 really keen on a discussion around this. So this, what I want to talk about is based on a piece that was co-authored by myself, Katherine Wright at the University of Newcastle, Newcastle University, and Roberta Guerrina at the University of Bristol. And in terms of what motivated us to write this piece, I think it came from really Facebook messenger chats and video chats and just us talking about our lived experience at the start of COVID, but also in the context of other conversations that we've been having for perhaps about five, six years now around crisis. So first, the financial crisis and the ensuing austerity and then Brexit and the work that we do on that and more recently COVID. But also it comes from our specific positionality. So myself as a black woman in Scotland, trying to navigate a relatively new institution because I just started my job at Stirling in 2019. Katherine navigating the sort of promotion system, she just got promoted and the impact of the crisis response on sort of a mobility within the institution. And Roberta, who's senior to us, professor, the director of the center, but also moving to a new institution and of the three of us, she had two children and was trying to commute and ensure that, you know, their own education was going as they should be going. So, but of course we're also collocated in different parts of the country. So I'm in Scotland, Katherine is in the north of England and Roberta is down south, you know, on the border kind of with Wales. So we thought, okay, we're having very different experiences, but we're also having similar issues in that, you know, we're all in British universities and although all our institutions are perhaps responding in different ways. So in Stirling, for example, they were quite decisive about when we moved online, whereas I think it took a while for Bristol to make that decision. There were still some commonalities. One of the things that we noticed is sort of, you know, when COVID happened, crisis tends to provide an opportunity for change or the status quo. And what we saw was kind of the status quo and change happening all at once where you had a lot of emphasis on researchers to kind of pursue money that would fund COVID related research, regardless of what it is that you'd previously done. And of course, for our part, as people who are interested in crisis, we didn't necessarily think that that was contra to some of what we might be interested in, but of course the ways in which we were particularly interested in COVID, which was not short term, which is sort of trying to understand that its impact on a sort of spectrum or a continuum was not necessarily, I would say, did not actually speak to the kind of urgent or reactive type of funding that was really been pushed, both by universities, but also by funding bodies. So, you know, we kind of defied that idea of newness. And we thought that that was really fascinating. We were concerned that, you know, those who would be considered productive going forward are those who are doing the research on COVID because they're able to publish much faster. At the same time, we were expending so much energy around teaching, making sure that our students are safe. And of course, all of this was happening at the same time where some of us were experiencing real traumas around the murder of George Floyd in the US and, you know, the black, the black profiles and black buttons and the institutional rhetorical support for black lives matter and racial equality that was not really born out in the everyday practices of these institutions. So we thought, okay, you know, another commonalities that we're all in sort of the same, we're in the same discipline. So we needed to reflect on that in the context of being in PolIR, so to speak. So the one thing I would want to mention about this particular piece is that as you know, it is published in our gender work and organization, but was actually initially submitted to politics and gender. So for those people who are familiar, this is one of the top journals around gender and politics. And it had a call out for 2000 word piece around COVID rapid research. And we thought that this would be a good fit, but it was desk rejected because it wasn't deemed to be a fit. And perhaps in the Q&A, it's something to come back to. And we subsequently submitted an edited to gender work and organization and it was accepted. The other question that Amanda asked is, why ontological insecurity as an operating concept? And I've been thinking about this. It's probably the question that I thought about the most when I was preparing for this. In the sense that, you know, on the one hand, I think, you know, frankly, kind of describes how I'm constantly feel ontologically insecure in the institution. Again, as somebody who resides in my body and is in my position. So it's not necessarily a new feeling. And it's one that has often resonated actually in the everyday and outside of actually security studies for me. I think that in our discussions, we realized that we have, this was the one thing that even though it's often quite difficult to articulate that sense of anxiety undermines what the system, the university system, particularly in the UK, but more broadly really the discipline would suggest would make you good academic. And you might notice that in the article, you know, we really focus on research and the impact on research. That wasn't because we were not thinking about teaching. In fact, that was probably the only, the thing that we prioritized above everything else. But we also knew that, you know, because of how at least for the three of us, our identities were wrapped up in sort of that dual place of being researchers and teachers. And we were being sort of forced to dedicate all of this energy to learning and scholarship without any reflection on how it's actually the balance that has made us previously a good teachers and good