Luke's Notes
Luke's Notes
Luke Martell
This is a personal blog and I post on social and green alternatives, education, books, stories of university life since 1990, politics, music, family, and other themes.
Latest Posts
Continued from Sussex Stories 4 The dream is over The interdisciplinary structures had gone. But more was to come. The university motto 'Be Still and Know' became rarely seen in any public face of the university. There was very little...
Continued from Sussex Stories 3 New appointments and equal opportunities: this is the real world I said the university I arrived at was 'beautiful' in the early years. But it was not beautiful for everyone. The student body was...
Continued from Sussex Stories 2 New Labour, New Britain In May 1994 the Labour leader John Smith died. I bumped into my colleague Stephen Driver on the stairs at work very soon after and we were speculating on who would be the new...
“I would describe myself as a socialist. I describe myself as a progressive”. These were Labour leader Keir Starmer’s words in May 2024 shortly after his first speech of the election campaign. Labour’s constitution defines it as a...
Continued from Sussex Stories 1 The interdisciplinary system For me, the most exciting thing about Sussex was that it had a unique interdisciplinary structure. 'Subject groups' like Sociology (what elsewhere were called departments) were...
See Contents and Introduction to this series. It was beautiful In the 2020s I bumped into an ex-colleague at the local swimming pool. She had been made redundant in some savage anti-education cuts at Sussex in 2012 and I had gone...
These are stories of my time working at Sussex University 1990-2024. PDF version here. Here's a list of the contents, and below that there's a brief introduction. Contents Introduction The early years 1990-98 Part 1 Interview and arrival...
Crossposted from The Loop 2023, under a Creative Commons licence. Socialist democracy includes but can go beyond the state, class, and socialism. It should overcome dichotomous thinking in favour of a pluralist socialism of diverse...
Communism and freedom; Labour and socialism; class, gender, and inequality; race and migration; war, violence, and survival; love; and footballers. Normally I read some academic books on alternatives, socialism, environment etc but this...
Crossposted with slight revisions from Transforming Society 2023.This blog is an introduction to themes from my book Alternative Societies. Alternative ways of living are less an escape from society and more a method for transforming it....
On dialogical education, what it is, more radical and less radical versions, putting it into practice, and whether it can be defended. I teach a course on Alternative Societies on the Sociology degree at Sussex University and this week...
Capitalists, communists, and climate; spies and assassins; cops and robbers; class, race, and gender. And footballers. A few years ago a friend told me he keeps a record of books he reads. So, I started doing it. It's nice to look back...
I've been writing an account of my time as a lecturer at Sussex University since 1990. Critical academics' inconsistency keeps rearing its head. This hasn't surprised me. It's been coming up for years. I've felt a bit alone perceiving it...
Between 2010-13 I wrote some blog posts (links at the bottom) about the privatisation and marketisation of universities in the UK (and elsewhere - for example, Chile, Canada, and the USA). This was as £9000 student contributions to their...