Felicity Callard
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felicitycallard.bsky.social
Felicity Callard
@felicitycallard.bsky.social
2.2K followers 1.3K following 630 posts
Researching daydreams and fantasies. I am employed as a human geographer and also work in the medical humanities

Editor, History of the Human Sciences @histhum.bsky.social
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felicitycallard.bsky.social
Ok I’ll stop but the light here is extraordinary and beautiful (3.24pm yesterday afternoon)
Photo of sunset over lake in city of Karlstad—puffy and stretched out clouds reflected in the water, blue sky and the sun about to set behind a line of conifers in the background
November 8, 2025 at 6:19 AM
felicitycallard.bsky.social
Unexpected artwork as you enter the university
Patrick Swayze in Dirty Dancing Art work, 'Nobody puts Baby in a corner' mounted at the entrance to the university (Karlstad University, Sweden)
November 7, 2025 at 1:33 PM
felicitycallard.bsky.social
The pales winter light outside our workshop window is beautiful
Weak low sun above conifers and university buildings — taken at Karlstad University in Sweden
November 7, 2025 at 9:27 AM
felicitycallard.bsky.social
The sky is darker than dark outside this replacement bus
Map of Värmland in Sweden. Location of phone at point of the screenshot is incredibly rural
November 5, 2025 at 6:50 PM
felicitycallard.bsky.social
Loved the Wayne Thiebaud at the Courtauld. Can’t get my head around the fact that is the very first museum show of his work in the UK
A Wayne Thiebaud of a delicatessen counter: sausages hanging on the left and cheeses and meats in the front with Thiebaud obsessed with their form (eg the blockiness of stacked cheeses). There are strips of paint across the middle of the painting signalling the structure of the counter.
November 1, 2025 at 2:18 PM
felicitycallard.bsky.social
When and where does the imperial core’s genocidal violence disrupt academic scholarship in the Anglo-American academy? Where and how does Gaza appear (and, equally, where does it not)?

This comes from the start of an essay on Theweleit’s Male Fantasies read.dukeupress.edu/history-of-t...
But often I find the consulting room curiously evacuated of the libido, even or especially with male patients. With notable exceptions, many of my patients do not talk about sex, real or imagined. We know that people are having less sex (Herbenick et al. 1419).' But they are not making love discursively either. Sometimes, listening to my patients' anhedonic language, a strange and mortal sleepiness begins to fall over me. This stupor began to trouble me in a new way after Israel's genocidal invasion of Gaza last year. About this campaign of terror my white, male patients were markedly silent. How could I blame them? I found myself tongue-tied on the subject in my own analysis, in which I imagined, however unfairly and transferentially, that my convictions would be unwelcome. I began to wonder if these two silences-around individual desire on the one hand and mass violence on the other-were in some way twinned. Had our loss of a language for sex made room for violence, and vice versa? In the clinic or in the world, what would it take to speak into these silences and bridge them?
October 31, 2025 at 8:15 AM
felicitycallard.bsky.social
Took me several years to take this down from my bookshelf to read; I had read several shattering reviews over the years. I finished it this evening and need now to sit in silence
Cover of “The Door” by Magda Szabó
October 28, 2025 at 6:44 PM
felicitycallard.bsky.social
The real cancel culture in British universities on.ft.com/430FLZs
FT figure showing “UK universities have undertaken widespread cost-cutting measures” using data from a survey of Universities UK members Dot plot of responses to a survey of Universities UK members showing institutions have undertaken widespread cost-cutting measures including course and department closures. Taken from https://on.ft.com/430FLZs
October 27, 2025 at 7:45 AM
felicitycallard.bsky.social
We have reached reading week. Here is beautiful Loch Lomond in the autumn sun on the last day before the hour changes
Looking towards the loch from the shore: blue sky, lots of colours in the hills behind, water lapping at the shore, trees with very few leaves left in the foreground
October 25, 2025 at 5:17 PM
felicitycallard.bsky.social
History of the Human Sciences announces its 2025-26 ECR Prize. All details (including previous winners) on our para-site histhum.com. Deadline: 30 January 2026.

Also! Follow the journal on Bluesky at @histhum.bsky.social www.histhum.com/early-career...
Screenshot of post of the ECR Prize 2025-26: available here https://www.histhum.com/early-career-prize-2025-26-history-of-the-human-sciences/
October 20, 2025 at 5:11 PM
felicitycallard.bsky.social
At last. This has been sitting, inchoately, inside/alongside me for years, I think. On the look out for people's pet posts that I might like for the rest of the day
Screenshot showing that a paper has been submitted to a journal: 'Submission confirmation. Thank you for your submission.'
October 19, 2025 at 10:29 AM
felicitycallard.bsky.social
What might the category of brain fog (cf. trauma) open up and what might it foreclose?

