ISRF Newsletter – September 2025
This week the Foundation has launched its latest Independent Scholar Fellowship competition. Also this newsletter: a Director's Note on the dangers of AI, recent blog posts, and upcoming ISRF events.
Contents
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'.
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.
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.
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.
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.