Lmst

Bernardine Evaristo renews call to diversify school curriculum in England https://www.theguardian.com/education/2026/jan/27/bernardine-evaristo-renews-call-diversify-school-curriculum-england #Schools #EnglishAndCreativeWriting #Gcses #Curriculums #BernardineEvaristo #Race #Education #Books #Culture #England #UkNews

Trump’s Latest Visa “Pause” Targets 75 Countries He Thinks Are Lazy

Last Wednesday, the Trump administration “paused” immigrant visa applications for people from 75 countries, mostly in the Global South, on the supposed grounds that people from those countries are of “nationalities at high risk of public benefits usage.” Since the 19th century, the United States has used “public charge” rules to restrict entry, alleging that […]

https://murica.website/2026/01/trumps-latest-visa-pause-targets-75-countries-he-thinks-are-lazy/

International Conference

THE ARCHIVAL TURN IN MUSIC SOCIOLOGY
60 Years of Music Sociology @ mdw

🗓️ 5–7 February 2026
📍mdw – Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien
& online (Zoom)

Conference Programme & Info:
👉 https://www.mdw.ac.at/ims/events/the-archival-turn-in-music-sociology

This conference explores archives and historiographies in music sociology through feminist, queer, grassroots, and decolonial perspectives and draws attention to ethics and care, lived experiences, cultural labour, methodological questions, and the challenges of digitalisation and platforms.

Keynote Speakers:
› Kate Eichhorn (The New School, USA)
› Uchenna Ngwe (Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance & Royal Academy of Music, UK)
› Nick Prior (University of Edinburgh, UK)

Organisers:
Tianyu Jiang, Rainer Prokop, Rosa Reitsamer
Department of Music Sociology
mdw – University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna

#mdw #musicsociology #archives #archivalturn #musicsociology #culturalsociology #sociology #popularmusicstudies #culturalstudies #genderstudies #socialsciences #humanities #music #socialinequalities #inequality #class #race #ethnicity #gender #feminist #queer #culturalmemory #culturalheritage #culturalidentity #identity #Vienna

https://www.fogolf.com/1148468/maxs-new-weapon-for-2026-by-peter-windsor/ Max’s new weapon for 2026 by Peter Windsor #ACTION #AutoRacing #automotive #F1 #Formula #Formula1 #FormulaOne #GP #GrandPrix #grid #MotorSport #PeterWindsor #PGAOfficialWorldGolfRanking #PGARanking #race #RACING #sport #sports #StephenGallacherGolf

"When lawmakers seek to review a list of books, #librarians find themselves on the frontlines of a national battle. Across the U.S., librarians face the impact of uniting against library collection standards that include restrictions on #race-related and #LGBTQIA+ content. Drawing on historical context, The Librarians explores the broader implications for education and public life."
PBS
https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/documentaries/the-librarians/

I’m a 50-year-old white British man — I think that’s why I can’t get a job

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://metro.co.uk/2026/01/26/im-a-50-year-old-white-british-man-think-cant-get-a-job-26470811/

🖋️ New article: A brief article about my race at the Stockport Daffodil 10km on 25 January 2026. #articles #running #race #trawdenac

Stockport Daffodil 10km 2026 - https://l.prry.uk/articles/2026-01-25-stockport-daffodil-10km-2026/

Genetic Data From Over 20,000 U.S. Children Misused for ‘Race Science’

The National Institutes of Health failed to protect brain scans that an international group of fringe researchers used to argue for the intellectual superiority of white people.

Gifted Article: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/24/us/children-genetics-race-science.html?unlocked_article_code=1.HFA.QnBp.GS7BBH5TVnqY&smid=bs-share

#Race #RaceScience #WhiteNationalism #Racism #JunkScience #WhiteSupremacy #NIH #Trump #MAGA #RobertFKennedyJr

🏃‍♂️ ⏰ 00:52:56 📏 10 km ⏱️ 05:15 min/km 🛫 80 m+ ❤️‍🔥 160 bpm 🧁 70 kcal

Ran my fastest 10km in a decade at the Stockport Daffodil 10km this morning. Article to follow. #training-log #running #race #trawdenac

Morning 10km - https://l.prry.uk/training-log/2026-01-25-morning-10km/

Screenshot from trainingpeaks showing route map and key run metrics and statistics

