse…

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Book Launch: Threads of Labour: Tapestry of an Ex-Industrial Community, by Lisa Taylor

Thursday 20th November 2025, 6:00pm-7:30pm (GMT). In person & online.

The Leeds Library

Charting a collaborative art-based project using carpet-making skills and the industrial heritage of the region, Threads of Labour investigates how a cleaved ex-industrial community used arts methodologies as a cohesion strategy. Drawing on images from the company's archives, the book mines the history of Firths Carpets Limited, a firm that carpeted interiors across the globe from the mid-1800s.

Learn More and Register Here

Book Launch: Neoliberalism and Race, by Lars Cornelissen

Tuesday 9th December 2025, 6:00pm-7:30pm (GMT). In person & online.

University College London

Neoliberalism and Race uses historical methods to reconstruct neoliberal ideas of race and position them within the broader field of racist ideology. Using archival sources, Cornelissen identifies relationships between the neoliberal tradition and fascist race theory, the British Colonial Office, and the transnational eugenics movement, each of which markedly impacted neoliberalism’s trajectory.

This launch will be co-hosted with the UCL Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation.

More Information & Registration

Against Improvement

Lorna Finlayson

As institutional leaders and politicians continue to pursue budget cuts to essential resources, language becomes a tool to mask their harmful impacts. Lorna Finlayson explores the subtleties of ‘improvements’, a political euphemism that indicates a change for the worse.

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Neoliberalism is Constitutively Racialised

Lars Cornelissen

In his new book, Neoliberalism and Race, Lars Cornelissen argues that the question of race has always preoccupied neoliberals, both as a theoretical and political issue. From colonialism to immigration, Cornelissen’s book explores how race has played a crucial function in the neoliberal worldview.

Read on...

Reimagining Victims’ Reparations: Building a Global Network for Grassroots Justice

Sandra Ríos Oyola, Matt Snell and Camilo Tamayo Gómez

As the field of transitional justice has grown, official reparations schemes have emerged to address victims of political violence, displacement and structural injustice. But what happens when the harms are irreparable, when the wounds inflicted are not just individual but collective, cultural, and historical?

Read on...

Launch: ‘Creating Inclusive Workplaces for Academics with Energy Limiting Conditions’ with Bethan Evans

Join ISRF Political Economy Fellow Bethan Evans for a launch event on guidance around systemic changes and individual adjustments to create more inclusive workplaces for academics with energy limiting conditions (ELC). The guidance is based on research exploring the dual problems of burnout and ableism in the UK neoliberal academy.

Register Here

New publication: ‘Win-Win-Win: Taxing wealth for fairness, revenue and growth’ by Martin O’Neill and Howard Reed

This report for the Fairness Foundation outlines the case for changing the UK’s approach to taxing wealth. Noting the negative impacts of rising wealth inequalities, it examines how an increase in taxes on wealth can help drive economic growth and raise much needed revenue.

Learn More

New Publication: ‘Public Order and the Internal Security Apparatus: Affective Tension Monitoring as Police Epistemology’ by Illan Rua Wall

The ‘tension monitoring’ system is used by police in the UK to predict and in turn prevent disorder from erupting. This article explores how the system aims to understand the affective life of communities, playing an integral role in police epistemology and securing civil order.

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New Publication: ‘States of Transition: From Governing the Environment to Transforming Society’ by Peter Newell

States play a key role in facilitating the transition to a more sustainable world. However states do more than govern - they are deeply embedded in contested social, political, cultural and economic systems. Newell’s new book examines state power within broader social relations to explore the possibilities and challenges of building a ‘transition state’.

Read More

12th Flexible Grants for Small Groups Competition (FG12)

Launching January 2026

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

11th Flexible Grants for Small Groups Competition (FG11)

Application window closed on 10th January 2025

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

8th Early Career Fellowship competition (ECF8)

Application window closed on 14th February 2025

Individual scholars and pairs are eligible to apply for a one-year fellowship to complete a significant piece of new research.

