@katespowage
Critical interdisciplinary sociolinguist working on the politics of language, capitalism, and colonialism. Shamelessly plugging Language as Statecraft, which thinks about all those things. Lecturer at the University of Leeds. Own views, reposts ≠ agreement
Individually one cannot, but it is striking (in a way that really advocates the old Marxist in me) that socially we can only really see a technology that saves a bunch of labour without generating replacement level jobs as a disaster. This is because we are *so* sure the profit will be privatised.
Very interesting analysis - at least partially the result of obsessive austerity policymaking since 2008, and the straightjacket provided by the political economic discourse on debt and investment.
I don’t think most people realize just how little the United States has traditionally spent on public media.
A court has ruled that the government's authoritarian ban on Palestine Action was unlawful.
Time to stop criminalising the people protesting a genocide - and start ending the UK's complicity.
The first article in our collection 'Gaming & the Humanities: Interdisciplinary Essays on the Last of Us' is out! Bob Yeates deftly critiques the biopolitics of race in #TLOU. It will be followed by work on objects, muscles, infrastructure, linguistic landscapes, and more! 🧟♀️ Congrats Bob👏🏼
Very happy to say my article on The Last of Us and race has been published by @openlibhums.org, part of their special collection on Gaming and Humanities edited by @katespowage.bsky.social and Adrienne Mortimer: doi.org/10.16995/olh...
Congratulations Bob! It's a great piece 👏🏼
Dear Labour:
Not all women are transphobic. I'm not sure why your party has such difficulty with this very basic concept.
AOC: I want to remind you where the real crime is. It's in the oligarchs taking $170 billion of our money from health care and food assistance and public programs and taking that and funneling it into a secret police program.
Starbucks’ CEO makes 6,666x what the average @sbworkersunited.org barista does.
It’s unconscionable.
As baristas at corporate stores fight for a fair contract and against Starbucks’ union-busting and greed, they have the solidarity of all 15 million members of America’s unions.
Write like no one will read it.
Edit like everyone will quote it.
You'll be unstoppable! 🚀
#WritingCommunity #AmWriting #AmEditing #BookSky #WriteSky
I have also to say, again, shame on the UK Supreme Court. Whatever led us here, it is absolutely not its apolitical application of the law.
Am increasingly with the very senior UK barrister who is telling her colleagues: "at least with the US Supreme Court you know what their politics are."
Once every 20 years or so, the director-general of the BBC is forced to resign for being insufficiently rightwing. Alastair Milne in 1987. Greg Dyke in 2004. Tim Davie in 2025. The great irony is that the BBC was in all cases profoundly biased towards established power. But just not biased enough …
11. Regaining the freedom we’ve lost is much harder and less likely than defending the freedom we already possess. We must do all we can to stop governments with autocratic tendencies from winning elections and reasserting the old order. Lose it once, and it might be gone forever.
A family friend was telling us about what her husband shared about his experience in Broadview before he was deported back to Mexico. She's been sharing to friends and family because she's just in disbelief & horror what her husband told her. She wasn't able to talk to him until he was in Mexico.
"An organized urban wing of the [Underground] railroad called vigilance committees focused on protecting, supporting, and learning from fugitives."
Jesse Olsavsky for @hammerandhope.bsky.social's latest, just released issue
hammerandhope.org/article/unde...
The university is not a skills machine and neither should politicians think of themselves of oiling the gears of economic performance. Politics is not just about adapting populations to fit labour market demands.
Polanski is talking nonsense about wealth taxes.
The Spectator (owned by GBNews owner Paul Marshall - estimated wealth of £800 million) doesn’t like taxing wealth fairly.
I wonder how they got to this editorial decision?
Let’s tax wealth fairly, fund front line services & make hope normal again.
join.greenparty.org.uk
To be effective, protest must be noisy, obstructive, annoying. No longer is this allowed. Now the last attribute of effective dissent – persistence – is also to be banned. But the moment protest ceases to be effective is the moment democracy dies. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
But too many of the slaves died in captivity. And so Columbus, desperate to pay back dividends to those who had in-vested, had to make good his promise to fill the ships with gold. In the province of Cicao on Haiti, where he and his men imagined huge gold fields to exist, they ordered all persons fourteen years or older to collect a certain quantity of gold every three months. When they brought it, they were given copper tokens to hang around their necks. Indians found without a copper token had their hands cut off and bled to death. The Indians had been given an impossible task. The only gold around was bits of dust garnered from the streams. So they fled, were hunted down with dogs, and were killed.
