Jonathan Westaway
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jonwestaway.bsky.social
Jonathan Westaway
@jonwestaway.bsky.social
Cultural and environmental historian/geographer. Mountain and polar regions. Cryohistories. Indigenous knowledge. Island Studies.

PL AHRC 'Other Everests' network.
uclan.academia.edu/JonathanWestaway
December 7, 2025 at 1:39 PM
Reposted by Jonathan Westaway
1/2 Historians of slavery & Empire have known all along that Lord Biggar’s & History Reclaimed’s interventions in these fields are wholly politically motivated, morally & logically inconsistent and founded on the cherry-picking rather than examination of evidence. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
The British Empire in the Culture War: Nigel Biggar’s Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning
The British Empire has been politicised to an extent that many of us could never have predicted just a few years ago. The colonial past features especially prominently in the right wing-oriented pr...
www.tandfonline.com
December 5, 2025 at 7:21 AM
Reposted by Jonathan Westaway
Our NiCHE Conversation with @sabinelebel.bsky.social is now on YouTube!

LeBel joined @jessicamdewitt.bsky.social to chat about orca memes and interspecies solidarity.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9Q8...

#envhist #envhum #orcas #animalstudies
NiCHE Conversations 6.5: Orca Memes & Anti-Capitalist Interspecies Solidarity with Sabine LeBel
YouTube video by Network in Canadian History & Environment - NiCHE
www.youtube.com
December 3, 2025 at 8:35 PM
Reposted by Jonathan Westaway
This weekend is the next iteration of Terror Camp, a free online conference for polar exploration enthusiasts, which has the highest level of intellectual content and hilarity I have ever encountered: www.terror.camp @terrorcamp.bsky.social
Terror Camp | Polar Fan Conference
Terror Camp is an annual virtual gathering of hundreds of polar exploration enthusiasts. Inspired by AMC's The Terror and the history of the Franklin Expedition, this polar exploration conference feat...
www.terror.camp
December 3, 2025 at 5:05 PM
Reposted by Jonathan Westaway
Excited to see @jonwestaway.bsky.social and coeditors’ great collection in my local independent bookshop @grovebookshop.bsky.social Was going to offer to do signings of my chapter but thought again!
November 29, 2025 at 2:01 PM
Reposted by Jonathan Westaway
My latest for @canadiandimension.bsky.social

“All we are doing is conducting a scientific investigation...we are discovering new species for science, which could disappear if the Vizcachitas mining project were to go ahead," says Cádiz-Véliz, local biologist targeted for opposing the Canadian mine
The mineral-intensive energy transition in Latin America is advancing in ways that undermine human rights and nature, pushing into fragile ecosystems, overriding community consent, and placing environmental defenders at growing risk.

NEW from Viviana Herrera of @miningwatch.bsky.social:
Corporate pressure mounts on Chileans opposing Canadian copper mine
A Canadian mining company is escalating legal pressure against Chileans fighting to protect a fragile Andean ecosystem. As Vancouver-based Los Andes Copper pushes its Vizcachitas project, local offici...
canadiandimension.com
November 27, 2025 at 4:21 PM
Reposted by Jonathan Westaway
As a mounting number of Russia's shadow fleet ships sails across the Northern Sea Route to Chinese ports, a Beijing-led business delegation came to Arkhangelsk to discuss shipping
Beijing's men on the Northern Dvina
As a mounting number of Russia's shadow fleet ships sails across the Northern Sea Route to Chinese ports, a Beijing-led business delegation comes to Arkhangelsk to discuss shipping.
www.thebarentsobserver.com
November 27, 2025 at 12:34 PM
Reposted by Jonathan Westaway
Call for Papers: TALKING STONES – OBJECT AND MATERIALITY IN EARLY MODERN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE International Conference – Prague, 17–18 April 2026.

See H-Sicily for the full Call for Papers: networks.h-net.org/group/announ...
November 26, 2025 at 3:31 PM
Reposted by Jonathan Westaway
New blog from IHR Director @[email protected] reflecting on how historians can advocate for history through our practice, and defend the important historical work that goes on within universities as well as beyond them. blog.history.ac.uk/2025/11/advo...
Advocating for History by Doing History - On History
This blog was written by Claire Langhamer, Director of the IHR Historians are very good at crafting arguments and in recent times very many people have advanced very many arguments about why history…
blog.history.ac.uk
November 26, 2025 at 10:45 AM
'These monks also illuminate a lesser-known dimension of Buddhism: its patriarchal structure. Across south and south-east Asia, particularly within the Theravada tradition, male monks enjoy privileges systemically denied to women.'

www.theguardian.com/news/2025/no...
The dangerous rise of Buddhist extremism: ‘Attaining nirvana can wait’
The long read: Still largely viewed as a peaceful philosophy, across much of south-east Asia, the religion has been weaponised to serve nationalist goals
www.theguardian.com
November 26, 2025 at 12:21 PM
Reposted by Jonathan Westaway
Coming out in February, this must read: "Intoxicated Ways of Knowing. The Untold Story of Intoxicants and the Biological Subject in Nineteenth-Century Germany."
Intoxicated Ways of Knowing
Argues that intoxication was fundamental to German physiological, psychological, and psychiatric research during the nineteenth century.   Intoxicating substances can be found lurking in every corner ...
press.uchicago.edu
November 25, 2025 at 9:26 PM
'Greenlandic parents in Denmark are 5.6 times more likely to have children taken into care than Danish parents, according to the Danish Centre for Social Research, a government-funded research institute.'
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
#KalaallitNunaat #Greenland #IndigenousRights #Colonialism
Greenlandic families fight to get children back after parenting tests banned
The Danish government has banned the use of parental competency tests on Greenlandic families after decades of criticism.
www.bbc.co.uk
November 23, 2025 at 6:11 PM
Reposted by Jonathan Westaway
Here's an excellent piece by Sverker Sörlin on his notion of integrative #humanities..

