Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Reposted by Celestine S. Kunkeler

Talia "AFAB" Bhatt ♀︎♀︎ @taliabhatt.itch.io · 3d

Medical institutions treat trans people as a population to surveil, manage, and dissect, rather than as people to assist or treat with basic dignity.

Typewriter Skeleton @tpwrtrmnky.bsky.social · 3d

Oslo University Hospital caught using trans patients' journals for research purposes:
- Without the patients' consent to participate in research
- Affecting minors
- 1700 of them
- Taking highly sensitive information from said journals

This is a HUGE breach.

Anine Hartmann @aninehartmann.bsky.social · 3d

Tidligere i år meldte vi et forskningsprosjekt til redelighetsutvalget ved OUS og UiO.

Nå er forskerne felt for alvorlige brudd på forskningsetiske normer.

7 350 1.2K

Celestine S. Kunkeler @celestinekunkeler.bsky.social · 2d

University Hospital in Oslo found to have illicitly used trans patients' records for research purposes without consent, entirely in keeping with its abysmal reputation and appalling treatment of its patient cohorts.

Anine Hartmann @aninehartmann.bsky.social · 3d

Tidligere i år meldte vi et forskningsprosjekt til redelighetsutvalget ved OUS og UiO.

Nå er forskerne felt for alvorlige brudd på forskningsetiske normer.

Oslo universitetssykehus felt for ulovlig forskning på transpersoner

Forskere ved Oslo universitetssykehus har forsket på transpersoner uten godkjenning. Nå er de felt for alvorlige brudd på forskningsetiske normer.

www.forskning.no

5

Reposted by Celestine S. Kunkeler

Katherine Kondor @drkondor.bsky.social · 3d

If you're in Barcelona, come see this round table on Monday 13th October!

1 2

Celestine S. Kunkeler @celestinekunkeler.bsky.social · 4d

Very interested to read this!

Zagria @zagria.bsky.social · 4d

Good article by Eli Erlick in the August G&LR, but why did she have to calumniate Violette Morris?

glreview.org/article/maki...

Making Sense of the Trans Right - The Gay & Lesbian Review

glreview.org

1

Reposted by Celestine S. Kunkeler

João Florêncio @noisybits.bsky.social · 5d

Took me a while to find it but this is the right mood

2 13

Reposted by Celestine S. Kunkeler

Elisabeth Lund Engebretsen 殷莉 @elengebretsen.bsky.social · 6d

1/5 The common strategy to invent organizations to advance anti-gender and LGBTQ+ hate continues, and Norwegian actors are (as usual) enthusiastic active participants and cheerleaders. Recently formed Athena Forum works to "advance sex-based rights", and has already published what they call a report

2 4 6

Reposted by Celestine S. Kunkeler

Ben Miller @benwritesthings.bsky.social · 6d

Time for some fags to bash back

Daniel @deargodwhatnow.bsky.social · 6d

Have to say, this is quite weird

2 2 37

Reposted by Celestine S. Kunkeler

European Consortium for Political Research @ecpr.bsky.social · 11d

🌸 #ECPG26 @ecprgender.bsky.social Section seeking Panels & Papers ⤵️
🏳️‍🌈 LGBTIQ+, Sexuality, Queer & Trans Studies, Policies & Politics
🪑@frammaturo.bsky.social, @norocel.bsky.social @auroraperego.bsky.social @massimoprearo.bsky.social @lrubiogrundell.bsky.social, Giada Bonu Rosenkranz
⌛👇 7 Nov

LGBTIQ+, Sexuality, Queer and Trans Studies, Policies and Politics

European Conference on Gender and Politics, Newcastle University, 15 – 17 June 2026

buff.ly

6 6

Reposted by Celestine S. Kunkeler

Hex Anderson @dexanderson.com · 10d

Just pointing out that one of the orgs here is Genspect, an anti-trans org that has previously used the feminist label for their work, out here arguing that A Handmaid's Tale is radicalizing people on the left.