11th Independent Scholar Fellow Competition (ISF11)

Application window closed on 31st October 2025

Independent scholars not employed at a university or research institution can apply for a one-year fellowship to complete a significant piece of new research.

1. Director’s Note

2. Live Competition

3. Upcoming ISRF Events

4. Blog

5. Fellows News

6. Competitions 2025

Director’s Note

Towards Much Less Boring Economics

Christopher Newfield

Here’s an odd thing about Britain. All summer it marshalled rage against asylum-seekers. Anti-immigration was summer 2025’s big British social movement. It was the public face Britain showed the world. Then in September, Britain sent more than 100,000 people to the Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (aka “Tommy Robinson”) neofascist march in London. Yet at the same time, Britain was unable to get angry about failed economic policy, Labour’s or anyone else’s. There were no 100,000-person marches demanding that Labour fulfill its 2024 economic promises for green growth or 300,000 new homes or a restored NHS or any of the rest.

One reason that the British don’t rally for economics is the boring narrowness of the acceptable public discussion….

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Independent Scholar Fellowship competition (ISF11)

Deadline: 5pm GMT (6pm CET), Friday 31st October 2025

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

An ‘Independent Scholar’ is understood by the ISRF as someone pursuing research outside of an academic role, whether or not currently in employment, who is engaged in intellectual work of a nature and standard comparable to that of a professional academic scholar.

More Information & Application

Book Launch: Threads of Labour: Tapestry of an Ex-Industrial Community, by Lisa Taylor

Thursday 20th November 2025, 6:00pm-7:30pm (GMT). In person & online.

Venue TBC.

Charting a collaborative art-based project using carpet-making skills and the industrial heritage of the region, Threads of Labour investigates how a cleaved ex-industrial community used arts methodologies as a cohesion strategy. Drawing on images from the company's archives, the book mines the history of Firths Carpets Limited, a firm that carpeted interiors across the globe from the mid-1800s.

More Information

Book Launch: Neoliberalism and Race, by Lars Cornelissen

Tuesday 9th December 2025, 6:00pm-7:30pm (GMT). In person & online.

University College London

Neoliberalism and Race uses historical methods to reconstruct neoliberal ideas of race and position them within the broader field of racist ideology. Using archival sources, Cornelissen identifies relationships between the neoliberal tradition and fascist race theory, the British Colonial Office, and the transnational eugenics movement, each of which markedly impacted neoliberalism’s trajectory.

This launch will be co-hosted with the UCL Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation.

More Information & Registration

Early Career Fellowship Award Announcement

Adam Smith

The ISRF has announced funding for five researchers to spend a year away from teaching and administration responsibilities.

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Homelessness, fear of starvation and racism – destitute migrant mothers and their children on the reality of life in the UK

Rachel Rosen & Eve Dickson

Drawing on in-depth research with migrant mothers and children in the UK, Rachel Rosen & Eve Dickson reveal how bureaucratic exclusion produces long-term destitution - and raises urgent questions about social justice.

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New publication: ‘Positioning Zimbabwe in the climate change mitigation-adaptation discourse: exploring benefits, barriers and risks’ by Nelson Chanza & Eric Kushinga Makombe

This article centres the experiences of Zimbabwe within the debates of climate-resilient development. In particular, it examines how mitigation and adaption efforts align with national development goals.

Access Here

Media: ‘Frontex unlawfully shared thousands of people’s personal data with Europol’ by Ludek Stavinoha, Apostolis Fotiadis & Lola Hierro

With colleagues, ISRF Mid Career Fellow Ludek Stavinoha published a major investigation in El Pais, Le Monde, and Solomon on the role of Frontex and Europol in the criminalisation of migrants and solidarity activists.

