swastee

Lecturer in/of Law ; Works on Critical Environmental Law &Aesthetics

[swastee @s_ranjan]

Call for Papers for #CLC2025 is now live!!!

https://t.co/DClZLxBcxI

[Ben 🇬🇧 @BenInRushcliffe]

All this in two years. @Keir_Starmer.

Feel free to share.

[Jack Dart @JackWDart]

If people genuinely believe Burnham won’t receive the exact same media onslaught, they’ve not been paying attention.

Starmer is not, objectively, bad. This idea that he is somehow the worst PM in British history is frankly laughable.

Liz truss lasted 49 days, crashed the pound and was laughed out of Downing Street.

Since Labour took office, Keir Starmer’s government has:

• Scrapped the two-child benefit limit, lifting hundreds of thousands of children out of poverty and putting money back into some of the hardest-pressed households in the country.

• Expanded free school meals, cutting costs for families and making sure more children get a proper meal during the school day.

• Expanded funded childcare, reducing one of the biggest monthly costs facing working parents and making it easier for people to stay in work.

• Raised the National Living Wage, increasing pay for millions of low-paid workers.

• Strengthened workers’ rights, giving people greater protection against insecure work and bad employers.

• Introduced statutory sick pay from the first day of illness, so workers are less likely to choose between their health and their wages.

• Ended no-fault evictions, giving renters more security in their homes.

• Brought rail operators back into public ownership, taking key services out of failed private hands and giving the public a stronger stake in how they are run.

• Cut NHS waiting lists from their post-pandemic peak, meaning more patients are being seen sooner.

• Raised the state pension through the triple lock, protecting pensioners’ incomes against rising costs.

• Scrapped the old non-dom tax regime, making some of the wealthiest people in the country pay more fairly.

• Added VAT to private school fees, raising money from those most able to contribute.

• Removed business rates relief from private schools, ending an unjustified tax break.

• Increased neighbourhood policing, putting more officers and PCSOs back into communities.

• Helped bring knife crime down, meaning fewer families face the devastation of serious violence.

• Recorded the lowest homicide rate since the 1970s, a material improvement in public safety.

• Created Great British Energy, giving Britain a publicly owned clean energy company.

• Created the National Wealth Fund, backing investment in industry, infrastructure and clean energy.

• Passed planning reforms aimed at getting homes and major projects built faster.

• Improved relations with the EU, reducing diplomatic hostility and rebuilding practical cooperation.

• Agreed a UK-EU security partnership, strengthening cooperation on defence and European security.

• Signed a long-term partnership with Ukraine, reinforcing Britain’s support against Putin’s invasion.

• Secured new trade agreements, opening up markets for British businesses.

• Helped restore seriousness to government after years of scandal, chaos and decline.

People do not have to like Starmer. They do not have to vote Labour. But pretending this is the record of the worst Prime Minister in British history is absurd.

[Politics UK @PolitlcsUK]

🚨 NEW: Keir Starmer has condemned people online “encouraging” the violence in Northern Ireland yesterday

“I will not tolerate it. Those responsible will feel the full force of the law”

[𐌁𐌉Ᏽ 𐌕𐌉𐌌𐌉 @OrevaZSN]

Opened Google Scholar today and was immediately hit with “AI can now summarize academic articles.” Bro, it’s called an abstract and it already exists.

[BBC Breaking News @BBCBreaking]

University of Sussex, in the UK, wins legal challenge after record £585,000 fine over freedom of speech https://t.co/ue2LLA3qw0

[(LASSnet) Law and Social Sciences Research Network @LassnetN]

LASSnet mourns the passing of Professor Marc Galanter on April 14th. Remarkably approachable and affable, he was endlessly generous and supportive to younger scholars—many of us cherished sharing lawyer's jokes with him.
He was so excited when LASSnet was founded.1/2

[Asian Journal of Law and Society @AsianJofLS]

We mourn the passing of Marc Galanter on April 14, a pioneering scholar whose work helped reshape the study of Law and Society. Galanter drew on his sustained engagement with India to question taken-for-granted Euro-American understandings of law.

https://t.co/8Odr2VsfSV

[Nick Robinson @NLR100]

Been mourning the loss of legal scholar Marc Galanter this week. He was a giant in a number of fields and a generous and kind man. I had the privilege of working with him on an article on India's Grand Advocates when he was already over 80, but as intellectually lively as ever.