researchers. So the ontological insecurity as an operating concept came from the fact that, you know, Jennifer Mixon and others have really good definitions for how we were feeling. It's linked to a precarity and sort of, I also think that's fascinating. So I like to think of this particular article as like the first, you know, trilogy. So there's this piece and there's another one that we've also co-authored. And then there's another piece that I've written on my own where I sort of tackle that idea of precarity and insecurity. I think they are related, but again, perhaps this is a bias of our place of what it is that we study. So on to the next question about how the pandemic has really brought to light the role of care work and how the role it plays in how we function as communities and how we shape the economy. So I think, I don't know if COVID has altered how higher education has, how higher education understood care work. I think, I mean, there's been so much work done, especially in the United States around care being in higher education that I'm not convinced that, you know, this is new or somehow that it has changed how we understand it. The only, and also, you know, if you think of care work, not simply as taking care of children, but the sort of caring that is done within the academy itself, I would suggest that, you know, so we're seeing it in very sort of heightened forms right now and everyone has to at least consider it even if they're not doing it. I think that's the main difference. But does that actually impact on institutional changes that I don't think that we've necessarily seen, at least we've not seen a lot of, not in the context of UK universities, some institutions, like I know that Strathclyde, for example, has given Fridays off to staff who just need it for regenerative purposes. But of course, that only makes sense if the quantity of actual work actually changes. So you can sort of say, hey, you have Friday to take care of yourself, take care of your family, but is the workload actually shifting so that you actually have that Friday off? I think that, yes, there are, we know that there are certain care responsibilities that get more coverage and support than others. So whenever things, at the beginning of the sort of lockdown when, you know, everything happens through, suddenly there was no space to prepare. A lot of mothers, young and older just had to wing it. And it was mainly mothers. So it wasn't that there weren't other parents in the picture, but given existing gender hierarchies within society and our own institutions, a lot of the task fell to mothers. And that became visible, even though we did not see the kind of response that we would expect not from government and certainly not from our institutions. And this is something that has still been dealt with. But one of the things, at least speaking for myself personally, that we didn't really talk about was, as I mentioned earlier, this happened at around the same time that a lot of black people were traumatized by what had happened in the US and were able to, some people were experiencing it here. So in the UK in terms of the relationship between black and other communities of colors relationship with the police and the impact of that hand and the sort of care that you had to undertake within the organization for our students of color, this was not necessarily acknowledged, mainly because in a way it's always been there. It's just that, in May of this past year, we who provided the care because we felt that we had to, we're also significantly traumatized. And I had to take time off from work at a time when my canvas page was still due and my deadline did not change for that. So here it was on sick leave and I still had to produce this work. In any case, I mean, I think one could argue that, we just haven't really had time to process it. So perhaps in the future, this is something that we're really going to get a chance to reflect on. Now, thinking through the, the initiatives and responsibilities that universities have and basically who has a role to respond and what is the role of colleagues? Well, I must say, I'm not, I don't think that I personally sort of have a strategy on how we go about this. Certainly, I believe that universities have a duty of care to their staff and they have a duty of care to their students to make them ontologically secure and how we understood this in the context of the article is that, when you're, for example, providing support around say applying for funding applications that you don't either discursively or materially prioritize those people who you think are more likely to bring in the money because it's based on COVID or people who are already, you know, people who after this crisis is over because they've been able to do their research that they are not necessarily advantaged over those people who were taking care of children, taking care of other people and who were just effectively struggling to cope during this crisis. The other thing that I think has been highlighted by COVID and I think, you know, we don't talk about it enough whereas I think, you know, where I think more or less clear about the gendered impact and we're coming to grips with the racialized impact. A lot of stuff that has been hard for a lot of us during COVID is the lived everyday experience of a lot of disabled people. And here we are, at least we make a showing of, you know attending to some of the needs, some of the caring needs or responding to some of the crisis needs of COVID where disabled people have not been given the time of day for years and years. So at the very least, I would hope that in any sort of reflection on regeneration and a recovery that is beneficial to all and that is inclusive that this comes front and center, that this isn't just, you know, this aren't just things that we do to recover from COVID that it becomes part and parcel of our identity. What would those