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Film Premiere: ‘Beekeeping at the end of times’ by Larisa Jašarević & Azra Jašarević

This film explores the impact of climate change on the honey ecologies of Bosnia and Herzegovina through the stories of Bosnian Muslim beekeepers. Connecting Sufi lessons, Islamic wisdoms and apocalyptic lore to the current ecological crisis, it offers ways of thinking and organising against “the end of times".

Learn More

Book Launch: ‘The Bonds of Freedom: Liberated Africans and the End of the Slave Trade’ by Jake Subryan Richards

Based on archival research across four continents, The Bonds of Freedom follows the journeys of people who were “liberated” through the maritime seizure of slave ships and then forced back into bondage between 1807 and 1880. The book examines their ongoing fight for freedom in the face of empire.

Register Here

Podcast Episode: ‘Are Summer Riots the ‘new normal’?’ hosted by ‘Talking About Race’

ISRF Mid Career Fellow Anthony Ince joined Kulvinder Nagre and Maya Goodfellow for a conversation on the ongoing anti-migrant protests in the UK. The ‘Talking About Race’ podcast, produced by Race on the Agenda, brings experts together to discuss issues facing Black and Global majority communities across the UK and beyond.

Tune In

11th Independent Scholar Fellow Competition (ISF11)

Now live: deadline 31 October 2025

Independent scholars not employed at a university or research institution can apply for a one-year fellowship to complete a significant piece of new research.

Apply Here

12th Flexible Grants for Small Groups Competition (FG12)

Launching January 2026

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

11th Flexible Grants for Small Groups Competition (FG11)

Application window closed on 10th January 2025

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

8th Early Career Fellowship competition (ECF8)

Application window closed on 14th February 2025

Individual scholars and pairs are eligible to apply for a one-year fellowship to complete a significant piece of new research.

1. Director’s Note

2. Live Competition

3. Upcoming ISRF Events

4. Blog

5. Fellows News

6. Competitions 2025

Director’s Note

How Do We Escape Today’s AI?

Christopher Newfield

Another of my perversely non-escapist beach reads this month was Karen Hao’s new book, The Empire of AI. You can tell she means the word “empire” literally from her subtitle, Inside the Reckless Race for Total Domination. Hao has written a superb work of deep reporting and reflection. By centring the story on OpenAI, she offers a systematic corrective to the sense of so-called “Artificial Intelligence” that you get from the breathless fluff and propaganda of our mediasphere.

The branch of computer programming mislabelled “artificial intelligence” has infiltrated all mainstream thinking about many domains—labour, capital investment, social development, and human consciousness itself. Hao has an engineering degree and broke some of the early stories about OpenAI while working for the MIT Technology Review and the Wall Street Journal. Yet these qualifications don’t quite explain her immunity to technology bullshit…

Read On...

Independent Scholar Fellowship competition (ISF11)

Deadline: 5pm GMT (6pm CET), Friday 31st October 2025

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

An ‘Independent Scholar’ is understood by the ISRF as someone pursuing research outside of an academic role, whether or not currently in employment, who is engaged in intellectual work of a nature and standard comparable to that of a professional academic scholar.

More Information & Application

Book Launch: Bordering Social Reproduction: Migrant Mothers and Children Making Lives in the Shadows, by Rachel Rosen and Eve Dickson

Thursday 25 September 2025, 6:00pm-7:30pm (BST). In person & online.

Barnard’s Inn Hall, London

In their co-authored book Bordering Social Reproduction, former ISRF Fellow Rachel Rosen and Eve Dickson argue that while welfare bordering may operate quietly in the shadows, it is nonetheless a form of punitive exclusion from the means of life and central to the (re)production of the racialised nation state. It enforces immiseration and debt across generations, rendering the labour of everyday life grinding and relentless.

More Information & Registration

Book Launch: Threads of Labour: Tapestry of an Ex-Industrial Community, by Lisa Taylor

Thursday 20th November 2025, 6:00pm-7:30pm (GMT). In person & online.

Venue TBC.