Thanks @dialogueshg.bsky.social for the opportunity to respond to @davidjbissell.bsky.social's article on brain fog/'being out of it' journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
What does the term ‘brain fog’ enable and what might it foreclose? In response to David Bissell's account of being ‘out of it’ through his analysis of the phenomenon and experience of brain fog, I consider how it opens questions of how body and mind might bear the ‘insults’ inflicted by both external and internal worlds. I speculate that accounts of brain fog might signal the supplanting of the logics of trauma (together with the compacted histories of psychoanalysis and psychiatry that trauma carries with it) and the installation of other ways of understanding embodiment, affect, and the wounds caused both by the external world and by illness/bodily change. In considering the ramifications of this potential shift, and through a reading of Palestinian poet Husam Maarouf's essay, ‘Hunger that defeats language’, I argue for not losing sight of the psyche in understanding inflictions that result in bodily – and psychic – dispossession.
October 17, 2025 at 4:52 PM
felicitycallard.bsky.social
So Cardiff University's defence of its surveillance of students via social media posts is to state that everyone else is doing it too
www.theguardian.com/education/20...
A Cardiff University spokesperson said: “We reject the suggestion that we’ve put students ‘under surveillance’. The protest was posted on a public-facing social media account. This was picked up as part of our day-to-day media monitoring. “We routinely monitor mentions of Cardiff University, including those made on social media platforms, to measure engagement with our communications activity and in relation to reputation management. This type of activity is not unique to Cardiff University and is used by other universities and organisations.”
October 8, 2025 at 3:13 PM
felicitycallard.bsky.social
It was 25yrs ago in year-long seminar designed to bring grad students together across disciplines & Shilpa spoke about this painting and at that point I barely knew Guercino’s name but something started then inside me & has intensified over a quarter of a century

ducatoestense.com/en/beni-stor...
Venus, Mars and Cupid, by Guercino. Description of painting here: https://ducatoestense.com/en/beni-storici-artistici/venus-mars-and-cupid/
September 18, 2025 at 8:04 AM
felicitycallard.bsky.social
The phrase 'normal and constructive life/lives', which the UN Commission uses 3 times, is a quotation regarding Srebrenica from the Judgement finding Karadžić guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity delivered in March 2016 www.legal-tools.org/doc/173e23/pdf
Paragraph starting 'The Chamber heard testimony' on p. 2363 of https://www.legal-tools.org/doc/173e23/pdf
September 16, 2025 at 7:16 PM
felicitycallard.bsky.social
Sitting with, not skimming over, the words compiled in the UN Commission's report makes you howl, once again, with rage www.ohchr.org/sites/defaul...
The Commission concludes that Palestinians who were physically and mentally harmed by the Israeli security forces’ military operations will continue to suffer from long-term harm of such a serious nature that they will no longer be able to lead a normal and constructive life. For example, in relation to Palestinian children, in June 2024, UNICEF stated that “almost all of Gaza’s 1.2 million children need mental health and psychosocial support”, especially those who were exposed to repeated traumatic events, maimed, have lost parents and close family members, and children with disabilities.177 According to a report published by War Child in November 2024, almost half of 504 surveyed caregivers stated that their children think they (the children) would die during the current war, and other children have expressed their wish to die.178 Many Palestinians from Gaza told the Commission that they live in extreme and constant fear for their safety since 7 October 2023. Some of them said that their children could not think of anything but ways to survive from being attacked daily.
September 16, 2025 at 6:01 PM
felicitycallard.bsky.social
Tell me good essays to read on Morandi and his 3 sisters. Obsessed with the dynamics running across the 4 of them having visited this summer both their apartment in Bologna and the house they had built in Grizzana www.casedellamemoria.it/en/associate...
The front of the Morandi house in Grizzana. 2 stories, 3 windows (one with balcony) on first floor, 2 on ground floor, green shutters
September 16, 2025 at 7:37 AM
felicitycallard.bsky.social
Now wondering how many streets are named after psychoanalysts

(Accidentally took a wrong turn in a (very) small Italian town and thought I had daydreamed seeing the word psychoanalyst on a street sign so went round again to double check and there was the street commemorating Franco Fornari)
Photo of a street sign: “via F Fornari (Psicoanalista 1921-1985)” in front of a rather wild hedge with a house behind
September 12, 2025 at 5:54 PM
felicitycallard.bsky.social
President of the Royal Society, folks. I despair
Speeding up peer review Smith also told the Lords committee that Al could help with other demands on the time of researchers. He said "the peer review system is almost breaking down" because organisations are struggling to get academics to read each other's papers voluntarily. He said there is "considerable potential for Al-driven triaging in peer review" but warned that "we're at a frontier" so the impacts of using Al in scientific publishing were unclear. Smith also encouraged more use of Al in funding proposals. He said that if a "brilliant academic...could feed a few sentences to a chatbot about what they want in their next application" then "they could get on with doing their research". Across the wider research ecosystem, Al could "change the very nature of how you do science", said Smith, with Al replacing humans in generating hypotheses.
September 10, 2025 at 10:17 AM
felicitycallard.bsky.social
I Bolognesi ❤️‍🔥