things look like? I mean, I think that the union has done a relatively good job in articulating how staff should be protected. So around the move to online teaching, we know how long that took to be enacted. In terms of colleagues, I think most people have been quite collegial and been quite supportive. If there was, you know, the only thing I would say is that I'm not sure that this can be material or tangible in any ways that, you know, we don't make assumptions about what people are going through. So I think it's easy to do that when you're not seeing people every day or every week as you used to in the hallways. And that's where colleagues can be supportive. I think, you know, union can definitely be and there'll be a range of ways in which you can do that. And on that note, I should say, if you're not in a union, join a union. Thanks. Great. Thanks for that, Toni. Those are some really interesting and important reflections. And I just remember, you know, when your piece, your co-author piece first came out, it was, it just resonated, I guess, with what I was thinking. So this is where I'm like, great, we need to invite Toni to come and talk. But, you know, just your commentary here, I saw, I can only see Aggie on the video, but I saw her nodding along to a lot of these shared experiences across higher education. And I do like the idea of ontological insecurities and securities, as you say, that it offers more of a holistic look of who the workers within higher education are and the different supports. They require, right, to be secure workers. I guess I pushed you more on the precarity because, as you know, I come from a feminist political economy background. So I was just wondering, I'm like, well, okay, what is new about this concept that feminist IP scholars haven't already, haven't already told us. And then I, yeah, and then I'm particularly too. So as I'm totally abusing the position of chair until someone raises their hand or asks a comment or put something in the chat box. But yeah, I think that the care work, you're right that this is a feminist for a long time have been telling us and demonstrating the care work that gets done in direct support of the university in terms of pastoral work and whatnot and the gendered implications of who actually does that work, let alone the other care work, the broader care work of raising children, of taking care of elderly, of broader reproductive work as well. And I mean, my own personal reflections is I agree with you that I feel like at King's too, everyone I think now needs to acknowledge care work more than what they used to for sure. But it just, yeah, it seems to be the care work that the parental care work seems to be rendered much more visible than other care work, which I also find curious and interesting. And then before I pass the floor over to Aggie for a question, just a further reflection on, I think you raise a really important point about universities were throwing money at research on COVID, but you're right, I think this is the experience at King's too, only certain framings of how that research gets conducted were done. And it's, I think, important to reflect upon what this funded research will tell us if it's not embedded, like you said, in a framing of longer term that actually highlights that these structural inequalities, precarities, ontological insecurities, as you say, have a legacy, right? They just didn't start when COVID starts and they're not gonna end. So what does that mean for the knowledge that we are producing? Who's producing that knowledge and how we think about the implications of COVID? But I will stop with my commentary there and I will just pass the floor to Aggie for hopefully a question to you. Mine was more of commentary you can pick up or not as you want, Tony. Aggie? Great, thanks, Amanda. And hi, Tony, it's lovely to see you. Thank you for a brilliant talk, I've always, you know, equal parts, you know, frustration and hope and rage and optimism and all of that stuff. And thank you to everybody who's doing all of the work that you're setting out there, you know, extremely important. I guess my question is about, you mentioned this concept of ontological security and I was just wondering if you've engaged with the kind of critiques of the concept of ontologies called security that have come out. I'm thinking particularly of Chris Rosdale's piece that came out, I think four or five years ago now, probably, and what he, and what I think it does is that it draws out this really important question of how do we navigate on the one hand needing certain kinds of security, right? Like on an everyday basis, we need to feel secure in our jobs, ourselves, our positions, our interactions. And yet, how do we simultaneously kind of maintain a critique of security projects who are security projects even at the level of ontology? Because as we know, security projects have at their heart this attempt to kind of totalize and master and always bring with them kind of hierarchies and exclusions of their own. So I guess I'm just wondering whether you'd engage with those critiques of ontological security and how that bears out in your thinking. Thanks a lot. Thank you, I guess. Engaged, no, but I was just reading last night Chris's critique again because it came up for another piece that I was working on. And I think the critique stands, I wouldn't doubt that at all, especially if I was deploying this in a sort of the usual security context, you would say, one that somehow at some point, one of the actors might be including the state. I think in the context of this piece, we used it bearing in mind sort of the normative baggage linked to it, that we use it as a descriptive concept for I think one main reason and to acknowledge one main thing that on the one hand, what security means for me is still different to what it means for Catherine and it's still different to what it means to Roberta, but that