Recommended Readings
- How crisis in Lebanon is fuelling drug dependency by Sebastian Shehadi
- Exodus by Zahra Hankir
- ‘Does Macron understand how much influence France has lost in Africa?’ by Achille Mbembe
- “We Do This ’Til We Free Us”: Mariame Kaba on Abolishing Police, Prisons & Moving Toward Justice
- The camps in Xinjiang are a global problem by A. Liu
- ‘Worse than a jungle’: the cartel controlling Iraqi borders by Maya Gebeily
- Dust storms, green waves by XqSu
- Israel’s Vanishing Files, Archival Deception and Paper Trails by Shay Hazkani
- From Beirut to Damascus, the sham and hypocrisy of the ‘mumanaa’ is imposed by Soulayma Mardam Bey
- ‘Babylon Berlin,’ Babylon America? by Ross Douthat
- ‘She just started blooming’: the trans kids helped by a pioneering project by Katelyn Burns
- Green Climate Fund whistleblowers urge US to take its money elsewhere – until ‘toxic’ workplace is fixed
- ‘We need to formulate a left-wing idea of happiness’ by Editors of oDR, Mohira Suyarkulova, Georgy Mamedov and Nina Bagdasarova
- India Targets Climate Activists With the Help of Big Tech by Naomi Klein
- Migrant Massage Workers Don’t Need to Be Rescued by Rosemarie Ho
- Who Were the Kronstadt Rebels? A Russian Anarchist Perspective on the Uprising
- We’re Hurtling Toward Global Suicide by Ben Ehrenreich
- A Spectre in France’s Public Debate: Islamo-Leftism by Rim-Sarah Alouane
- I watched Syrians on Clubhouse grapple with their failed revolution by Kareem Shaheen
- An hour of patience: Reimagining the Syrian revolution by Noor Ghazal Aswad
- ‘As if she had never existed’: The graveyards for murdered women by Julie Bindel
- Human-Made Stuff Now Outweighs All Life on Earth by Stephanie Pappas
- The Balkan Roots of the Far Right’s “Great Replacement” Theory by Jasmin Mujanović
Hummus For Thought 
I shared a panel with an academic once and she went on a self-help style monologue about courage and creativity in academic research. I did my best to explain that a student’s anticipation of how she evaluates their academic work is an entirely different experience when the outcome will define their immigration status, and possibly that of their direct families.
It’s hard to “add to the body of literature” freely and creatively when the off chance of not doing it to your supervisor’s liking could mean denial of access to the only safe land you can be in (since failing to “win” the right to remain in the U.K. for someone who comes from a conflict country could automatically deny them access to all of Europe, thanks to Dublin Regulation… so they could be stuck in an immigration limbo for decades) she entertained the idea for a minute but rapidly went back to telling me about the need to think out of the box and be courageous. These are the brains that are enriching the body of literature, whatever the hell that means!
This is why I’ve stopped bothering to go on these self-help-oriented panels that my university keeps on inviting me to. I’ve been to half a dozen of them over the years and it’s always the same thing. I’ve even tried to send emails whenever they’d add stuff ‘if you still need help please send us an email’ but these would never actually end up anywhere.
It was really baffling to learn from my first or second meeting with my supervisor at the University of Edinburgh that not attending meetings could lead to them reporting me to the home office. It was one hell of a welcome week.
And I’m honestly among the luckier ones, despite everything. I have an Argentinian passport which I used as my backup, not that it gave me any right to actually sustain myself in the UK in any sustainable way.
UK higher ed especially is a scam. There’s no other way of describing it. You have to pay to work for them and then have to do extra work to pay for the costs of working for them. If there was some justice the UK government would be owing students millions of pounds.
the links at the bottom describing the next page aren’t clickable for me and the numbers don’t highlight after they’ve been clicked so i found navigating the multi-page format hard on a phone, just fyi!
Hey! Thanks for letting me know. I’ve made the ‘next page’ at the bottom clickable now so hopefully this should be better.