Palazzo D’Accursio (now the City Hall)
Photo of front facade of Palazzo D’Accurso, Bologna — with banners stating Fermate il governo di Israel (Stop the Government of Israel), and Verità per Giulio Regeni (Truth for Giulio Regeni)
September 9, 2025 at 12:59 PM
felicitycallard.bsky.social
Ok I am getting myself together to face reading the appendix. It has been a very intense August
“stavrogin’s confession”. Appendix to Dostoyevsky’s The Demons, which the editor refused to publish when the book first appeared
August 30, 2025 at 2:47 PM
felicitycallard.bsky.social
You walk almost the furthest you can walk into the huge Uppsala cathedral and then you look up and find — it is not mentioned on the leaflet outside the cathedral, but there is a plaque installed alongside it — the awful, antisemitic Judensau above you publicmedievalist.com/importance-a...
Medieval carving of a Judensau (Jews’ sow) from Uppsala cathedral: “A sow is greedily shoveling food from a trough into her mouth with her front trotters. Under her belly, two crude caricatures of Jewish faces (you can tell they’re supposed to be Jews because of their pointy hats) are sucking at her teats…” https://publicmedievalist.com/importance-absent/
August 23, 2025 at 5:54 AM
felicitycallard.bsky.social
Overwhelming rage is fuelling my rounding up of old as well as current posts that need to be logged in @archivegenocide.bsky.social given Israel's killing of Anas Al-Sharif and his colleagues yesterday. Just logged this one from January.
Hen Mazzig Twitter post from Jan 18, 2025: 'Al Jazeera “journalist” Anas Al Sharif, hard at work in Gaza this morning, recreating an homage to his idol, Hamas terror chief Yahya Sinwar. Save this screenshot for when he trades the camera for a weapon and Al Jazeera pretends he was just a “neutral reporter.”' [below is a photo of Anas Al-Sharif sitting in a chair with the ruins of Gaza behind him; next to it is a photo of Yahya Sinwar sitting in a chair in a room that appears to have been damaged.]
August 11, 2025 at 5:28 PM
felicitycallard.bsky.social
Last night I sobbed as I heard Israel had murdered Anas Al-Sharif & his colleagues from Al Jazeera. We cannot begin to understand their bravery in resisting the genocidal occupation through filming, speech, truth.

“Be bridges toward the liberation of the land & its people” x.com/anasalsharif...
I entrust you with Palestine-the jewel in the crown of the Muslim world, the heartbeat of every free person in this world. I entrust you with its people, with its wronged and innocent children who never had the time to dream or live in safety and peace. Their pure bodies were crushed under thousands of tons of Israeli bombs and missiles, torn apart and scattered across the walls. I urge you not to let chains silence you, nor borders restrain you. Be bridges toward the liberation of the land and its people, until the sun of dignity and freedom rises over our stolen homeland. I entrust you to take care of my family. I entrust you with my beloved daughter Sham, the light of my eyes, whom I never got the chance to watch grow up as I had dreamed.
August 11, 2025 at 5:41 AM
felicitycallard.bsky.social
There's a really important section at the end of @florarenz.bsky.social's article that links – through the tightening of who are construed as 'true' members of minoritised groups – the attacks on trans and gender diverse people to those with mental health conditions and other disabilities
Legislating everyday life Using the examples above, the judgment is evidently problematic in its immediate legal context. However, it’s also hard not to read this judgment in a wider con- text where political discourse seems to be shifting to- wards at best seeing only ‘true’ minorities as deserving of rights and protections. The FWS case was about the issue of identifying ‘true’ biological women who can be subject to limited positive discrimination measures, but in the process also seeks to define ‘true’ trans people, i.e. those who pass and therefore may have some slightly better protections, and ‘true’ lesbians and gay men, i.e. those who experience sexual attraction only to people assigned the same sex as them at birth. This turn to a supposedly stable, permanent biological truth to determ- ine group membership for at least three of the protected characteristics in the EA 2010 could have potentially far- reaching consequences for the remaining protected char- acteristics in the longer term. For instance, Wes Streeting, in his role as Health Sec- retary, recently stated that he believed that mental health conditions are ‘over-diagnosed’ and this was leading to too many people claiming disability-related benefits.26 Other parliamentarians have similarly stated that men- tal health conditions and some other related disabilit- ies are either not real or at a minimum over-diagnosed. Consequently, the proposed changes to welfare legisla- tion would make it disproportionately harder for those with mental health conditions and less ‘severe’ impair- ments to claim disability benefits. Overall, the supposed consensus seems to be that protections and rights for minority groups have in some way gone too far and that we should at a minimum limit these to only a few ‘true’ cases.
August 8, 2025 at 8:58 AM