FULLY FUNDED PHDs IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
I'm looking for *two* PhD students to join my ERC project on refugee-led approaches to displacement justice. The positions are funded for four years, and you get to join our lovely community in Bristol. Please share widely!
philjobs.org/job/show/30997
The first set of postdocs for our ERC project on popular government have just been advertised. These 3 postdocs will be based at UC Louvain with my co-PI Pierre-Etienne Vandamme and focus on contemporary democratic theory. Apply! jobs.uclouvain.be/Personnelsci...
Something compelled me to make this
📣 Call for Abstracts!
Excited to be among the organisers of the 12th annual Graduate Conference in Political Theory (28-29th May)!
Submit abstracts here: forms.gle/ccfeNR21Pn3Y...
Please share among colleagues and fellow PhD Students!
The Legislation Upon winning a general election, a Reform government under Prime Minister Nigel Farage will: 1) Leave the ECHR 2.) Repeal the Human Rights Act and replace it with a British Bill of Rights. 3.) Pass The Illegal Migration (Mass Deportation) Bill: This Bill will: Create a legal duty to remove illegal migrants for the Home Secretary The Bill opens with a blunt obligation for the Home Secretary: "The Secretary of State shall ensure the removal from the United Kingdom of each person who does not have extant leave to remain and is not an Irish citizen or otherwise protected by regulations made under this Act." The following parts of the legislation are introduced on an emergency basis, with an in-built sunset clause after 5 years: Disapply the 1951 Refugee Convention, the UN Convention Against Torture, the Council of Europe Anti-Trafficking Convention (ECAT) Derogation is justified under the Vienna Convention doctrine of state of necessity: Britain faces a national emergency in which uncontrolled illegal migration undermines public order. These treaties will otherwise be used by activist judges to frustrate deportations, even after the repeals of the HRA and ECHR. Create Detention Power Without Hardial Singh Constraints This means illegal migrants can be detained until they are deported. Activist lawyers routinely use Hardial Singh to secure their client's bail, after which the client absconds. If you came to the UK illegally, you are ineligible for asylum. End of story All asylum claims will become inadmissible if made by a person within the Act's scope. If you came to the country illegally, you are ineligible for asylum in the UK. This strips the Home Office, the immigration tribunals and the higher courts of jurisdiction to even consider claims. A claim that cannot be considered cannot suspend removal and therefore, cannot delay a flight. Re-entering after deportation and destroying ID becomes a serious criminal offence Re-entry after deportation will be…
The Operational Plan We will create an enforcement unit called UK Deportation Command, including an Illegal Migrant Identification Centre - harnessing cutting edge data fusion A Reform government will create a cutting edge enforcement data centre to relentlessly identify and detain all illegal migrants in the UK. Using powers granted by the new legislation, it will automatically share data between the Home Office, NHS, HMRC, DVLA, banks and the police. It will power bulk warrants, including mandatory biometric capture during any police encounter. Each power addresses a failure mode observed over the past decade - for example, banks and GP surgeries unaware of a customer's status, or overstayers slipping through because a warrant covered only a single property. Secure Immigration Removal Centres (SIRC) will be built rapidly to detain up to 24,000 Detention capacity for up to 24,000 will be created within 18 months. The Home Office will build Secure Immigration Removal Centres. This will be modular accommodation built in remote parts of the country. Conditions are basic but not punitive: prefabricated two-person rooms, canteen catering, on-site medical suites. Robust perimeters and internal movement controls prevent escapes. This enables detention-on-arrest: no more bail. This capacity would allow for up to 24,000 illegal migrants to be deported per month. Initial Voluntary Return Window A six-month Assisted Voluntary Return window precedes large-scale raids. Illegal migrants will be offered a financial incentive to self-deport. An app will be launched to facilitate this. The Deportation Flights The Home Office will scale up charters to 5 flights per day. To guard against last-minute aircraft unserviceability, the RAF will keep one Voyager aircraft on six-hour 'hot-spare' readiness. If a commercial charter breaks down, detainees can still be flown out that night, preserving operational integrity. The legal reset will mean activist lawyers will no longer be able preven…
The UK version of “Project 2025” by the Reform party includes a British ICE, a concentration camp for 24,000 people, mass surveillance and withdrawing from refugee, anti-torture and anti-trafficking conventions.
It’s on their website. That’s how comfortable fascists are in the UK today.
📣 Call for Abstracts!
Excited to be among the organisers of the 12th annual Graduate Conference in Political Theory (28-29th May)!