Charting a collaborative art-based project using carpet-making skills and the industrial heritage of the region, Threads of Labour investigates how a cleaved ex-industrial community used arts methodologies as a cohesion strategy. Drawing on images from the company's archives, the book mines the history of Firths Carpets Limited, a firm that carpeted interiors across the globe from the mid-1800s.

More Information

Book Launch: Neoliberalism and Race, by Lars Cornelissen

Tuesday 9th December 2025, 6:00pm-7:30pm (GMT). In person & online.

University College London

Neoliberalism and Race uses historical methods to reconstruct neoliberal ideas of race and position them within the broader field of racist ideology. Using archival sources, Cornelissen identifies relationships between the neoliberal tradition and fascist race theory, the British Colonial Office, and the transnational eugenics movement, each of which markedly impacted neoliberalism’s trajectory.

This launch will be co-hosted with the UCL Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation.

More Information & Registration

Can higher education be a neurodivergent-affirming space without funding?

Helen Kara

How can academia and other sectors create enabling environments for neurodivergent people? Discussing the concept of neurodivergent-affirming spaces, Helen Kara argues that better understandings and practices can emerge through supporting the work of neurodivergent researchers themselves.

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Strategic Corruption: A Useful Concept or a Catch-All?

Tena Prelec

Drawing on insights from a recent ISRF-funded workshop, Tena Prelec reflects on the affordances and limits of the concept of 'strategic corruption'.

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From oil to cod – ISRF event explores what yesterday’s empires reveal about today’s wars

Adam Smith

An ISRF-hosted series of lectures on decolonisation sheds new light on contemporary conflicts.

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New publication: ‘Reproductive subsumption: Notes on the making of reproductive labour in capitalism’, by Elena Baglioni

This article explores how workers are differently formed in capitalism by focusing on how capitalism changes the relation between production and social reproduction and with what consequences for labour.

Access Here

11th Independent Scholar Fellow Competition (ISF11)

Now live: deadline 31 October 2025

Independent scholars not employed at a university or research institution can apply for a one-year fellowship to complete a significant piece of new research.

Apply Here

12th Flexible Grants for Small Groups Competition (FG12)

Launching January 2026

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

11th Flexible Grants for Small Groups Competition (FG11)

Application window closed on 10th January 2025

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

8th Early Career Fellowship competition (ECF8)

Application window closed on 14th February 2025

Individual scholars and pairs are eligible to apply for a one-year fellowship to complete a significant piece of new research.

1. Director’s Note

2. Upcoming ISRF Events

3. Blog

4. Fellows News

5. Competitions 2025

Director’s Note

Why Democratic Communism Could Be the Answer to the Climate Emergency

Christopher Newfield

In this monthly Director’s Note, Christopher Newfield considers how democratic communism, grounded in ecological Marxism and democratic planning, could offer a compelling alternative to capitalist growth.

We can’t simply add more diverse voices to deliberation, but must plan a system that allows for deliberation about incommensurable goals that leads to a stable, mutually agreeable accommodation.

This is currently beyond the capabilities of humanity, as our 19th century stall-out suggests. We still aren’t ready to implement the ideas Neurath and Keynes came up with so many decades ago.

And yet a just economy and survivable world depends on developing these capabilities. The best way to get them is to build the processes in which these capabilities will be used.

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Book Launch: Bordering Social Reproduction: Migrant Mothers and Children Making Lives in the Shadows, by Rachel Rosen and Eve Dickson

Thursday 25 September 2025, 6:00pm-7:30pm (BST). In person & online.

Barnard’s Inn Hall, London

Bordering Social Reproduction explores what happens when migrants subject to policies that seek to deny them the means of life nonetheless endeavour to make and sustain meaningful lives. Developing innovative theorisations of welfare bordering, the volume provides rich ethnographic insights into the everyday lives of destitute mothers and children who are denied mainstream welfare support in the United Kingdom due to their immigration status.