Dan of the Year @downwithdan.bsky.social · 10d

THE ANTIFA LORAX

TOP 10 BOOKS RADICALIZING
THE LEFT
and why they are creating political violence against Patriots
2
LORAX
3
CHUCK PALAHNIUK FIGHT CLUB
1984
GEORGE ORWELL
1984
REASONS:
- Anti-Patriot
- Anti-Authority
- Anti-Conservative
- Pro-Violence
- Pro-Antifa
6
IT CAN'T HAPPEN
HERE
SINCLAIR LEWIS
IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE REASONS:
- Anti-Patriot
- Anti-Authority
- Pro-Antifa
- Anti-United States
- Pro-Left wing terrorism
WE ARE STARTED
-LIBERTY•
Dr. Seuss
THE LORAX REASONS:
- Pro-Antifa
- Anti-Authority
- Pro-Violence
- Pro-Environment
FIGHT CLUB
REASONS:
- Anti-Masculinity
- Anti-Authority
- Anti-Christian
- Anti-Consumerism
- Pro-Left wing terrorism
7/8
HOWARD ZINN
PEOPLE'S HISTORY
OF THE
UNITED STATES
A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES REASONS:
- Pro-Radicalism
- Pro-Communism
- Pro-Violence
- Anti-Authority
- Pro-Antifa
9
5
MARGARET
ATWOOD
THE
HANDMAID'S
TALE
A HANDMAID'S TALE REASONS:
- Pro-Feminism
- Anti-Christian
- Anti-Fertility
- Pro-Left wing terrorism
- Pro-Antifa
- Pro-Violence
- Anti-Conservative
10
dalton trumbo
FUN HOME
ALISON BECHDEL
REASONS:
- Pro-LGBT
- Anti-Science
- Anti-Christianity
- Atheistic
- Gender Propaganda
GENDER QUEER
GENDER QUEER REASONS:
- Pornography
- Sexualizing Children
- Pro-LGBT
- Anti-Christianity
- Gender Propaganda
- Pro-Child Confusion
ata
american family association
THE GRAPES OF WEATH
THE GRAPES OF WRATH REASONS:
- Pro-Communism
- Anti-Patriot
- Anti-Authority
- Pro-Violence
- Pro-Antifa
- Anti-United States
- Anti-Christianity
renspect
Johnny got his gun
JOHNNY GOT HIS GUN
REASONS:
- Anti-United States
- Anti-Patriot
- Pro-Communism
- Anti-War
- Anti-Wealth
- Anti-Authority
- Pro-Violence
* CITIZENS
DEFENDING

10 38 130

Reposted by Celestine S. Kunkeler

Dr. Marc-André Argentino @maargentino.com · 10d

It is Book Launch day for @amaramarasingam.bsky.social and My edited volume "Contemporary Far-Right Culture The Art, Music, and Everyday Practices of Violent Extremism"

www.routledge.com/Contemporary...

16 95 240

Reposted by Celestine S. Kunkeler

Cheryl Morgan @cherylmorgan.bsky.social · 11d

Next week in UK politics:

Fuhwaage: we will execute all immigrants

Labour: Reform’s policies are racist. Under Labour immigrants will experience unalivement in a respectful and sensitive manner

1 24 69

Reposted by Celestine S. Kunkeler

C-REX @crexuio.bsky.social · 11d

📢 New Blog Post! 🚨 Just a month before the Dutch elections, Iris Beau Segers and @leoniedejonge.bsky.social highlight the troubling normalization of far-right ideologies, the democratic erosion, and the recent violence at an anti-immigration demo in The Hague. www.sv.uio.no/c-rex/englis...

Far-Right Normalization and Democratic Erosion: A Pre-Election Update from the Netherlands - C-REX – Center for Research on Extremism

Just a month ahead of the Dutch elections, Léonie de Jonge and Iris B. Segers raise concerns about the growing normalization of extreme-right ideologies and actions, highlighted by the unprecedented v...

www.sv.uio.no

1 23 29

Reposted by Celestine S. Kunkeler

Nancy Wingfield @nmw1.bsky.social · 16d

Available for pre-order now. Recommend to all of your friends who think of WWI only in terms of the Western Front! The results of two hugely talented historians co-authoring a book.

1 16 44

Reposted by Celestine S. Kunkeler

Melissa Gira Grant @melissagiragrant.com · 16d

I looked into the group and the guy pushing the FBI to create a new designation of “transgender ideology–inspired violence and extremism”—itself a political project, meant to conflate the fact of trans people’s existence with extremism.

The Right’s Baseless Project to Link Trans People With Extremism

A campaign for the FBI to adopt a new designation of “transgender ideology–inspired violence and extremism” is less about law enforcement than politics.

newrepublic.com

24 500 1.2K

Celestine S. Kunkeler @celestinekunkeler.bsky.social · 18d

'Instead, the trans past can be a tool for imagining how we might build liveable trans lives in community, outside of and without reference to the state and other institutions— and perhaps even in the face of, and in active resistance to, state violence and repression.'

History Workshop @historyworkshop.org.uk · 18d

The summer has seen anti-trans campaigns across the UK and US, alongside a crisis in healthcare. But what use could trans history have in these time, beyond proving 'we have always been here'?

Sam Rutherford @echomikeromeo reflects on Imagining Trans Futures:
www.historyworkshop....

3 7

Reposted by Celestine S. Kunkeler

Akil N Awan @akilnawan.bsky.social · 18d

Time to delete your academia,edu account 👇

Ordinary Notes @hystericalblkns.bsky.social · 23d

If you’re on academia dot edu, let me suggest that you strongly consider deleting your account.

The new TOC from academia dot edu.

By creating an Account with Academia.edu, you grant us a worldwide, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable license, permission, and consent for Academia.edu to use your Member Content and your personal information (including, but not limited to, your name, voice, signature, photograph, likeness, city, institutional affiliations, citations, mentions, publications, and areas of interest) in any manner, including for the purpose of advertising, selling, or soliciting the use or purchase of Academia.edu's Services.