After each six or eight months' work in the mines, which was the time required of each crew to dig enough gold for melting, up to a third of the men died. While the men were sent many miles away to the mines, the wives remained to work the soil, forced into the excruciating job of digging and making thousands of hills for cassava plants. Thus husbands and wives were together only once every eight or ten months and when they met they were so exhausted and depressed on both sides... they ceased to pro-create. As for the newly born, they died early because their mothers, overworked and fam-ished, had no milk to nurse them, and for this reason, while I was in Cuba, 7000 children died in three months. Some mothers even drowned their babies from sheer desper-ation.... In this way, husbands died in the mines, wives died at work, and children died from lack of milk ... and in a short time this land which was so great, so powerful and fer-tile... was depopulated... My eyes have seen these acts so foreign to human nature, and now I tremble as I write....
Please remember that the disgust people have over Christopher Columbus is not based on some modern, 21st century “woke” ideology, but rather on contemporaneous accounts of atrocities that make many modern genocides appear quaint in comparison.
Below, are the accounts of Bartlomé de las Casas.
Astonishing advance by the Greens, astonishing implosion of Labour. When will Starmer's government get the message that it is destroying its base with deeply unpopular, rightwing policies?
By chasing Reform, it legitimises the far right while delegitimising itself.
100%! And the hype can't be separated from the insane speculation on it (if I had zeroes riding on the success of AI I might tell people it was the future, regardless of its shortcomings).
Post from Threads user rodneyowl: "Ireland has declared the Basic Income for Artists scheme permanent. This will be officially announced in tomorrow’s budget. Details to follow. Congratulations to all who fought for it and the present and future artists of all sorts in Ireland. That includes me 👌We’re just comin to the end of a 3 year pilot scheme. It’s been a roaring success. For every €1 paid out to the 2000 participants, the government got €1.46 back. Can’t argue with that. Other countries are already taking note."
Damn. This is amazing. £325 per week, paid monthly, for 3 years - and the result was a profit for the Irish economy:
www.citizensinformation.ie/en/employmen...
We are alarmed by reports that Germany is on the verge of a catastrophic about-face, reversing its longstanding and principled opposition to the EU’s Chat Control proposal which, if passed, could spell the end of the right to privacy in Europe. signal.org/blog/pdfs/ge...
The Economist claims wealth taxes don't work mainly because the rich end up fleeing. I invite the magazine to read rigorous academic research like Cristobal Young's book or Sam Friedman et al.'s work on this issue instead of spilling out ideological nonsense share.google/pV3cOUrhnDMd...
The explosiveness of the attack, also, is noteworthy. There's no warning given here - it's drawn less from the repertoire of professional policing and more from the fear-inducing tactics of unstable, abusive people in interpersonal relationships. 'Snapping' is all about keeping people on edge.
1. I've long contended that austerity doesn't save money. It merely transfers costs from one group (the very rich, who would otherwise pay more tax) to others. Last night was a powerful reminder of that. Before I go further, I should say I’m fine. Just a black eye, cuts & bruises, no serious harm. 🧵
Matthew McConaughey says he wants a private LLM, fed only with his books, notes, journals, and aspirations, so he can ask it questions and get answers based solely on that information, without any outside influence.
this exists it is called thinking
Naming it for Mitterrand serves a national story that is, at best, fuzzy on the details of colonial and postcolonial politics. But the library is full of decolonial and other counterhegemonic material. There's something about the limits of a toponymic critique there - important though it is.
Also, amid some great leftist art on display, the library is named for Président Mitterrand, who allegedly intervened on the side of the Akazu in Rwanda in 1994, probably for geostrategic reasons but supposedly to protect Francophonie in East Africa (bit.ly/BFS76). Strange, multivalent space...