More Information

Book Launch: Threads of Labour: Tapestry of an Ex-Industrial Community, by Lisa Taylor

Thursday 20th November 2025, 6:00pm-7:30pm (GMT). In person & online.

Venue TBC.

Charting a collaborative art-based project using carpet-making skills and the industrial heritage of the region, the book investigates how a cleaved ex-industrial community used arts methodologies as a cohesion strategy. Drawing on images from the company's archives, the book mines the history of Firths Carpets Limited, a firm that carpeted interiors across the globe from the mid-1800s. Women's labour and tastes were business critical to the production and sale of Firths carpets. Drawing on the author's personal connection to the village, an ethnographic sensibility and novel research techniques, ex-worker responses to a village radically altered by ruination are explored. Ex-workers felt nostalgia for the dignity of work and a sense of homesickness in a village ghosted by industrial spectres of the past. Threads of Labour argues that left-behind deindustrialised places require acts of social re-making if their communities are to survive.

More Information

Book Launch: Neoliberalism and Race, by Lars Cornelissen

Tuesday 9th December 2025, 6:00pm-7:30pm (GMT). In person & online.

Venue TBC.

Beginning in the interwar period and running through to recent developments, Neoliberalism and Race shows that racial themes have always pervaded neoliberal thinking. The book's key argument is that neoliberal thought is constitutively racialized—its racial motifs cannot be extracted from neoliberalism without rendering it theoretically and politically incoherent. The book aptly explores a wide variety of racial constructs through the structure of neoliberal ideology, deconstructing the conceptualizations in the works of landmark thinkers such as Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Peter Bauer, Thomas Sowell, Charles Murray, and others from the early twentieth century to the present.

More Information

Awards Announcement: Eleventh Flexible Grants for Small Groups Competition

Stuart Wilson

In October 2024, the ISRF launched its eleventh Flexible Grants for Small Groups competition. Having received a number of strong proposals, a selection panel nominated the following 17 projects for award.

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Why Neoliberals Destroy Universities

Lars Cornelissen

In both the UK and the US, neoliberals have systematically targeted higher education for destructive reform. Lars Cornelissen argues that this is a function of neoliberalism's enduring hostility to the university sector.

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New publication: ‘Muslim-Mancunian Women: Racial-Colonial Literacy, Counter-Knowledge and Epistemological Justice’, by Fatima Khan and Sadiya Akram

Epistemological justice, which exposes the role of colonialism in conceptualising contemporary society, particularly racial inequalities, has gained prominence within sociology. Yet, sociologists often ignore that the material conditions of professional sociology inhibit racial justice-oriented knowledge making.

Access Here

11th Independent Scholar Fellow Competition (ISF11)

Launching late summer 2025

Independent scholars not employed at a university or research institution can apply for a one-year fellowship to complete a significant piece of new research.

12th Flexible Grants for Small Groups Competition (FG12)

Launching winter 2025

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

11th Flexible Grants for Small Groups Competition (FG11)

Application window closed on 10th January 2025

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

8th Early Career Fellowship competition (ECF8)

Application window closed on 14th February 2025

Individual scholars and pairs are eligible to apply for a one-year fellowship to complete a significant piece of new research.

1. Director’s Note

2. Blog

3. Fellows News

4. Competitions 2025

Director’s Note

A New Regulatory Framework for University Cuts

Christopher Newfield

In this monthly Director’s Note, Christopher Newfield reflects on cuts and mismanagement in UK and US universities, and proposes a new regulatory framework to guide more accountable and constructive reforms.

Universities are not tobacco or oil companies. But their managements have long concealed or distorted the effects of their marketised business model, with a dependence on student debt paired with inadequate public funding.

At the same time, the managers with financial authority are as unregulated as were pesticide manufacturers and oil companies—and as unaccountable to staff, students, research, teaching, knowledge, public benefit or society. Pro forma consultations with unions focus on completing redundancies rather than collaborative rebuilding.

