Will be thinking about her all day

I understand that no one’s required to enjoy every kind of care to nevertheless offer it, but it still seems like empathic occlusion to me.

Nothing to ask other than if there is anything I/we can do to support! :)

Hey Pi!! I’ll ask the organisers, but I can also send you the script too :)

You do not need Indigenous, Immigrant, Queer or Other-than-human persons to live in physical proximity to you to call them “neighbour”, for they are *you* in the eyes of those who subjugate and steamroll literally anyone for capital and control.

Things change, and we must adapt to those changes. At an institution known for its direct intellectual & monetary investment in international relations, what better time to renegotiate the very concept of leadership so that it denounces war crimes and the flouting of international humanitarian law?

You do not share in this era if you think the Rector should perform as Baronet Anstruther or Andrew Carnegie. You're not in this decade if ignoring the precedent for an activistic Rector since Popovic. You're not in 2025 if claiming that only a few should use their power to decry top-down violence.

Today, there is no single, static way to be a Rector, reflecting a fact of history, and of existence: Concepts and their subsequent material realities change to meet the needs of their cultural and temporal context.

An academic “Rector” as a position is first and foremost a concept. The etymological home to which this concept returns remains the same (“to lead”), and yet the architecture & trappings of that home have changed drastically over the 400+ years of its existence within universities across the globe.

Rather, I have been most unsettled by the misconception "what is must always have been", for this rationale belies truly uncritical ontologies and dangerous assumptions about concepts themselves.

Luckily, we have three powerful skills already at our disposal!
1. Offering aid, love, affirmation, safety to queer/trans kin
2. Engaging directly with queerphobia about where folks have been self-abnegating and how queerness liberates.
3. Causing a ruckus (*cough, cough*)

But it also further legitimises anti-queer (and anti-autonomy) discourse on the global stage whilst peddling a lifeless "science" indifferent to the deeply complex bio-social realities of our miraculous planet.

This ruling carries obvious domestic costs (e.g., scapegoating trans people and the stoking of tensions with the NHS and other public services, further accommodating the neolib private).