ISRF Newsletter – July 2026
Featured in this edition of the newsletter is a Director's Note on the ever changing debates around AI. Also included: upcoming book launches, Dispatches and news from our Fellows.
Contents
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 2nd 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.