Starling House by Alix E. Harrow
Jul. 10th, 2025 08:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)

Desperate to pay her brother Jasper's way out of Muhlenberg County, Opal accepts a job at an infamously cursed mansion.
Starling House by Alix E. Harrow
Now that the Trump government is relentlessly attacking higher education and abusing its power at the border to arbitrarily refuse entry to scholars, many academics wonder whether it’s still possible to travel to the US for conferences or other research purposes, especially if they have publicly criticized the Trump government or its allies. But where you can travel, under what conditions, for your academic work, has long been an issue for scholars who come from countries with “weak passports”: passports with which they require visas, often in long-winded, uncertain bureaucratic processes that they might not be able to finish before the conference in question has taken place, and for which they often have to pay with their private money.
As a European with a strong passport, this topic was, for a long time, a complete oversight for me. I had no idea how much hassle colleagues from countries with weaker passports had to endure when they wanted to travel internationally (see also here, for example). This is just one of the many ways in which the global scientific system is unequal. If you imagine, for a moment, a Rawlsian veil of ignorance, with the specific task of imagining that you’re a PhD student but you don’t know in which country, globally, you’ll land, you can start to visualize the huge differences.
Even though there are complexities and differences between disciplines, much of the academic landscape is organized in a center-periphery logic in which certain universities, networks, or journals dominate the discourse. Maybe this is particularly extreme in the humanities (where you then also find an interesting divide into French- and English-speaking spheres). I can’t speak for all fields, but I hear from many colleagues that they experience a similar logic: there are a few main players, e.g. research groups or even single academics, who draw a lot of attention. Even within countries, one can sometimes find such dynamics. The most visible players attract most funding, the best PhD students, and sometimes also most media attention.
Now, maybe to some extent such an attention economy is unavoidable in research. But what is not unavoidable – and smells much more like a remnant of the world’s long durée past – is that these main players are so much concentrated in countries that are former colonial powers that continue to hold strong influences over knowledge production. Or that the boards of international science organizations are so dominated by people from the US and Europe. Or that the speakers of many “international” scientific conferences, for example the World Science Forum, are so unevenly distributed across countries. Or that Nobel prizes and other international awards go so often to people from the same few countries.
Of course, a lot of this has to do with unequal resources: research funding and travel budgets vary enormously, and weak currencies can add to the problem. In many countries, a job at a university comes with such a high teaching load that research becomes a spare-time hobby. Sometimes, academic salaries are so low that people need to take on additional jobs, e.g. in consulting or administration, to make ends meet. No wonder they cannot “compete” with fully funded researchers from richer countries, at least not if one fails to take their circumstances into account.
But arguably, it is not only a matter of money, but also of ignorance and lazy thinking on the part of privileged academics. Warm words about the international nature of knowledge creation do not always translate into real attention to the unequal circumstances and the joint search for solutions that would help support those in less advantaged positions. We need to raise awareness and understand better what patterns of inclusion and exclusion, and what distribution of resources, shape the academic landscape.**
What’s to be done, then? I don’t think there can be easy solutions, but I am convinced that we can do better than we currently do. For early-career researchers, the Global Young Academy provides a fantastic platform for mutual learning and collaboration. Another promising path forward might be long-term collaborations between research groups from different countries, where researchers can learn from each other and jointly produce knowledge. And in the publication process, editors could pay more attention to submissions from scholars whose English might not be perfect, but who can bring new perspectives and voices into the discourse (here, the topic overlaps with questions of linguistic justice).
Once you’ve started thinking about this topic, it becomes hard to “unsee” how privileged the position of academics in richer countries is – at least, this was my experience. I tended to always look to those who are even more privileged: who teach at more well-known universities, have more travel money, or better research facilities (this is a tendency that already Adam Smith analyzed in human behavior: we pay attention to those we see ahead of us). I had quite a few humbling “check your own privilege” moments when I realized how hard it is to be an academic in most other countries.