feeling of anxiety, which again, as I said earlier, it's not necessarily tangible. Like if you asked, said, I was sat on a therapist chair and they asked me, tell me what you mean by what you feel like. I can't define it for you, but I know how I feel. It's kind of like when you make those comments on Twitter and people have similar comments, having read the same thing, it's not because they can see each other, but it's sort of that reaction. And I think, going back to the midst and definition, that really resonated with us that it's, and to distinguish it from the point about precarity, where precarity is asking us to consistently reflect about those feelings of anxiety, but in relation to the structure, which is the case here, it is about the structure, but it's also about me as an academic outside of the University of Stirling specifically and just me out there in the world and the identity that I've cultivated for myself and how that's been impacted by COVID and those practices. And I think that's why we chose that as the descriptor, for example, rather than precarity, even though, as I said earlier, I actually think some more recent work around precarity has been quite useful. So yeah, I don't know if that answers your question. I still think that that critique stands and I wouldn't discount that. And I would say, there has to be care there, I think that in the way that at least I understand it and it articulates those feelings of anxiety that are not quite tangible, but at the same time, perhaps also help us make sense of our own reactions, whether it's kind of a retreat or engagement with this sort of crisis response, then makes it useful for us. Yeah. Thanks, Tony. Claudia put in the comments just a tag on from Aggie's point, is that she wonders, how do we navigate the call for protection on to logical security with the other call of transforming the university? Have you thought about how those work in relation to one another? Right. So I mean, to my mind, I guess, it might be appropriate that if you take this to its logical conclusion, you call for sort of protection on the part of the university, but I wouldn't call for protection part of the university. We are the university, if anything, this is a call to arms to reclaim what the university is. At the same time, I guess, one of the reasons why I'm often quite skeptical about a transforming the university, I'm not skeptical about the idea that we can, we should strive for change, whether it's through claims around decolonizing the curriculum and all of that and thinking those things through, but sometimes I think that conversations suggest that there will be an endpoint, whereas the argument that I would make is that the university in the way that it's constructed, to still to keep claiming to be the university is quite hegemonic anyway. And so in however many years that university things have existed, people who look like me still don't belong. I don't think that that's going to change in 20 years, even if we start talking more feminism. And it doesn't mean that I can't survive within the institution, but the institution is not built for me. And I cannot foresee a situation where the things that we say matter to the constitution of the university as it currently exists, even when we're looking at its best practice will ever have space for people who look like me. But that doesn't mean that I can't survive within it. I think maybe that's where I don't think, I don't think that the university can ever protect me. Although of course the university as a structure perhaps offers some sort of protection. I mean, at least I used to think it did, but given the conversations we're having about academic freedom and free speech, perhaps not so much. Yeah, I mean that's such a dystopic view, which I think is so important too, isn't it? So it's, you know, I think it's where we look, like you said, to being ontologically secure, right? And who, and you know, if it's not structured, if we don't believe that the university as a structure can ever fully, you know, be the space where people who, like you said, Tony, people who aren't white, who, you know, who the university itself, the architecture wasn't built on, feel secure, then what? Then who? Then I guess maybe finding the solution isn't necessarily the answer at the moment. I'm not sure what the answer is. I mean, I think, so I guess that's why I do come back to maybe be ontological security, at least as I would suggest we use it. Again, perhaps not the logical conclusion of those people who do more theorizing than I do, that my ontological security within the university, so me being ontologically secure within the university is perhaps not just attached to what it is that the university does for me or to me, right? And so actually in the process of collaboration and engagement, which is facilitated by the fact that, you know, the three of us are in university, perhaps provides some sort of ontological security, but that's not because Sterling or Newcastle or Bristol did anything for us. And I think maybe that would be the distinction that I would make there in terms of, you know, what you can expect or what you can't expect. It doesn't mean that, you know, at least I, you know, I'm hoping that's not what the, what the article came across as that, you know, we should just sort of throw our hands up and give up at this point. But actually if we can call attention to the fact that the slippery slope that we think that we're on or, you know, at different points in this particular crisis, you think you've reached the tip of the iceberg that we need to be careful that that's indeed not the case and that, you know, again, like this week, we kind of see the kind of conversations that are going on and that are happening. It really shows us that, you know, we are, it's not just that we are in crisis mode, but there are multiple crises that intersect and that COVID is just, you know, to