The result is the long-term decline of an essential social sector at the core of so-called knowledge societies, future industries, basic productivity growth, and stronger, happier societies with better intellectual lives, that has entered long term decline. Yet I see no urgency in government, in management, or even in much of the sector. I see plenty of resignation.

One conclusion is that universities need a regulatory framework as badly as AI, chemical and fossil fuel companies do. The obvious model is an Environmental Impact Assessment or Statement. It would function as an Educational Impact Statement (EIS).

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‘There is no green transition’: Why oil runs through the history of Empire and decolonisation

Adam Smith

Political economist Adam Hanieh explains how the history of state-owned oil companies is tied up with imperialism and anti-colonial struggle.

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Bulletin 32: Crisis and Conjuncture: Climate, Borders, Politics

Lars Cornelissen & Baindu Kallon

In May, the ISRF published issue 32 of the Bulletin. This issue speaks to the links, tensions and affinities between migration and issues of climate and politics. Based on papers presented at the ISRF's 2024 annual conference, contributions aim to recalibrate existing categories of analysis in the face of escalating political, humanitarian, and environmental crises.

Read On...

New publication: Threads of Labour: Tapestry of an Ex-Industrial Community, by Lisa Taylor

Charting a collaborative art-based project using carpet-making skills and the industrial heritage of the region, the book investigates how a cleaved ex-industrial community used arts methodologies as a cohesion strategy. Drawing on images from the company's archives, the book mines the history of Firths Carpets Limited, a firm that carpeted interiors across the globe from the mid-1800s.

Pre-Order Here

New publication: Taming Egg Donors: The Egg Donation Reproductive Market in Spain, by Anna Molas

In this important new ethnographic study, Anna Molas discusses the Spanish egg donation market, one of the most prominent fertility markets in the world. She explores how young women are incorporated as egg donors into the global reproductive industry and reveals the fragile processes of selection, monitoring, and control that ensure the supply of human eggs.

Pre-Order Here

New Publication: Bordering social reproduction: Migrant mothers and children making lives in the shadows, by Rachel Rosen and Eve Dickson

This book shows how enforced destitution and debt work alongside detention and deportation as part of a tripartite of exclusionary technologies of the racial state. It advances the novel concept of weathering to comprehend mother' and children's life-making practices under duress – arguing that these are neither acts of heroic resilience nor solely symptomatic of lives rendered disposable, but indications of the fragilities of repressive migration regimes and, on occasion, refusals to accept their terms of existence.

Click Here to Buy

11th Independent Scholar Fellow Competition (ISF11)

Launching late summer 2025

Independent scholars not employed at a university or research institution can apply for a one-year fellowship to complete a significant piece of new research.

12th Flexible Grants for Small Groups Competition (FG12)

Launching winter 2025

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

11th Flexible Grants for Small Groups Competition (FG11)

Application window closed on 10th January 2025

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

8th Early Career Fellowship competition (ECF8)

Application window closed on 14th February 2025

Individual scholars and pairs are eligible to apply for a one-year fellowship to complete a significant piece of new research.

1. Director’s Note

2. Blog

3. Fellows News

4. Competitions 2025

Director’s Note

ISRF in the Polycrisis

Christopher Newfield

Alternatives to the polycrisis are being built by the intelligence of small networks of people working together, out of view of the hypernormalized media that forms our simulated public space. The ISRF is one such network, and the London team had a great time talking about what our friends and Fellows have been doing over the last year at the Foundation’s annual advisory board meeting in Amsterdam at the end of May.

We had two sessions led by board members themselves. One was on culture and creative methods; the other was on the current state of heterodox economics. These are both core research areas for the ISRF…

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First Book Fellowships Award Announcement

Adam Smith

As part of a scheme to help recent PhD graduates turn their theses into publishable books, the ISRF has announced funding for seven researchers.