1 16 11

Reposted by Celestine S. Kunkeler

Feminist Legal Studies @flsjournal.bsky.social · 19d

📣🏳️‍⚧️ Call for Papers

We are inviting papers for our special issue, “Feminist Responses to the Regression of Trans Rights: Strategies, Alliances, Hope.” The issue will be dedicated to trans-inclusive feminist legal analysis that addresses attacks on trans rights & lives.

Details below. Please share.

Call for Papers: Special Issue of Feminist Legal Studies

Feminist Responses to the Regression of Trans Rights: Strategies, Alliances, Hope

Amidst continuing backlash against trans rights, recognition and inclusion, two recent decisions from the UK have substantially impacted not only trans people’s legal status but also legal and social narratives of sex, gender and identity. The narrative that trans inclusion has a chilling effect on the rights of others, particularly women, has been adopted uncritically by both the UK Supreme Court in For Women Scotland and the Office for Students in its finding that the University of Sussex’s trans-inclusion policy had a chilling effect on free speech. These cases highlight a backlash that has been ongoing for some time, and sparks debates and fear of what may lie in the near future for trans people and kin, as well as other gender-variant persons, not only in the UK, but across jurisdictions and in a global perspective. The discourse of the ‘gender critical’ movement is splintering both the feminist and LGBT+ movements globally, with some aligning politically with the Far- and Christian Right against trans rights, adopting their terminology of ‘gender ideology’ and potentially posing a wider threat to sexual and reproductive rights.

While this a difficult situation for trans people, kin and allies, this special issue seeks to emphasise that legal battles – including battles (temporarily) lost – are also an opportunity to seek to reinforce old alliances and to form new ones, to find new legal frontiers and imaginaries, to reinforce the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of legal arguments as well as intergenerational memory of what feminist legal work is, has been and should be about. How, we ask, do these decisions (and those like them globally) reflect and reproduce structures of coloniality, heteronormativity and cisnormativity? What do these decisions add to critiques of legal feminism? What would be construct…

1 160 190

Reposted by Celestine S. Kunkeler

Past and Present @pastpresentsoc.bsky.social · 23d

On advance access: "Ships, Guns and Money: The Logistics of Revolution and Garibaldi’s Campaign of 1860"

by Daniel Banks (European University Institute)

doi.org/10.1093/past...

Ships, Guns and Money: The Logistics of Revolution and Garibaldi’s Campaign of 1860*

Abstract. When Giuseppe Garibaldi set sail for Sicily on the campaign that led to the unification of Italy in 1860, he gave a group of exiled political rad

doi.org

1 4 7

Reposted by Celestine S. Kunkeler

Gwendal Piégais @gwendalpiegais.bsky.social · 24d

I am very proud to share with you the introduction to the special issue that I co-edited with Robert Gerwarth in the journal @conteurohistory.bsky.social : "Intra-State Conflicts and the Politics of Aid in Europe, 1917–49: An Introduction" #Humanitarianism #CivilWar www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Intra-State Conflicts and the Politics of Aid in Europe, 1917–49: An Introduction | Contemporary European History | Cambridge Core

Intra-State Conflicts and the Politics of Aid in Europe, 1917–49: An Introduction

www.cambridge.org

2 20 33

Reposted by Celestine S. Kunkeler

Ruth Pearce @notrightruth.bsky.social · 24d

"What’s Wrong with Gender-Critical Feminism?"

In a new article for the feminist philosophy journal Hypatia, Suzy Killmister looks at how and why gender-critical feminism has ended up appealing so widely to neo-Nazis and other fascist actors.

What’s Wrong with Gender-Critical Feminism? | Hypatia | Cambridge Core

What’s Wrong with Gender-Critical Feminism?

www.cambridge.org

16 29

Reposted by Celestine S. Kunkeler

Dr Charlotte Galpin @drcharlottegalpin.bsky.social · 26d

Are you doing research on anti-trans politics? Consider submitting to the special issue of @cogitatiopag.bsky.social 'Global Politics and Anti-Trans Moral Panics: Transfeminist Perspectives', co-edited by me, @ashstokoe.bsky.social and @ginagwenffrewi.bsky.social to be published in 2027 (1/2)

Future Issues | Politics and Governance

Politics and Governance is an innovative new offering to the world of online peer-reviewed open access publishing in the Political Sciences.

www.cogitatiopress.com

1 4 3

Reposted by Celestine S. Kunkeler

Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · Sep 6

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or
even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in
the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or
apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we
are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not
considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This
is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse
and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece,
we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology
industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to
relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI
(black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are
in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are
both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and
Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf.
Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al.
2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms
are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

96 1.6K 3.1K

Reposted by Celestine S. Kunkeler

Michael Hobbes @michaelhobbes.bsky.social · Sep 10

"but"?

16 100 840

Reposted by Celestine S. Kunkeler

Morgan M Page @morganmpage.bsky.social · Sep 9

Emailing your MP is about as useful as putting a message in a bottle and tossing it out to sea.

2 20