…decentralized_divasᵀᴹ

by KEIFERGR33N

#diva #christinaAguilera #omniTrio #music #remix #aesthetic #vocalist #adultswim #edm #musicvideo #loops #fyp #glitchart #dance #gta3 #gta #race #motorcycle

Sunday, January 25, 2026

Belgorod under heavy fire in 'most massive' attack, Russian governor claims -- Here's why Minneapolis reminds me of what I once saw in Ukraine -- 80% of Ukraine faces emergency power cuts following Russia's overnight aerial attack, focused on Kyiv -- Russia has lost 1,233,020 troops in Ukraine since Feb. 24, 2022 ... and more

https://activitypub.writeworks.uk/2026/01/sunday-january-25-2026/

Emergency repairs on a power pole after a transformer burned out due to regular Russian air attacks, Kyiv, Ukraine, winter 2026

The radicalisation of urban exploration YouTubers

This episode of QAA goes deep on something I’ve noticed over recent years: since I first started following them it seems that urban exploration YouTube has become increasingly reactionary. Indeed in some cases there are obviously far-right tropes entering into these videos:

https://soundcloud.com/qanonanonymous/london-has-fallen-e356

My sense has always been that there’s a form of the sociological imagination driving this in which viewers follow these creators out of a genuine curiosity about the urban environment and how it is changing. The thoughtful urban explorers touch on a lot of important themes about capitalism, inequality and the urban environment but they do it in an impressionistic, shallow and often banal way. But there are some of them I find very watchable nonetheless. I’ve often thought that there’s a huge opening here for a compelling urban sociologist to build a significant following, meeting the same audience demand in a richer and deeper way. I suspect Les Back for example would be great at this.

In this sense I wonder increasingly if the oversupply problem in digital public engagement (i.e. too much academic content, too small an audience, inadequate delivery mechanisms) could be solved by more targeted genre-based interventions. Indeed it’s suddenly struck me how I don’t think I’ve ever seen a single in situ academic blogger. If anyone can think of an example of this I’d love to see it.

So why are so many of the urban explorers drifting in a reactionary, even far-right, direction. There are a range of potential explanations I can think of:

Grifting in pursuit of increasingly large reactionary audiences
The algorithm prioritising reactionary content (is there evidence of YouTube taking an X like turn?)
These YouTubers being terminally online and being radicalised by other content they are exposed to (including cross-platform discourse)
The forms of biographical rupture which happen to men in their 20s and 30s driving some of these creators towards radical content

The more interesting aspect of this though would be the nature of the sociological description these YouTubers are engaged in. If you’re setting out to document ‘urban decay’ without any resources for explaining the structural roots of that trend ready-to-hand tropes of urban decay will insert themselves into your narrative. This can’t be pure description. There has to be story telling for compelling content. These stories need mechanisms which drive them. This is where reactionary analysis will fill in the gaps when there’s nothing deeper to draw upon, creating increasingly reactionary interpretations of (impressionistic) observations of urban change. I wonder if this is at least part of the mechanism in some cases.

But I find it hard to watch stuff like this and not think it’s a grift… there’s something so affected about the breathless way in which she purports to be terrified while walking through Whitechapel market (the absence of ‘english faces’) which just seems obviously affected:

https://youtu.be/vQe9uatZ9eE?si=iHLC2o0e_N9G96cu&t=435

I mean there are points in this video which are just obviously bad faith. This Punjabi sign is lingered on in a close up outside Whitechapel station:

Where this is presumably where they were standing, with the Whitechapel sign next to it (in an area with a 33% Bengali population):

So we can see bad faith deception, broader grifting and genuine radicalisation converging in producing these videos. I do wonder if the superficiality of the videos, a constant attention to surface level impressions articulated in the most superficial way, should be considered a separate factor here. Or rather it’s a dimension in which these other aspects converge to maximal effect to produce this increasingly toxic sludge. There’s a constant invocation of ‘english culture’, ‘traditionally english’, ‘quintessentially english’, ‘proper english’, ‘actually english’ (etc) without any attempt to define or explain what these terms mean. Underneath all the other factors I think there’s a genuine lack of curiosity here about the world around them beyond these surface impressions.

#algorithm #digitalPublicEngagement #farRight #lesBack #publicEngagement #race #racism #radicalisation #socialMediaForAcademics #urbanSociology