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Bulletin 32: Crisis and Conjuncture: Climate, Borders, Politics

Lars Cornelissen & Baindu Kallon

In May, the ISRF published issue 32 of the Bulletin. This issue speaks to the links, tensions and affinities between migration and issues of climate and politics. Based on papers presented at the ISRF's 2024 annual conference, contributions aim to recalibrate existing categories of analysis in the face of escalating political, humanitarian, and environmental crises.

Read On...

Women in Transition: Gender Roles and the Privatization of Energy Production

Margot Verdier

Margot Verdier explores the gendered impacts of the fossil fuel phase-out in Western Macedonia, Greece.

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How one woman’s artwork kept alive the memory of an indigenous people whose culture was destroyed by colonialism

Adam Smith

Shanawdithit's drawings provide a firsthand account of the violence endured by the Beothuk at the hands of settlers in the first British colony of Newfoundland.

Read On...

New publication: Taming Egg Donors: The Egg Donation Reproductive Market in Spain, by Anna Molas

In this important new ethnographic study, Anna Molas discusses the Spanish egg donation market, one of the most prominent fertility markets in the world. She explores how young women are incorporated as egg donors into the global reproductive industry and reveals the fragile processes of selection, monitoring, and control that ensure the supply of human eggs.

Pre-Order Here

New Publication: Bordering social reproduction: Migrant mothers and children making lives in the shadows, by Rachel Rosen and Eve Dickson

This book shows how enforced destitution and debt work alongside detention and deportation as part of a tripartite of exclusionary technologies of the racial state. It advances the novel concept of weathering to comprehend mother's and children's life-making practices under duress – arguing that these are neither acts of heroic resilience nor solely symptomatic of lives rendered disposable, but indications of the fragilities of repressive migration regimes and, on occasion, refusals to accept their terms of existence.

Click Here to Buy

Podcast: Book launch for Spying on Muslims in Colonial Mozambique, 1964-74, with Sandra Araújo

On the 27th of February, the ISRF hosted a book launch to celebrate the publication of Sandra Araujó’s brilliant new book, Spying on Muslims in Colonial Mozambique, 1964-74. This podcast is based on that event.

Click Here to Listen

Video: Decolonisation lecture series, part 1: A World Remade by Decolonization?

On the 9th of April, the ISRF hosted the first in a three-part lecture series on decolonisation. The lecture, given by former ISRF Fellow Martin Thomas, developed a global history of post-war decolonisation.

Click Here to Watch

Video: Decolonisation lecture series, part 2: Shanawdithit: A Woman at the End of the World

On the 30th of April, the ISRF hosted the second in a three-part lecture series on colonial history and decolonisation. The lecture, given by ISRF Fellow Julia Laite, narrated the history of Shanawdithit’s fascinating and important life, alongside the history of the island of Newfoundland, which was England’s first transatlantic colony.

Click Here to Watch

Video: Decolonisation lecture series, part 3: Oil, Decolonisation, and the Future of the Climate Emergency

On the 15th of May, the ISRF hosted the third in a three-part lecture series on colonial history and decolonisation. The lecture, given by ISRF Fellow Adam Hanieh, explored oil’s influence on national independence struggles, from the 1955 Bandung Conference to the rise of OPEC and the nationalisation of crude reserves.

Click Here to Watch

11th Independent Scholar Fellow Competition (ISF11)

Launching late summer 2025

Independent scholars not employed at a university or research institution can apply for a one-year fellowship to complete a significant piece of new research.

12th Flexible Grants for Small Groups Competition (FG12)

Launching winter 2025

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

11th Flexible Grants for Small Groups Competition (FG11)

Application window closed on 10th January 2025

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

8th Early Career Fellowship competition (ECF8)

Application window closed on 14th February 2025

Individual scholars and pairs are eligible to apply for a one-year fellowship to complete a significant piece of new research.