use a very quality term. It's just an intervening variable in the border crisis. I just wonder if there, I know there are some particular ECRs that are in PhD students that are on this air in this meeting too. And I'm not sure if they have particular reflections. I know, you know, Tony, you and I have both read that recent kind of multiple these. I wonder if you can, and that particularly addresses or confronts ESRC and the broader funding of PhD students in the funding infrastructures, let alone like we have a ref and all of that still going ahead. Like what, I just wonder if you could offer some thoughts upon, you know, reading that, particularly for PhD students. Yeah, so I thank you again for sending that to me. And I think it kind of captures a lot of the other, the conversations that have been going on in different spaces, particularly on social media around how you create in particular has behaved. I think, you know, there are a few things that it highlights for me. And again, this is where you sort of see, okay, we're in this crisis and COVID is just one thing. Well, the first is number one, like, you know, the percentage of PhD students who actually get funding from Ukraine in this country is quite small. However, Ukraine or in our case, usually it's ESRC, right? The guidelines that they set for how the PhDs run is the one that most institutions take on. So what happens in the Ukraine cosmos tends to affect all PhD students regardless of who is funding you. I think the possible exception of that is perhaps students that are funded by a welcome trust, they seem to be happier on the whole. So a few things. One, Ukraine's reaction has been abysmal. But Ukraine's reaction is not out to step with most institutions, including mine, and this idea of resilience. Now, resilience, at least as I understand it in of itself, I mean, if you're just looking at a dictionary definition, it's not actually a bad thing. But in my experience, it's often attached to certain ideological frames, within our higher education sector, that I've actually found to be quite destructive, where basically if things are not going well for you, it's kind of your fault. Whereas, I mean, I think that's slightly different from, you know, yeah, we need to adapt to crisis and how do we adapt to crisis so that we can bounce back better. We can bounce back better. Nothing that Ukraine has done, in my opinion, would suggest that this is the perspective they want to take, even though the language has been very much, yeah, you should just really, it's up to you guys to devise, up to your supervisor, so more labor on those people who have supervision. But also the anxiety, the levels of anxiety that this has created amongst PhD students. So I know someone who's, their research is supposed to be in South Africa, and they can't, they physically cannot go to South Africa, not at least because, you know, first it's outside of the UK, but secondly, you know, there's the whole South African variant thing. So I think, you know, that was the double whammy. And yet they've had to fill out like, you know, pages and pages of paperwork around mitigation and sort of, you know, changing the project because that's not the project that you've pre-wanted to fund. And there's been absolutely no care at all around, you know, this is just physically undoable. It's not because I don't want to do, but this is physically undoable. There's been no reflection around that. Meanwhile, what is the institution doing? It's like, well, there's just this paperwork to fill, so good luck with that. So on the whole, right, this has been a big problem, but I also see it as part of a bigger problem, like, you know, bigger problem that's often always affected early career researchers from PhD to postdoc. Part of a bigger problem we're in for even the sort of diversion of monies to studying COVID has not seen COVID funding for the communities most affected by COVID in this country. You know, the fact that, you know, no black scholar got any funding despite the applications that have gone through a lot of the same processes. So again, I sort of see this as being on the continuum. Was it surprising? Absolutely not. I think that's the only thing I would say I was, well, it's not the only thing. The only thing I was sad about, everything else I was very angry about. The thing that I was sad about is that some people were actually surprised. And it's like, if you ask those people who couldn't even get funding, because you know, historically, UCRE, ESRC, AHRC, MRC doesn't provide a lot of funding for people of color in this country. Then it's not surprising that, you know, this is the attitude that they would take this attitude of disdain to people who having good faith applied for funding, who having good faith, you know, been doing their work and people who might, you know, also be parents or have other care and responsibilities and just, because it's not even a pretence that they don't exist. It's an acknowledgement that they exist, but that, you know, they're not our problem. You know, I think reports like the one that you shared are useful to bring together those experiences and to create a space and a forum for a bit of reflection. But given the sort of my dialogue and engagement with activists who've been on UCRE's case around inequalities, I mean, I'm not convinced that anything is going to change. Yeah. I think there was a question from Laura. So Laura, you already answered it while she was typing it. It was, yeah, does the broader call of decolonizing fix anything? You're like, nope, in short. Yeah, so, but Aggie had a question that she wanted to ask. Okay. Sorry to jump in again. If anyone else wants to go ahead, please do. But I was just, I was wondering about your own experience, Tony, and those of your co-authors and indeed other folks on the call as well. How do you sort of navigate the tension between, on the one hand, it's very hard to