Submit abstracts here: forms.gle/ccfeNR21Pn3Y...
Please share among colleagues and fellow PhD Students!
📣 Call for Papers:
🗓️ 23-24 April 2026 at LSE
Submit full papers: forms.office.com/e/9qVWeNTK0p
Please share with colleagues & early-career researchers!
📣 Call for Papers:
🗓️ 23-24 April 2026 at LSE
Submit full papers: forms.office.com/e/9qVWeNTK0p
Please share with colleagues & early-career researchers!
Famously, fascism was defeated in the marketplace of ideas. With debate.
My highly contingent and partial take on Gen AI in Higher Education is this: the biggest problem with Gen AI isn't brazen cheating or dishonesty. It's the normalisation of seemingly minor things being incorrect: call it a 'close enough' mentality.
and in framing themselves as the only True Knowers, the data boys fail to understand how they form part of the complicated, contingent outcomes they’re claiming to observe objectively. “We can only respond to poll numbers, not shape action,” is itself a theory of the world that evidence doesn’t back
"Many Americans are done with what they perceive as an unacceptable status quo." 🗽
Our PhD student @janwasserziehr.bsky.social argues that whilst #Mamdani’s victory surprised the Democratic establishment, it tallies with an increasingly #polarised #US #electorate. 👇🏽
blogs.lse.ac.uk/government/2...
If you're around London next week, consider joining us for this workshop on alternatives to capitalism! Details below👇
Misinformation *is* central to democratic problems today, but the solution is *not* to correct such epistemic failures directly. Instead, we must address them at their roots, in social identity.
Or so I argue in a new post for @apaphilosophy.bsky.social.
blog.apaonline.org/2025/11/12/t...
I ran a simulated social media experiment with 1450 Republicans to test different fact-checking interventions.
AI produced the largest decrease in engagement with Trump misinformation, outperforming independent fact-checkers and doing so far more consistently than Community Notes.
Daniel James in front of a slide about some challenges for racial eliminativists.
Thanks to Daniel James (TU Dresden) for a great talk on racialized oppression, followed by a great exchange. An absolutely brilliant research seminar.
🚨 We have a cool new ESRC PhD studentship opportunity on the topic of political persuasion for someone interested in campaigning, field experiments and/or computational methods @lsegovernment.bsky.social, in collaboration with
@campaign-lab.bsky.social. All info 👇
www.lse.ac.uk/study-at-lse...
From political philosophy to political proposals via the social sciences. A lively debate, launching Tom Parr's new book. With Becky Clark (LSE), David Axelsen (Essex) and @brunoleipold.com .
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”
Starmer’s policy: a transfer of resources from the poorest, straight to the arms industry.
I always knew that one day I’d be able to do something with this meme
My theory: the relative decline in power of a certain kinda woke humanities set (post-2020) happened in some part because when a crisis came and America was relatively receptive they just had no workable policies. "Abolish the police" just weren't it, but it was the only slogan that broke through...
Really enjoyed talking about Marx and the Paris Commune for this week's episode of Past Present Future
A four-panel meme using scenes from SpongeBob SquarePants. In the first panel, Mr. Krabs (labeled “Me”) is angrily pointing and saying “All right, get lost, all of ya. You’re fired. Go on. Scram.” In the second panel, a crowd of fish (labeled “Political Theories”) is being shooed away while Mr. Krabs says, “Get out of here, you moochers. That’s right, keep moving.” In the third panel, Mr. Krabs turns to one remaining character and says, “Except you. You stay.” In the fourth panel, a goofy-looking clown is smiling with arms outstretched, labeled “Historical Materialism.”
I want to believe 😭
A ramshackle of suspicions and prejudices is all theories ever are (approbative)
Our PhD student @janwasserziehr.bsky.social is organising an exciting conference on 10th June about AI, consiousness, and morality. Register here: www.eventbrite.de/e/lse-worksh...
@jackwilkinson.bsky.social told me about this saying today. It will stay with me for a while.
Google Books Ngram Viewer graph showing frequency of the terms "epistemic" (blue line) and "metaphysical" (red line) in English-language books from 1800 to 2022. The "metaphysical line" shows higher usage throughout most of the 19th and early 20th centuries, with peaks around 1830. The epistemic line remains near zero until about 1930, then rises dramatically after 1960, eventually surpassing metaphysical around 2018. Both terms show significant increases in usage from the 1980s onward.
about to crack this case wide open
