Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Dominic Dean

@drdominicdean.bsky.social

780 followers 1K following 1.1K posts

Lecturer in Literature at the University of Essex. Researcher and author (Killing Children in British Fiction - SUNY, 2024). I work on contemporary British fiction and film, children, Ishiguro, migration, intergenerational conflict. All views my own.

Posts Media Videos Starter Packs

Pinned

Dominic Dean @drdominicdean.bsky.social · Jan 21

My book, Killing Children in British Fiction: Thatcherism to Brexit, is now out from @sunypress.bsky.social.

'An authoritative, acute, and insightful book...makes a powerful case for child killing as an index of our times' - @bobeaglestone.bsky.social.

sunypress.edu/Books/K/Kill...

Book cover with title 'Killing Children in British Fiction: Thatcherism to Brexit' by Dominic Dean. Cover image shows a seafront promenade with beach huts during dusk, with a sunset.

5 26

Dominic Dean @drdominicdean.bsky.social · 1h

I mean, that does sound pretty great...perhaps not the most balanced meal but definitely a collection of delicious things.

1 1

Reposted by Dominic Dean

Becky Guest @beckyguest.bsky.social · 3h

📢 Call for Senior Editor: Literature & Literary Criticism on our growing broad scope open access journal Cogent Arts & Humanities ✨ Apply by 19 November 2025 👇 think.taylorandfrancis.com/editor_recru... @tandfresearch.bsky.social @routledgelit.bsky.social

Senior Editor needed for Cogent Arts & Humanities

think.taylorandfrancis.com

1 1

Reposted by Dominic Dean

Waitman Wade Beorn, PhD, FRHistS @waitmanwbeorn.com · 4h

Ok. But are there any downsides?

The Verge @theverge.com · May 26

Nick Clegg says asking artists for use permission would ‘kill’ the AI industry

Paul McCartne, Elton John and others signed an open letter.

buff.ly

6 72 370

Dominic Dean @drdominicdean.bsky.social · 4h

Passed by a house in Colchester that is both heavily beflagged and selling bicycles from the driveway, and I'm wondering if this is someone's plot to lure in liberals to be dealt with.

Dominic Dean @drdominicdean.bsky.social · 4h

Served with beans and a sausage where the casing looked like it was made with cling film.

1 1

Dominic Dean @drdominicdean.bsky.social · 5h

I ofc would like the UK to welcome more immigration, full stop, but I accept that is an uphill battle, whereas we can’t even get out of our most immediate crises unless a government feels able to openly welcome people on highly selective visas.

Dominic Dean @drdominicdean.bsky.social · 5h

British politics - and indeed Britain itself - will not meaningfully improve until a leader is able to openly and non-defensively say that they welcome more immigrants in this kind of context. Until that time, it’s basically recycling and parsing variations of resentful stagnation.

Jonathan Portes @jdportes.bsky.social · 8h

I'd Do Anything For Growth (But I Won't Do That)

www.ft.com/content/5ab6...

More UK visas for highly skilled Indian workers ‘not part of plan’, says Keir Starmer

British premier embarks on two-day trade trip with 125 chief executives, cultural leaders and university vice-chancellors

www.ft.com

1 1

Dominic Dean @drdominicdean.bsky.social · 6h

I do think a mosque in Cotswold stone, in some deep valley, would look pretty stunning.

Adil Ray @adilray.bsky.social · 1d

Jenrick says, Handsworth the area I went to school in isn’t integrated as he didn’t see a white face and the closest he has seen to a slum? So is he saying we should pay minorities much more for their low paid jobs and welcome them to The Cotswolds with their mosques and temples???

Reposted by Dominic Dean

Martin Paul Eve @eve.gd · 6h

I wrote an undergrad diss on Pynchon, an MA thesis on Pynchon, a PhD on Pynchon, and a book on Pynchon & I endorse this sentiment

"Pynchon’s work is often labeled “Postmodernism,” but it’s also interpretable as a body of left historical literature concerning antifascism"

lithub.com/thomas-pynch...

Thomas Pynchon Has Been Warning Us About American Fascism the Whole Time

Paul Thomas Anderson’s adaptations of Thomas Pynchon’s novels—first Inherent Vice in 2014, and now One Battle After Another in 2025—may be tipping the scales, with more first-time Pynchon readers f…

lithub.com

3 2 14

Dominic Dean @drdominicdean.bsky.social · 7h

Don't worry at all, Gav! A bit of idealism (perhaps even centrist idealism!) now and again is probably healthy.

Dominic Dean @drdominicdean.bsky.social · 7h

I think part of it is this (I emphasise only part of it, because I don't want to be a crank). But I do think we've reached generations that had much less early exposure to institutions that take morality and intellect seriously than e.g. Thatcher with her Methodist father.

bsky.app/profile/drdo...

