#ClimateDiary If anyone here is near #Eastbourne in the next few weeks: do come and see the Emma Stibbon “melting ice rising tide” exhibition at the Towner Gallery, which rather brilliantly connects her polar art with new work on the changing Sussex coast line.
#ClimateDiary#Eastbourne After the exhibition we went to seafront itself; tried to take pictures of beautiful cliff gardens - see last year’s! On #WildFlowerHour! - but will need to come back in morning with better light. Still, beautiful as always but yes, crumbling… #TheCrumble
Thinking about impermanence, all the more at the moment because if i lose my job we might have to move. I have moved so much in my life and used to not mind, but I really love Eastbourne and really don’t want to move; I wonder whether that’s also because of an overall sense of uncertainty and insecurity. Or maybe i am just getting older and all change seems bad..
Not sure I can bring myself to watch this, with major redundancies at my university and others, and whole departments being closed down, because there are not enough students. The whole sector is breaking apart. I hope the series will consider this too.
Yes, your son should go, and even better if he chooses a subject like #Anthropology which is shrinking just as the world needs it more than ever #university#UK#TheCrumble
#Budget#UKPolitics This article by Gary Stevenson is so good, please read every word of it.
“Whatever Jeremy Hunt says, traders know the rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer. And they’re paid millions to bet on it.”
This is what the world is - it is run by a minute elite for a minute elite and the rest of us, the masses, the natural world, we just don’t count. It is a #TragedyOftheNonCommons (will reshare my own piece on this below 1/n)
#FollowTheMoney 🧵12/n Of course, things were never rosy for everyone. Nevertheless, key shared assumptions about the #commongood informed post war public spending and that is all eroding now.
“Continuing austerity does not just kill people’s services; it has long since warped most political debates about what we should expect from the state. In lots of places, squalor, mess and festering social problems are now seen as the norm. “ #TheCrumble
#FollowTheMoney 🧵 13/n and i have to mention UK universities too, since I am directly affected myself (see #AcademicVenting).
40% of UK universities are in debt, with major reduncancies right now (incl at Goldsmiths). All in arts, humanities and social sciences. All of this is crumbling, with too little money flowing into it. Another industry, another #CommonGood
being eroded. Check out this constantly updated tally. #TheCrumble
#ClimateDiary Today a colleague texted: brace yourselves! Redundancies email at 12pm! In fact it still hasn’t come (though it will). But i was irrationally angry with my colleague for rather ruining my day, making it harder to give lecture etc. I just really don’t want to know until it happens. Totally head in the sand about this. Made me relate much more to people not wanting to hear about #ClimateCrisis - they too just want a bit more blissful denial, because the news are too bad. 1/2
2/2. Well, we have now had the email. 130 FT redundancies. That will be more when PT are included. We are 644 so potentially a quarter of us.
By now those reflections ⬆️ on knowing in advance feel irrelevant; it all just feels, and is awful. But there is still a connection to the #ClimateCrisis ; it is all interlinked. Capitalism destroys life.
1/3 Daughter sent me this photo today - a massive lake in Gildredge Park in #Eastbourne where there is normally just grass. I remembered that about a year ago the same happened and I did my very first #ClimateDiary post (before official launch). And then felt bad as I had been planning to write a #ClimateDiary blog to mark our one year anniversary, but assumed I had missed it by now; another one of my many unfinished, undone projects. BUT, i just checked:
3/3 #ClimateDiary And, I think, we have indeed managed to create something of a collective record here of what we are living through - maybe #TheCrumble, a term @TomSwirly introduced me to last week.
So here’s to our second year - let’s keep on sharing and working on increasing #ClimateDiary’s global reach! And one day I may indeed “do something” with it; I keep on meaning to, @esmichelson, just so much other work .. one day!
Half thinking of starting an #AcademicVenting hashtag here, about the dire, dire state of UK (global?) higher education. Sharing nuggets of senior management decisions, neoliberal language, and overall slow collapse.
Won’t work of course because most of us can’t risk honesty, but honestly: the everyday reality of what is happening deserves recording in all its depressing and damning detail. #Universities#AcademicChatter#neoliberalism
Yesterday we were informed we will have 130 FT redundancies. More with part time staff included. We are 644 so potentially a quarter of us. From 11 departments, including #anthropology.
We don’t know yet who. I don’t know how these decisions are made (it’s related to which programmes or modules will be closed). I feel completely sick the whole time. Far beyond venting, just existential fear.