Leaders and followers, tops and subbies.

cn: self harm

🧵 Last week, I resigned from a teaching job I really loved.

Constant + targeted discrimination from the school’s management about my self harm scars meant that I just couldn’t stay

I’m sharing this bc how schools treat their staff hugely impacts their students -

— Neha Shah (@nehashah_) July 21, 2021

A historian at Oxford. More of the thread, my highlights 

-I’m sharing this bc how schools treat their staff hugely impacts their students -

-(sorry this is quite a long thread but please stick with it if you can!)

-a bit of context: anyone who knows (or sees) me irl will know that I have historic self harm scars on my arms and legs. It’s fairly obvious what they are, but I’ve become less self-conscious about them over time. Nowadays, I barely even think about them, let alone cover them up -

-during the January lockdown, I was in school every day supervising the vulnerable & key worker kids. One day, a kid asked about my scars + I explained that they were from a time I was unwell. As per school policy, I reported this conversation to a safeguarding lead &

-asked for support with future conversations of this nature. 

Below is a selection of the responses I received from members of the school’s senior leadership team:... 

The medicalization of deviance, of discourse, and the bureaucratization of everything. Teachers should be vetted and then trusted. Shah should have been trusted to communicate her history to the kids going through the same struggle, and she should have trusted herself. But she can't. She asked to be policed, and complains at the result. But passivity reinforces itself: her submission to her "lead" is another form of self-harm. On the other other side of the coin: the earnest acceptance of self hatred as body and gender dysphoria.

 

Thug life is barbarism. It needs no written philosophy. It needs no defense. It's not opposed to art. As I've said more than once, maybe not here, if art were about morality, killers wouldn't know how to dance.

The philosophical, academic and intellectual defense of barbarism, the theory of barbarism, is no longer barbarism. It's fascism.

That's for Dembroff. Look at the photograph she posted, at the photo of her, and her self-description. Jenner by comparison is merely an idiot male misogynist playing dress up. Drag is the equivalent of gender Orientalism, a fetish for the other. Conscious fakery renders it comic. That's why it's called The Queer Art of Failure. The need to impose the acceptance of fakery on others as reality is...  I've said it all before. 

The ubiquity of "leads", and "lead investigators" 

Professor Insole is the Lead Investigator for a major five-year programme, called ‘Redeeming Autonomy: Agency, Vulnerability, and Relationality’, funded and hosted by the Australian Catholic University, with co-investigators Dr David Kirchhoffer (ACU), Professor Jennifer Herdt (Yale), Professor Kristin Heyer (Boston), and Professor Yves De Maeseneer (Leuven).

Professor Lambert is internationally renowned for his scholarly writings on critical theory and film, the contemporary university, Baroque and Neo-Baroque cultural history, and; especially for his work on the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida. He has lectured internationally and was recently invited as a Visiting Distinguished Professor at Ewha University, Seoul National University, and in the winter of 2010 was appointed as the BK21 Visiting Distinguished Scholar at Sungkyunkwan University, South Korea.

He has also served as a lead investigator of several other major multi-institutional research and interdisciplinary initiatives in addition to the Humanities Corridor Project, including the Trans-Disciplinary Media Studio (with SU School of Architecture) and The Perpetual Peace Project, a multi-lateral curatorial initiative partnered with Slought Foundation (Philadelphia), the European Union National Institutes of Culture, the International Peace Institute, and the United Nations University.

"Research" in philosophy. "Doing philosophy". The empirical study of hot air. 

Related: liberals, including the liberals who call themselves leftists, screaming about covid denialists, anti-vaxxers, while ignoring their own history of decrying neoliberal pseudoscience. Trump or "Objectivity" and "Truth". We're back to the liberal fantasies of a reality based community.

The hip young literary editor of The Nation

Too bad for Arendt but likely the checkers on her pieces made them better and I can think of a couple others that might have also been improved with a bit more checking...

contra Arendt,  Dwight Macdonald and Alfred Kazin.

This piece could be worse.