brought to you by the same subset of the population who think it’s gay to wash your ass

“loss leaves a bureaucratic trail” - love that

Around 10,000 university workers being made redundant this year. Labour policies are definitely cutting through in higher education …

I entered and didn’t win well over a decade ago, but the feedback was so useful that I worked on the article and published in tcbh a couple of years after! Great prize/process

grinding up the grain into flour and baking a tasty history cake

Sure, but they’d straight away ask “and why aren’t you as bold as Mamdani”, I reckon? And they’d squirm through that!

Maybe “weakly social democratic compared to the vision outlined less than a decade ago” would be fairer! What you list are SD policies, but they don’t add up to a SD vision when they’re so cautious/ underwhelming. But I accept this is opinion & you’re the expert in the area! 😅

I guess the (predictable and fair) follow up question to a Labour rep would be, “so why don’t you have a similar vision for Britain?” and they want to avoid trying to answer that

Like, I think when it comes to Labour’s shyness over doing some things - like celebrating UKHE - it’s because they are looking over their shoulder at Reform, but in this case I genuinely don’t think the current cabinet sees Mamdani as in their stable at all.

Labour is currently not really socially democratic - and in fact has basically purged left wing members - so it would be more odd (in my opinion) if they pretended to like what Mamdani is selling

The irony being that a Reform government would (IMO) be what tips those undecided voters over to Irish unity

Very cool to be published in @jhistsex.bsky.social! They were a dream to work with - great editing and copy-editing that improved the article for sure.

If you cannot access MUSE, a pre-copyedited/pre-proofed version is open-access available on the Queen's University Belfast repository: pure.qub.ac.uk/en/publicati...

We use these life stories to make an argument about the surprising vibrancy & possibilities of queer life in Northern Ireland long before the gay rights movement - a social world that was not shut off from wider currents but an important location of them.

There are some pretty remarkable findings, from the popularity of Harlem Renaissance novels in the Northern Irish city to the first reconstruction of the life of perhaps the most famous 'confirmed bachelor' of the twentieth century.

Our sources include colourful memoirs, private letters, and coded personal adverts.

Especially exciting: this article marks our first published use of the David Strain diaries - a remarkable and forgotten diarist who recorded in exceptional depth the workings of Belfast's queer scene in the 1930s.

We use life-story vignettes to uncover the historical importance of transnational connections for queer self-making in Northern Ireland.