Dominic Dean @drdominicdean.bsky.social · 13d

I suspect it's partly that previous generations were likely to grow up in/around institutions that unapologetically centered moral language and thinking (primarily, but not only, churches/religious institutions) and now we've reached a generation of middle-class white Brits that mostly lacked that.

Jonn Elledge @jonnelledge.bsky.social · 13d

forgive the double quote tweet, but... I increasingly feel like a big problem is the loss of the language of morality in politics? We're scared of it because awful people have historically used moral condemnation to be awful, but I do feel like you sometimes have to just go "this is just wrong"

Dominic Dean @drdominicdean.bsky.social · 7h

One question he got from the audience was whether he had ever been tempted by Socialist politics; he said yes, when he'd witnessed extreme poverty up close. I thought that was a pretty interesting (and afaik, honest) answer. One couldn't imagine a senior Tory of the 2020s, or even 2010s, giving it.

1 1

Dominic Dean @drdominicdean.bsky.social · 7h

I've heard him speak in person and he definitely has a big presence in a room. Perhaps dangerous nostalgia, but it's hard not to think that senior politicians were often simply bigger people, morally and intellectually, in his era. (Of course, one can have a big moral hinterland and still be bad.)

Dominic Dean @drdominicdean.bsky.social · 7h

Obviously I‘m being glib and more communal spaces would be a good thing. But the rhetoric is so wildly untethered from reality, especially given its popularity with people who are themselves amongst the most atomised of our society.

1 4

Dominic Dean @drdominicdean.bsky.social · 7h

To hear the chorus endlessly banging on about ‘integration’, you’d think England was some kind of commune where we spend each evening eating and dancing with the rest of our village, rather than the pretty atomised twenty-first century society that it is.

1 6

Dominic Dean @drdominicdean.bsky.social · 8h

Maybe Badenoch’s attack on English graduates is a long-game attempt to prevent the return of Michael Gove.

Dominic Dean @drdominicdean.bsky.social · 8h

Thanks for using your platform to make this point Sam, it is appreciated.

Reposted by Dominic Dean

Sam Freedman @samfr.bsky.social · 9h

At some point these imbeciles are going to realise that arts courses are *funding* the courses they do like and if they cut those places unis will just go bankrupt so no maths or science either.

15 43 330

Dominic Dean @drdominicdean.bsky.social · 8h

Not my area, but I struggle to imagine that there are jobs in advanced manufacturing that realistically won’t require an undergraduate degree as a baseline qualification before any more sector-specific qualification or training? A UG degree isn’t a particularly high baseline of education these days.

Dominic Dean @drdominicdean.bsky.social · 20h

A party exclusively for those who hate their grandchildren (and other people’s grandchildren even more).

Research Professional News @resprofnews.bsky.social · 21h

Breaking: Tories would slash university places by 100k.

Student numbers cap plan billed as saving £3 billion to invest in apprenticeship funding.

Tomorrow, Badenoch will unveil plans to limit student numbers across all subjects.

www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-p...

Tories would slash university places by 100,000 - Research Professional News

Student numbers cap plan billed as saving £3 billion to invest in “doubled” apprenticeship funding

www.researchprofessionalnews.com

2 5

Reposted by Dominic Dean

BeijingPalmer @beijingpalmer.bsky.social · 1d

the Dubai influencer/manosphere/grift/sex work space is an incredible story that's massively underwritten

rattatatouille @rattatatouille.bsky.social · 1d

Yeah, there's a reason all those Instagram influencers get flown out to the Gulf states, and it's not just pictorials.

(This is also why I thought "Dubai chocolate" was a euphemism for something until recently)

14 67 440

Dominic Dean @drdominicdean.bsky.social · 1d

A lot of people are responding to this by pointing out that the country being admired has a huge immigrant workforce; but I fear that having such a workforce as visibly second-class, kept precarious and quiescent, is exactly
the appeal; and honestly they care far more about that than about numbers.

Roland Smith @rolandmcs.bsky.social · 1d

We must emulate the United Arab Emirates, apparently.

Where to even start...?

1 4

Dominic Dean @drdominicdean.bsky.social · 1d

Obviously I am in no position to know, but I don't see any reason, based on the current known facts and the behaviour of those who do know the truth, to rule this out as a possibility; and should this be so, it's important that the pressure on the government is massive and sustained.

Dominic Dean @drdominicdean.bsky.social · 1d

Should it emerge that the government's line about secret information justifying the proscription of PA (because they are much worse than the public can be allowed to know) is substantively false, I hope we will hear some serious calls for resignation of both the current and the last Home Secretary.

1 3