[Louise Tillin @louisetillin]

We are hiring @KingsIndiaInst for an exciting new post: Lecturer in Politics and Technology - https://t.co/zkysLOlvZG

Closing date: April 20th. Come join a group of dynamic staff and students at King's India Institute.

@KingsJobs @Kings_SGA

[Aditya Sondhi @sondhi_aditya]

https://t.co/GQD1SEqHQD

This year’s LLM Scholarship is now live for applications. (I have no say in the selection.)

[swastee @s_ranjan]

@caribphil Wow.

[Colin McFarlane @ColinMcFarlane3]

New piece in @ProgHumGeog, 'Crisis-thinking and critical urbanism'. What might crisis-thinking be doing to how the urban is conceived, researched, and politicised? How might it impact how we see urban possibility?

Open access here:
https://t.co/XaBrPmW1Hz

[maanbarua.bsky.soc @maanbarua]

New article: #metabolic ethnography

Social science methods need to become commensurate with the chemicalization of life, going beyond settled comfort with objects, multispecies relations and proximate causality.

Open access:
https://t.co/VAaitZW2pt

[dwai banerjee @dwai_banerjee]

My new book is out from @PrincetonUPress.

"Computing in the Age of Decolonization" tells the story of India's attempt to build sovereign computing capacity — from the 1950s through the 1980s — and why it failed.

It's a story about what decolonization could have meant for technology, and about how Cold War geopolitics and multinational corporate power foreclosed those possibilities.

[Antipode @antipodeonline]

New #OpenAccess article by @v_e_thompson -- "Policing as Un-Breathing and Geographies of Black Breathing in Europe" https://t.co/3g9PEDwROq

[Illan rua Wall @ruawall]

Following the death of the much beloved Emilios Christodoulidis, we want to go back to the beautiful series that Scott Vetch and others put together in response to his magnum opus, the Redress of Law.

[Illan rua Wall @ruawall]

Very excited for the next Critical Legal Conference, this year being hosted by Westminster Uni. We have this teaser of the theme: https://t.co/W9KE0I5r9p

[Yanis Varoufakis @yanisvaroufakis]

Hello, this is Yanis Varoufakis with a piece of news that would have been hilarious if it weren’t so scary. This morning, two policemen appeared on my doorstep to serve a summons ordering me to the police headquarters to be interrogated by the Greek DEA, our drug busting police department. Not as a witness, expert or not, but as the accused. Accused of what?

Shortly after New Year’s, I appeared on a podcast organised by young people to answer their questions on everything that concerns Gen Z today: social media, the meaning of life, their job prospects, what I call technofeudalism etc. At some point, they asked me if I had ever used drugs. Determined not to do a Bill Clinton (remember the laughable “I didn’t inhale”?), I said I had. Apart from pot, I told them, I had one experience of taking ecstasy in Sydney 36 years ago. It was pleasant, I danced for 16 hours effortlessly but then, I added, it gave me a migraine for a week – and so I never used again. That was my introduction to making the point that, however pleasant drug taking may seem, there is a price to pay. And that the ultimate price is dependence, addiction – “the end of liberty”, I said emphatically.

Do you see where this is going? Yes, the Greek police have opened an investigation of me under the charge of... aiding and abetting the narco-mafia. [Do me a favour folks: Please don’t tell Trump, OK?]

Seriously now, at a time of war, genocide, stupendous exploitation and so on, my little trouble with the inane Greek police is neither here nor there. But it is important. Here, in Europe, many people still live under the illusion that we have liberty, rationality and freedom. We don’t. Dark forces are at work, pushing us into a postmodern version of the Dark Ages.

So, beware, people! They are out to take away the last remnants of autonomy and freedom we have left. Resistance is, literally, existence.

[Sukhvinder Shahi @sshahi_7]

Please consider contributing to our special issue of British Journal of Aesthetics @BJAtweets on the topic of 'Transnational Feminist Aesthetics'.
Philosophical contributions and inquiries welcome at [email protected].
CFP details: https://t.co/Ft20yFJyWv

[dwai banerjee @dwai_banerjee]

My new book "Computing in the Age of Decolonization: India's Lost Technological Revolution" is now up for pre-order with @PrincetonUPress !

Why India trains the world's tech workers but captures so little of the industry's wealth—and what happened to the dream of technological independence after 1947.

https://t.co/JOvBpcqb0B