Rachel Smith

Solidarity with UCU members and staff at Aberdeen. Compulsory redundancies and management intransigence undermine the very fabric of the university community. Resilience to the @maggiechapman.bsky.social and the trades unions on the ground.

Headline on BBC news reads: Aberdeen University strike dates announced in row over cuts.

Disappointing to see it reach this stage - strikes now planned on 12, 13, 17 and 18 March.

I'll be sharing solidarity with those forced to strike to improve conditions @ucu.org.uk

'You never know': Leading Scots university boss can't rule out compulsory job cuts Professor Peter Edwards of the University of Aberdeen said that categorically ruling out job cuts “is a very difficult thing for anyone to do”.

In an interview with The Herald, Aberdeen University principal Peter Edwards said he could not rule out compulsory redundancies.

Days later, plans to make £12m in savings over the next two years were unveiled.

www.heraldscotland.com/news/2589208...

Goodwin lol more like Matt Badloss

Leaving the point that Humanities are good to have to one side, I genuinely don't get the medium-to-long-term maths of this pervasive model. Take increasing central charge from 'cheap' & 'cheaper' to teach programmes & shrink them, & you also shrink your internal subsidy for more expensive subjects.

*Marx making a shocked face.jpg“

Headline in The Herald reads: Fears as job losses amid Aberdeen University restructuring bid. The article has a picture of students in graduation outfits which are black with blue and yellow hoods.

The manner in which staff report being treated is abysmal. Higher education staff work incredibly hard, in increasingly difficult situations. They need to be valued, treated with respect and deserve a transparent process going forward.

The University Unruined What are the practical means by which academic staff can get direct control over budgets and programme planning?

"Treating access to financial data as an exclusive management right, rather than part of a university’s shared deliberate processes, deprives academic staff of the sense of competence that enables meaningful participation."

isrf.org/blog/the-uni...

For our special issue we are honored to feature Michel-Rolph Trouillot's previously unpublished manuscript "Banana Wars: The Sweetness of Commodities," edited by Ryan Cecil Jobson.

Sad news, Dr Bolles published important and groundbreaking scholarship in anthropology of work and labor, including women's work, globalization/neoliberal restructuring, and organized labor in the Caribbean.

Recommended listen:

I'm begging people to read one (1) E.P. Thompson-influenced work pleeeeease

Devastatingly sad.
Every Labour MP should be forced to read this. In fact, every MP, who rushed back to Parliament to vote to save one steel mill, whilst hastening the collapse of dozens of universities - and harming the students, staff, communities and economies universities sustain and support

Header image from @culanth showing ‘Vol. 40 No. 4 (2025) – Articles’ and the article title in large text: ‘Marine Inequality, Borderization, and the Radical Potential of Kinship.’

Fiona McCormack’s essay, “Marine Inequality, Borderization, and the Radical Potential of Kinship,” engages with climate, capitalism, and decolonial critique, examining how marine spaces materialize global inequalities through regimes of extraction, governance, and labor.

Where Have All the Workers Gone? Re-Imagining Labor in the Post-Pandemic World This Hot Spots series zooms in on the images and re-evaluations of work/labor and changing position of workers in the aftermath of the pandemic. ...

Cultural anthropology latest Hot Spots Series, “Where have all the workers gone?” is both "an empirical question that ethnographers often encounter in the field" and "an epistemological reflection on where anthropologists today locate labor, work(ers), and their struggles"

‘Give PhD archive attention it deserves,’ British Library urged Scholars criticise lack of progress on restoring repository of 600,000 PhD theses more than two years after it was felled by cyberattack

I am really disappointed that the new version of EThOS at the British Library (the service for getting PhD theses) will be metadata-only. I really think we should use such resources, even if they are not books. They are still contributions to knowledge.

www.timeshighereducation.com/news/give-ph...

A reminder: as happy as I am to see adverts for jobs; no role is 'permanent' in UK HE and hasn't been for some time. 'Open-ended' is what we call it: it's important to remember we are actually all precarious to some extent, especially at the moment.

Why are UK universities failing? - LSE Impact The HE sector in the UK faces the prospect of a university going into administration. How have universities fallen so low and is change possible?

👀ICYMI: "To speak of the “demise” of the UK university is not to suggest its disappearance, but its transformation into something increasingly unrecognisable."

#AcademicSky #HigherEducation #Universities

The nationalist right - our high streets are empty and it's killing communities
The government - let's explore making them more attractive and easy to navigate destinations
The nationalist right - woah, that is akin to the mass murder of millions of people by a totalitarian dictator

On Burns Night 2026, the words of our revolutionary-loving Scots bard are more potent than ever. Here are some of Robert Burn’s works on themes of revolution, solidarity, and universal equality: www.bbc.co.uk/arts/robertb...

Newly Digitized Records Reveal How Indigenous People Shared Their Knowledge of New Zealand's Plants With Captain Cook's Crew Long-overlooked documents housed at London's Natural History Museum testify to the exchange of information between 18th-century European botanists and their Indigenous counterparts

Fun read
#TheOutpost 🌱🌿👨‍🌾☠️🦜
Newly Digitized Records Reveal How Indigenous People Shared Their Knowledge of New Zealand's Plants With Captain Cook's Crew www.smithsonianmag.com/history/newl...

There is still time to apply for our panel, co-sponsored with @easainfo.bsky.social Labour Network: P159 "The Work of Resistance: Possibilities for Labour in Polarising Worlds" #EASA2026 in Poznań in July
nomadit.co.uk/conference/e...
CFP closes on Monday (26 January)! @saw-anthroofwork.bsky.social

When you do get in, it looks like something out of 1980s…

A third of a billion spent on ruining people’s lives doesn’t seem a wise use of education spending

How is this 'responsible financial management'? Explain it to us like we're 5. Because that's how staff gets talked at when we point out that cutting your core resource has never led to magic growth anyway.

Change this financial system. Yesterday.

Jesus, hadn't realised it had gotten to over 13,000 jobs (academic and professional services) - any other industry facing this level of job losses would be having crisis meetings with government... (gov took emergency control of British Steel to save 2,700...)

Many university presses - Incl Oxford Cambridge and Liverpool - have not-for-profit status AND run multiple well regarded journals. Consciously prioritising NFP publishers is a small thing, but wholly achievable.

Are you working on the anthropology of labour and work? Then this may be the panel at EASA2026 for you! Submit your abstracts until January 26 2026.

Tag us in your announcements so that we may repost them.

We look forward to seeing you in Poznań
#conference #easaanthro #anthropology #EASA2026

@anthropologyofwork.bsky.social
Editorial Collective invites contributions to P 159 “The work of resistance: possibilities of labour in polarizing worlds” at #EASA2026

CfP closes on 26 Jan 26

See you in Poznan!
#anthropology

@saw-anthroofwork.bsky.social

Work with us We are happy to announce that we are now advertising three (3) paid positions at the Tomb of the Eagles for 2026. The positions are a Heritage Manager who will oversee day-to-day running of the site…

Want a heritage job? In beautiful usually-there’s-not-this-much-snow #Orkney?

As part of our community project to reopen the Neolithic Tomb of the Eagles to visitors, we now have three paid positions advertised for 2026.

For more info follow the link. Applications close 5pm, 18 January.

🏺