ISRF Newsletter – February 2026
This edition of the ISRF newsletter features a Director's Note on recovering professorial authority. Also included is our latest competition, new Bulletin, Fellows news & blog posts.
Contents
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 96th birthday.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.