do any of this work when you have unsympathetic institutions or unsympathetic management at departments or school level or whatever. But on the other hand, if you do have sympathetic or seemingly sympathetic folks, there is that danger or that possibility then that they both wanna get involved and then oversee and then somehow kind of take ownership of but at the same moment potentially dilute and divert some of these activities. So I mean, how do you see the relationship between the kind of grassroots people trying to do this work on a kind of semi-formal basis, i.e. all of us and those folks who kind of on the one hand would want to seem to facilitate it but on the other hand, then what checking exercises and mainstreaming activities get involved. Like, how should that dynamic work in your experience? Because I'm finding myself a bit stymied at the moment. Yeah. I mean, I would say I'm probably just perhaps as frustrated as you. I'll give you one example. So a few, I think it was just last week. I mean, the days blend into each other now. I don't know what day it is, but I think it was last week and I was, every Wednesday we get sent a sort of communication round from the university. And for me, a way to be part of the university community still, particularly when everything is online is to go through that, you know, sometimes they announce who's gotten new funding and you can say congratulations or, you know, some new exercise class that I never remember to go to somehow. But, you know, I go through those, the Wednesday communications and one of it was around decolonizing the curriculum. And I thought, well, you know, University of Edinburgh has been really good around this and still has Glasgow sort of reflecting on the links to slavery and colonialism. So I thought, okay, you know, what is my institution wanting to do about this? And I clicked on the link and it took me to a page of, you know, not to put anybody on blast, two white women on a page where decolonizing the curriculum was embedded within this logic of resilience that I was talking about, right? So again, to be clear, I'm not, you know, I've done some research and reading around resilience myself. I don't think that you cannot not use it particularly in our line of work, but I've seen how it's been articulated in the context of higher education since COVID, which is what I'm skeptical about. And the fact that it was sort of embedded within resilience, not decolonizing curriculum for its own sake, whatever you, you know, before we even get to how they understand that, but being embedded within sort of this resilience. And I had a very visible reaction to it because I sort of tweeted about them. So many people were shocked and I'm like, I mean, I don't even know if I'm shocked or angry or anything. And my reaction was, you know, this is why I disengage with certain processes. So when you ask, you know, how does that dynamic work? Olivia Rituzipua has this concept of ethical retreat. And I sort of turned that on his head. So like, you know, when she's talking about ethical retreat, she's basically talking about people who have power leaving a particular space because it causes more harm than good. And you know, in this context states, but I sort of turned that on his head and I sort of think of it as me leaving a space because what is actually happening, I think is unethical. So it's ethical for me to actually withdraw from that space, even though I don't, it's not that I have power in that particular space. I just find it as a useful descriptor. And so sometimes I think you have to make that call because, you know, I think, you know, sometimes it's good to be in certain spaces where you can properly raise your voice and, you know, put your foot down about certain things. But I, you know, in this particular context where in the midst of, you know, pandemic, people literally dying, you choose that moment to decide that, you know, of all the moments before and possible moments after you want to decolonize the curriculum within a narrative of resilience and adaptability, I can't, there is no way that I can trust you, even if you say you're sorry because that was the deliberate choice. So I think that in some cases, you know, you just have to say, yeah, I'm not doing that. In other cases, when you have allies, when you have enough people around the table who are saying, really, you know, it's useful to bind together and that, you know, the result of that is this article, the result of that is the article we've submitted to you. But in other context, you just have to say, no, thanks. So like earlier this year, I was asked, I wasn't asked to be failed because my head of department is awesome. She said, so, you know, this stuff around black history month is going on in October, I'm just, you know, letting you know out there, I was like, no, because this was the university that released this Black Lives Matter statement on a Saturday and on Facebook. I thought, you know, it's very hard for me to believe that you do care. So yeah, no, I'm not going to be used to pretend that you care about those things. Like, you know, right now we're trying to get to figure out how to support students who might have to quarantine for almost 2,000 pounds. And you know, who's going to put up that money? So do you care about Black Lives or do you just care about their money? So things like that sometimes means that I just don't engage and I think that's okay. Some people would ascribe it to a self-care issue. And I think in some cases it is, but I think in other cases, I think it's just ethical to do that. Yeah. I mean, again, not to bring in my own research again, Tonya, I feel like I want to go off. You should. I feel what, you know, for, and I'm sure Claudia and Aggie will be, you know, nodding along because I've talked at nauseam to them about this too. It's the concept of affect to you, right? And how, I mean, what you're describing