Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

"The idea of offering pay cuts to save the jobs of precarious academic staff - canvassed for example at LSE - is well intended but naive. It’s reminiscent of the justification for the social contract in the 1970s - wage controls would benefit the lower paid. The problem is the same: what mechanism ensures that the pay saved goes to keeping on precarious staff? If university unions had the power to enforce such a mechanism against the unscrupulous bosses who run universities today they would be able to defend jobs more directly. There is no substitute for building up workers’ collective power, which means continuing the Four Fights Campaign and rejecting the employers’ offer." —Alex Callinicos, King's College London

"Snapshot data from varying official sources shows that in Italy, Spain, France,  Ireland  and Belgium between 42% and 57% of deaths from the virus have been happening in homes, according to the report by academics based at the London School of Economics (LSE)." Half of coronavirus deaths happen in care homes

According to research by the London School of Economics, if you’re a working class graduate with a first class degree you’re less likely to land an elite job than a middle class graduate with a 2:2. And even if you do succeed in getting the position, you'll earn on average 16% less than your middle class counterparts. Why? In this "investigation " Amol Rajan, media editor at the BBC, either has failed to answer why or he was censored (an editor edited him!). The main reason according to Rajan is "class prejudice". Class, thus, is like racism "a prejudice". not a production of socio-economic structure of property and power: how production is organised, who gets the profit, who owns what, and what power relations govern the producers and the owners of capital.  Furthermore, class society has to reproduce itself in terms of power relations and ideas, (i.e. ideology). This main division in society has to be deflected towards "identity politic

The Return of the 'C' Word: SASE Conference 2019

When I asked two students doing Gender Studies at LSE last year, one of them was doing an MA, and three students at UCL studying something similar, none of them could name an Arab feminist or author. " The results indicated a grim reality . Non-Africa based scholars represented between 73.2 and 100 per cent of cited authors in surveyed reading lists. Out of the 274 assigned readings for a Development Studies course at a leading British university, only one reading was from an author based at an African institution. The narrow dissemination of research from African institutions in ‘prestigious’ journals confines the repertoire of methodological tools that are available in research and limits learning and teaching. It also allows dominant approaches and paradigms in some disciplines to remain unchallenged. For instance, in the fields of economics, and particularly in US universities, orthodox paradigms became hegemonic to the extent of excluding different views, especially those

"As a university lecturer I often find that my students take today’s dominant economic ideology – namely, neoliberalism – for granted as natural and inevitable. This is not surprising given that most of them were born in the early 1990s, for neoliberalism is all that they have known. In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher had to convince people that there was “no alternative” to neoliberalism. But today this assumption comes ready- made; it’s in the water, part of the common -sense furniture of everyday life, and generally accepted as given by the Right and Left alike. It has not always been this way, however. Neoliberalism has a specific history, and knowing that history is an important antidote to its hegemony, for it shows that the present order is not natural or inevitable, but rather that it is new , that it came from somewhere, and that it was designed by particular people with particular interests."  —Jason Hickel, 2012 Hickel is a lecturer at the