Independent Social Research Foundation

07/10/2026

ISRF Newsletter - October 2026

This edition of the newsletter features a Director's Note on reimagining the university. Also included: upcoming events, blogs, Fellows news and upcoming competitions.

This edition of the newsletter features a Director's Note on reimagining the university. Also included: upcoming events, blogs, Fellows news and upcoming competitions.

25/09/2026

In December 2025, the ISRF launched its eighth Mid-Career Fellowship competition. Having received a number of strong proposals, the Selection Panel met in July 2026, and voted to make seven awards:

Dr Rune Bennike (University of Southern Denmark)
Energy Transition in the Seesaw: Labor Regimes, Semi-Peripheral Development, and Moral Economies Between Deindustrialization and Decarbonization

Professor Lara M. Coleman (University of Sussex, UK)
Insurgent Humanism

Dr Mariagiulia Giuffré (Independent Scholar) & Professor Triestino Mariniello (Liverpool John Moores University, UK)
Genocide Obligations from Below: Civil Society and the Operationalisation of Prevention and Cooperation Duties

Dr Stella Milani (University of Florence, Italy)
Beyond the Script: Decentring the Vulnerability Paradigm Through Comics-Based Participatory Research with Unaccompanied Migrant Minors in Italy

Dr Lisa Palmer (University of Birmingham, UK)
Love Inside Babylon - The Cultural Politics of Lovers Rock Reggae Music in Britain

Professor Anna Stavrianakis (University of Sussex, UK)
Unfinished Business. Weapons, War And Empire In The 21st Century

Dr Deniz Yonucu Kesici (Newcastle University, UK)
Entangled Racisms: How Multiple Racisms Fuel the Far-Right in Diverse Societies

Read more about their projects: https://isrf.org/competitions/mcf8

15/09/2026

Join us at the Bishopsgate Institute in London on 23rd October for the launch of Ruth Kinna & Alex Prichard's 'Constitutionalising Anarchy'. With Simon Choat & Kimberly Hutchings we will discuss this reconstruction of 150 years of anarchist constitutional theory https://isrf.org/events/constitutionalising-anarchy

08/09/2026

Pens shaped like drones, toy bombs, rubber missiles and miniature tanks - all can be found at arms fairs, which are tightly guarded international trade shows for military equipment. Jill Gibbon's latest book takes readers behind the scenes to explore how the marketing of weapons functions as a way to obscure the destruction of war

The defence industry has a curiously privileged place in UK and US government spending. The new Burnham administration has promised to prioritise military spending over other sectors. President Trump is set to increase the US defence budget by 44% in 2027 while other government agencies have been gu...

03/09/2026

ISRF Newsletter - September 2026

Featured in the latest edition of the newsletter is a Director's Note on on creativity, neoliberalism and the university. Also included: upcoming events, blogs, Dispatches and news from our network.

Featured in this edition of the newsletter is a Director's Note on creativity, neoliberalism and the university. Also included: upcoming events, blogs, Dispatches and news from our network.

28/08/2026

Plans for university restructuring and cuts follow the same pattern - an announcement of voluntary severance schemes, followed by risk of redundancy letters and then a 90-day consultation period. What happens during these negotiations? Our latest dispatch explores further

Methods of massive university staffing cuts are now quite streamlined across the UK. At my institution, like many other universities over the course of 2026, voluntary severance schemes trailed the announcement of 400 academic staff job losses on the second day of the teaching term, followed (the ne...

25/08/2026

Ukraine's attacks on the Russian e-commerce platform, Wildberries, has far reaching implications for traders across Central Asia. Claudia Eggart explains how small and medium sized business owners in Kyrgyzstan's are grappling with the trade disruptions.

Ukraine’s campaign to target Russia’s e-commerce giant Wildberries has had impacts far beyond the Russian federation. For Russia, Wildberries is comparable to Amazon, accounting for about 50% of the country’s online retail market. But its market place is used by manufacturers as far afield as ...

20/08/2026

The story of the Teesside Freeport is not simply one of economic regeneration and deregulation. It also illustrates how such zones reshape norms around accountability, transparency and development. Our latest ISRF Report from Dr Alexandra Hall examines the complexities of freeports - from legal governance to their impact on local communities, livelihoods and environments.

This page gathers all of the ISRF's official academic publications. This includes the Foundation's in-house periodical, the ISRF Bulletin, as well as individual reports and publications.

18/08/2026

What does it mean to work in the UK's higher education system today? For many academics, it involves confronting increasingly narrow career pathways, from teaching only contracts to conducting 'strategic' research. In this contribution to our Dispatches series, Eva Nanopoulos interrogates how the university's two-tier system divides staff, reinforces precarity and extracts more labour from academics.

‘But some people want, or are naturally more suited for, teaching’. I remember that sentence well. It was right before the pandemic. This was not exactly common knowledge, but my department was trying to move some people currently on research and teaching (T&R) contracts to teaching-only contra...

13/08/2026

This week on Material Crimes, Robyn Gill-Leslie examines the cover-up of anti-apartheid activist Imam Abdullah Haron in 1969. Her investigation uncovers the infrastructures of the apartheid that enabled systems of torture and abuse while protecting those who inflicting it from justice

Material Crimes · Episode