and trying to articulate the indescribable, the intangibles, right? I think also speak to the concept of affect as well as in terms of, you know what, Burlant and Ahmed, for example, describes it too. And how that becomes gendered racialized classed and how people experience are expected to absorb more than others, right? Swallow more than others who can have outbursts, who can swallow, who can, and I think all of this also ties into the concept of resilience, right? Who gets rendered more resilient, who gets rendered more ontologically securious is those aspects too. So maybe over a glass of wine at some point, we can have what we think might be an internal article around this too. So thinking about this and sharing. And I do like, yeah, your point of knowing when to just disengage and say no, because I think we all get frustrated with the broader social justice, EDI kind of campaigns like Aggie articulated quite well. You know, it's the constant push, push, and then deciding when to pursue something and whatnot. I think that's pretty good wisdom as well too. But I've talked way too much. Does anyone else have any other closing remarks? I think you just speak so eloquently, Tony, that I don't know. I prefer just listening. That's fine. But I don't know if anyone and just leave the space or pause, you know, virtually you always have to pause a bit more to see if anyone else has any kind of final comments or commentaries. Again, I love that the, you know, some PhD and ECR students are here. And I know anecdotally through these different shared spaces, we've been able to, I mean, Aggie and I and Claudia participate quite frequently in the writing or writing sprints. And this has, I think offers another great space where you can collectively share ideas, feelings, thoughts. Like you said, you know, about the university, there's the structures of the university, but then there's also the colleagues, right? The networks, the friendships and whatnot that I think are so important. And this is able to foster spaces of multiple perspectives and experiences, which I think is really important. And we still need to hold on to that too. Yeah. But yeah, I don't think anyone's gonna raise their hands. I think they're just, yeah, it's totally fine. It's great that, you know, people are in the room listening and we're engaging in these conversations. So, Tony, I guess I'll just give the floor left over to you or any kind of final reflections or thoughts before we close this cafe. Great. I mean, I guess one of the things that I've been thinking about lately is, you know, often we say things like, you know, the structure. And I say that as well, like the university. And in the end, right, we do that because we want to distinguish those things that seem unchanging and harmful to us from the things that make us feel good, help us become our best selves, which are, you know, the friendships, the different types of collaborations and that happen across institutions. But I also want, but I, you know, increasingly I'm thinking sometimes that gives a pass to what is in effect people. That, you know, if you say, yeah, so, you know, whatever it is that we say that is wrong with our universities, this is based on decisions that specific people are making, either as a group because they are in particular positions or as individuals, but also because they're in particular positions. And this group collectively known as the management, but often refer to themselves as leadership. And I guess that's where my, a lot of my thoughts and my conversations with both Robert and Catherine is sort of tending to this days, you know, as sort of an extension of what we're talking about in the article about, you know, the distinctions between management and leadership and the importance of still recognizing agents within structure and agents that have the power to change and that change obviously can be, again, regenerative or toxic as we find. So, you know, definitely do not let VCs off the hook even if it feels more productive to just disengage for a while. But, you know, there's a reason why they are the CEOs of the institutions. And that's why, you know, I'll be frank and say I'm quite pleased by what's, not what led to it, but the kind of responses in both Leicester and in Manchester around choices that have been made in the context of COVID for whatever reason. And that, you know, when you feel bugged down by the system I think that's a, that it's a productive way for us to sort of, you know, make sense of the world around us. But, you know, when you do have that energy again don't forget that this system is being driven by certain people, by a certain person and for particular reasons and interests. And, you know, we should be able to hold those accountable. Those people accountable. Thank you so much for your reflections and thank you for ending it on a both. It's okay to retreat, have self-care, but, you know let's build ourselves up as a community and fight back. And you're right in naming people behind these processes and structures and institutions, right? So, to concretely name that these are people and these are concrete social relations that are underpinning why decisions are being made. So, yeah. Again, Tony, thank you so much for co-authoring this amazing piece and the research that you continue to do on this work. It's so important. And thanks so much for your activism around this. We need this across university spaces too, right? So, and for giving us a very sobering reminder of reality, but also spaces. Again, my turning to AFFEC, spaces of hope, right? I know. That, you know, that always exists. So, thank you for presenting at our EDI cafe chat. And thank you very much for having me. All right, and hopefully, you know this isn't the last of our continual conversations on this. So, thanks everyone for attending too and we'll hopefully see you next Wednesday. All right, take care. Thank you. Bye. Bye.