1. Khawla Badwan from Manchester Metropolitan University has been writing A Poem for Palestine each day since the early days of the current conflict, usually published on LinkedIn. You’ll find the first nine poems for July in the PDF below, and here’s Khawla’s poem for 9^th July,

The privilege

Beware the other

They are inconveniently here

They don’t count in your sphere

Turn around

Look away

Beware the other

Don’t mention their dead

Don’t care about their end

Turn around

Look away

Beware the other

If challenged, call it neutrality

Don’t worry about morality

Turn around

Look away

Beware the other

Let’s stand firmly together

Protecting our privilege forever

Turn around

Look away

2. This coming Saturday, 20^th July, at 13:00 UK time you can join this Mentoring Teacher-Research Network (MENTRNET) webinar,  ‘EAR-Thailand #2024 project – Successful practices in a teacher-research mentoring programme’. More details and registration here https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZEqd-usqjMsGtEshpnZNewySHLHZEGItXan#/registration

More information on future MENTRNET events and recordings of past events here https://mentoring-tr.weebly.com/festival-2024-25.html

3. Founded in 1954, the purpose of the European Cultural Foundation (ECF) https://culturalfoundation.eu/ is “to grow a European sentiment of solidarity among the peoples of Europe”. Common Ground is the ECF’s annual publication https://culturalfoundation.eu/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Common-Ground-2024_web.pdf

Try one of the following:

Brussels’ Eastern Enigma by Katja Hoyer;

Europe in Barbieland by Pawel Zerka;

Fragile Memory, Friso Wiersum’s interview with Mariia Ponomarova & Olexii Kuchanskyi about their documentary film of the Odesa Film Studio.

PDF below as well.

4. Emanuel Schegloff, who died on May 23^rd  at his home in Santa Monica, California was the last surviving co-founder of the field of conversation analysis (CA), the study of naturally occurring conduct in human interaction, which introduced notions now familiar to us all, such as turn-taking. Here’s the graceful obituary that John Heritage wrote for him https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1080/08351813.2024.2368389 PDF below.

5. And, finally, Poetry, prose and plumbing: some first reflections on how Labour will govern from Geoff Mulgan https://tinyurl.com/a9whrvmu

Here I share thoughts about the new administration which has got off to a very good start and is a dramatic improvement on what went before. How government works matters just as much as what it does (even though this is of almost zero interest to the commentariat) and I’m now a professor in an engineering department, a field which cares a lot about practicality and implementation and has a low tolerance for the hot air that is all too common in and around politics.