1. Director’s Note

2. Upcoming ISRF Events

3. Blog

4. Fellows News

5. Competitions 2025

Director’s Note

Reversing Helplessness

Christopher Newfield

In the past two months, ISRF has held two meetings of our Political Affect research group. The second of these was on the topic of Drive in both psyche and society, brought to us by the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany.

I left the next day for Portugal, where among other things I watched Lisbonnais dealing with a total Iberian power failure by sharing bus space and cash and heading to parks for an afternoon and evening of group conversation.

As I was returning to London, Nigel Farage’s right-wing party, Reform UK, won a by-election and dominated local elections a few days later…

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Decolonisation lectures, part 3: Oil, Decolonisation, and the Future of the Climate Emergency

Thursday 15 May, 2025, 6:00pm (BST). In person and online.

Barnard’s Inn Hall, London

Professor Adam Hanieh's lecture explores oil’s influence on national independence struggles, from the 1955 Bandung Conference to the rise of OPEC and the nationalisation of crude reserves. It examines how these shifts reshaped global power, exposing both the successes and limits of decolonisation, and their contemporary relevance in understanding the roots of today’s climate crisis.

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Liberalism, Fascism and the Politics of Rights

Lara Montesinos Coleman

In this contribution to Bulletin 32, Lara Montesinos Coleman rethinks the relationship between rights, law, and resistance in the face of fascist resurgence.

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How the last 50 years of economic policy can help explain Labour’s latest benefit cuts

Adam Smith

The UK Chancellor's Spring Statement is consistent with longstanding trends in social security and employment policy, as explored in great detail in Jay Wiggan's recent book.

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Exploring the Contradictions of Planning in Post-War Britain

Yasminah Beebeejaun

In this contribution to Bulletin 32, ISRF Fellow Yasminah Beebeejaun explores the linkages between Britain's colonial legacy and post-war urban planning, focussing on themes of race, migration, and de facto segregation.

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On Refugees

Artur Kula

In this contribution to Bulletin 32, Artur Kula discusses the way themes of national belonging fit into Polish public memory and bear on current political discourse surrounding immigration.

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Trump’s tariffs are not the end of globalisation

Adam Smith

For historian Martin Thomas, trade tariffs and foreign aid cuts should be seen within the context of a wider story around decolonisation and the end of empire.

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New Publication: Bordering social reproduction: Migrant mothers and children making lives in the shadows, by Rachel Rosen and Eve Dickson

This book shows how enforced destitution and debt work alongside detention and deportation as part of a tripartite of exclusionary technologies of the racial state. It advances the novel concept of weathering to comprehend mother's and children's life-making practices under duress – arguing that these are neither acts of heroic resilience nor solely symptomatic of lives rendered disposable, but indications of the fragilities of repressive migration regimes and, on occasion, refusals to accept their terms of existence.

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Video: Decolonisation lecture series, part 1: A World Remade by Decolonization?

On the 9th of April, the ISRF hosted the first in a three-part lecture series on decolonisation. The lecture, given by former ISRF Fellow Martin Thomas, developed a global history of post-war decolonisation.

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Video: Decolonisation lecture series, part 2: Shanawdithit: A Woman at the End of the World

On the 30th of April, the ISRF hosted the second in a three-part lecture series on colonial history and decolonisation. The lecture, given by ISRF Fellow Julia Laite, narrate the history of Shanawdithit’s fascinating and important life, alongside the history of the island of Newfoundland, which was England’s first transatlantic colony.

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11th Independent Scholar Fellow Competition (ISF11)

Launching late summer 2025

Independent scholars not employed at a university or research institution can apply for a one-year fellowship to complete a significant piece of new research.

12th Flexible Grants for Small Groups Competition (FG12)

Launching autumn 2025

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

11th Flexible Grants for Small Groups Competition (FG11)

Application window closed on 10th January 2025

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

8th Early Career Fellowship competition (ECF8)

Application window closed on 14th February 2025

Individual scholars and pairs are eligible to apply for a one-year fellowship to complete a significant piece of new research.