To solve some of the issues for #science raised in recent posts by @ersatzben.com @richardaljones.bsky.social @profserious.bsky.social we will need more of this thinking

www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....
University of Chicago Press Journals: Cookie absent
www.journals.uchicago.edu
November 23, 2025 at 9:44 AM
Reposted by Jonathan Westaway
Profoundly beautiful account of the history of snow studies, the fragility of snow and the impact of the anthropocene by Sverker Sörlin.

Also an appeal for a different way of doing #science
November 23, 2025 at 9:44 AM
Reposted by Jonathan Westaway
Reposted by Jonathan Westaway
he Miners' Library, Wanlockhead. established 1756. Not quite as old as the one in neighbouring Leadhills, which opened in 1741, but still and important resource for working people.
#blackandwhitephotography #Scotland #Galloway
November 22, 2025 at 9:10 AM
Reposted by Jonathan Westaway
Join the Society's Historical Geography Research Group for their upcoming conference: 'Practising Historical Geography: Porous Archives 2'.

📍 In person (Newcastle University) and online
📅 Friday 12 December

Find out more and register for free 👉 blogs.ncl.ac.uk/porousarchives
November 20, 2025 at 12:00 PM
Reposted by Jonathan Westaway
This battle to get these recordings released is important just for admirers of Dick Gaughan’s music, but for music fans in general. www.theguardian.com/music/2025/n...
‘I never wanted to sing into a vacuum’: Scottish folk pioneer Dick Gaughan’s fight for his lost music
A skilled interpreter and social justice champion, Gaughan is a hero to the likes of Richard Hawley and Billy Bragg. Yet much of his work has been stuck in limbo for decades – until a determined fan s...
www.theguardian.com
November 19, 2025 at 6:42 PM
Reposted by Jonathan Westaway
"Seasonality at the Bear Island Indian Day School" by @tweedwoodcabin.bsky.social is the latest article in our Land, Memory, and Schooling: Environmental Histories of Colonial Education series edited by Crystal Gail Fraser & @jdunkin.bsky.social

niche-canada.org/2025/11/18/s...

#envhist #cdnhist
Seasonality at the Bear Island Indian Day School
The Bear Island Indian Day School balanced Anishnabeg seasonality and colonial schooling until Ontario’s environmental policies dismantled land-based life and autonomy.
niche-canada.org
November 19, 2025 at 4:27 PM
Reposted by Jonathan Westaway
Just discovered that Julia Stephens' new book will be out soon! I've been looking forward to this since a UK train conversation with Julia years ago about jewelry in South Asian history: press.princeton.edu/books/hardco... @juliasteph
Worldly Afterlives
The hidden histories of empire, told through the haunted afterlives of colonial migrations
press.princeton.edu
November 19, 2025 at 1:14 PM
Reposted by Jonathan Westaway
Today is publication day for my book, Mixed-Blood Histories: Race, Law, and Dakota Indians in the Nineteenth-Century Midwest, through the University of Minnesota Press!
www.upress.umn.edu/978151792034...
Mixed-Blood Histories
An unprecedented study that puts mixed-ancestry Native Americans back into the heart of Indigenous history Historical accounts tend to neglect mixed-ancestry...
www.upress.umn.edu
November 18, 2025 at 2:04 PM
Reposted by Jonathan Westaway
Four new books open up debate on why same-sex marriage has come to anchor queer politics in India, and how the notions and politics of Southasian queer life shift across local, diasporic and transnational scales of identity and belonging.

A review essay by Rahul Rao :
Navigating new scales of queer Southasia
IT WASN’T THAT long ago that queer Southasian studies – perhaps especially work centred on India – seemed to be intensely preoccupied with the frame of the nati
buff.ly
November 19, 2025 at 11:30 AM
Reposted by Jonathan Westaway
Unfurling with a Song: Ecological Themes and the Question of Creative Labour in Contemporary Scroll-Paintings:

Tomorrow at 17:30 p.m

Join on site or online: univienna.zoom.us/j/6395063435.... (688384)
Or in the seminar room 1 of the ISTB (Spitalgasse 2, Hof 2.7)

stb.univie.ac.at/news-events/...
November 19, 2025 at 12:01 PM
Reposted by Jonathan Westaway
In the latest #HOPOS Ivan Ferreira da Cunha "examines the role of imagination and fiction in Otto Neurath’s work, particularly in his scientific utopianism."

Link to the article here: www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....
November 19, 2025 at 8:00 AM