Insofar as our goal truly is knowledge production, we should look much more towards those whose voices have, hitherto, been neglected because of their geographically or socio-economically disadvantaged position, as well as other lines of disadvantage. There is a lot of work to do, but there is also so much to learn!
* This blogpost reflects many conversations I had with scholars from different countries, but in particular, in the last months, Amal Amin, Flavia Maximo, David Cheruiyot, Darlene Demandante, Shamiso Musarurwa, Sayoni Santara, Inanna Hamati-Ataya, and the participants of this workshop. Thank you for all that I could learn from you! All remaining biases, mistakes, etc. are my own.
** Together with a group of scholars from different countries, we have set up a survey on questions around Global Science Equity. If you’re interested and want to help us gather data, please fill it in (link) and help spread the word.
Family Portrait, by Dira Sudis. Nestra: Still haven’t seen the show yet, but this is so good, I almost feel like I don’t need to.
Himself had lost his favourite tote bag - it was buffy-themed, not just your random thank-you-for-over-spending-in-our-shop bag. We turned the house upside down, and then I found it yesterday. It was in the car and has probably been there for weeks. Man reunited with buffy tote bag, all is well.
Cat is doing okay. Something happened to him Sunday night (chased by a dog, got lost IDK), and he spent Monday being a very tired old sad cat. I was that worried, I phoned the vet. Got told to let sleeping cats sleep, bring him in if condition persisted. Anyhows, he cheered up and Tuesday he had energy enough to eat an entire can of tuna, complain loudly and wash himself fluffy. All is well.
Saw my first “did using an LLM screw up your business? We can help you find someone to fix it” ad in the wild today. (It was a Fiverr commercial on Youtube.) Wonder how many more of those are coming.
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From 2023: Novelist Alexander Wales blogged a bit about trying to get an LLM to generate a publishable novel. He made a good-faith effort, took a lot of different thoughtful approaches, and documented enough of it to be a good read. Part 1: “I’ve been trying my hand at writing with the assistance of ChatGPT and occasionally other tools. Mostly, it sucks…” Part 2: “I’m still trying to get an LLM to write me a novel, and experiencing the first major setbacks while working on chapter 2.” (There is no post 3.)
And from this January: “A dad just can’t seem to figure out why his six-year-old daughter wasn’t impressed by the AI toy he gave her for Christmas. […] He writes that he cannot understand why his daughter disabled the dinosaur plushie’s built-in AI voice — opting, instead, to play with it like a regular toy, and dressing it with clothes she made.“
LLMs are an interesting novelty the first time you play with them, but for people with actual creativity — whether it’s writers, artists, or Literally Any Child — you overrun their limits and get bored with them so fast.
(What really gets to me about the dinosaur one is the dad saying he “wasn’t able to really understand where’s the resistance.” Instead of approaching the problem as “let me analyze this toy to figure out why it hasn’t earned my kid’s interest,” he’s gone with “of course the toy is entitled to my kid’s interest, let me analyze her to figure out why she’s ‘resisting’.”)
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From this week, a writer trying to get ChatGPT to quote/summarize some linked essays: “The lines you quote are not lines I wrote. They are not in the piece. What is going on here?”
Ending on a golden note from FFA: “Hi my name is Loquacious Techbro Midjourney ChatGPT Claude AI and I have long, beige, run on sentences (that’s how I got my name) with purple prose streaks and red flag tips that reach into the stratosphere and icy blue prompts that like using limpid tears and a lot of people tell me I look like 300 Ghibli characters smashed together(If you don’t know what that is get da hell out of here!).”
I had a first-thing physio appointment, so I dragged myself over to the hospital for that and then nestled down in my Surrounded By Green and... mostly read Murderbot, with occasional fruit harvest and weeding.
(I have also had lots of opportunities to practise self-compassion, both in re the number of things I did not manage to harvest before they went over and in terms of having realised within the last half hour or so that one of my pens has vanished from all of the bags it was nominally in; I hope that if I go and poke around the table etc tomorrow it will rematerialise...)