Jonathan Westaway
LightNews LightNews
banner
jonwestaway.bsky.social
Jonathan Westaway
@jonwestaway.bsky.social
1.2K followers 930 following 250 posts
Cultural and environmental historian/geographer. Mountain and polar regions. Cryohistories. Indigenous knowledge. Island Studies.

PL AHRC 'Other Everests' network.
uclan.academia.edu/JonathanWestaway
Posts Replies Media Videos
Pinned
jonwestaway.bsky.social
Jonathan Westaway @jonwestaway.bsky.social · May 13
Very honoured to have won the RGS-IBG Geographical Engagement Award 2026 @rgs-ibghe.bsky.social
shorturl.at/Sj4Uc
Thank you to all the project partners on the AHRC funded #OtherEverests project @ukri.org
@christophersmith.bsky.social

We did some cool stuff with some very talented people...
Reposted by Jonathan Westaway
mountainsofgreece.bsky.social
New podcast! Vanessa Archontidou talks about Mount Oligyrtos, Mount Everest, and her role as EU Climate Pact Ambassador.

@staclassics.bsky.social
@futuremountain.bsky.social
@britschoolathens.bsky.social

mountainsofgreece.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk/2026/09/12/s...
Seven Summits
Vanessa Archontidou on how mountains help us tell stories about climate change and empowering women.
mountainsofgreece.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk
September 14, 2026 at 2:11 PM
Reposted by Jonathan Westaway
historicaljnl.bsky.social
📣Out now on #firstview!

Abhimanyu Arni @kingshistory.bsky.social on 'Indian Political Intelligence (IPI) and the Recolonization of the Indian Diaspora: From Ethnographic Surveillance to Racial Deportation, 1938–1953'

#Activism #Colonial 20thc 🗃️

👉Open access: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
This article examines the activities of Indian Political Intelligence (IPI) in Britain between 1909 and 1947, arguing that the agency exemplified the ‘imperial boomerang’ as, through it, the authoritarian and racialized practices of colonial governance returned to shape the British state. Although headquartered in Britain, IPI was financed by the Government of India and operated as a key component of the Raj’s security apparatus, working closely with Special Branch, MI5, and other state bodies. This article shows how the agency deployed colonial ethnographic categories and intelligence practices to monitor and disrupt Indian anticolonial activism, particularly among the organized working-class diaspora in the Midlands. IPI’s campaign against the Indian Workers Association during the Second World War culminated in the creation of Defence Regulation 47AAD, which enabled the arrest, detention, and deportation of Indian seamen and workers on racialized grounds. By tracing the origins and implementation of this regulation and the associated deportation programme, the article reveals how colonial modalities of surveillance, policing, and racial governance were repatriated to the metropole. In doing so, it demonstrates how colonial security practices undermined the universality of British liberalism and contributed to the construction of racialized forms of state power within Britain itself.
September 18, 2026 at 7:00 AM
Reposted by Jonathan Westaway
earthislandjournal.bsky.social
In April, the Trump administration lifted a Biden-era mining ban near Minnesota's Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.

Besides recreation and conservation, the region is important for wild rice harvesting. And it's such Indigenous treaty rights that may help save the Boundary Waters from mining.
The Fight for the Boundary Waters Gets Closer to Home
Congress may have stripped a mining ban from Minnesota’s treasured wilderness area, but local lawyers, activists, and Indigneous leaders aren’t giving up yet.
https://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/articles/entry/the-fight-for-the-boundary-waters-gets-closer-to-home##
September 17, 2026 at 7:24 PM
Reposted by Jonathan Westaway
savetibet.bsky.social
A new Anthropic threat intelligence report provides disturbing evidence of China-based, government-aligned actors targeting the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA) alongside members of the Tibetan Buddhist civil society and advocacy organizations including Students for a Free Tibet (SFT) and ICT.
September 17, 2026 at 5:52 PM
Reposted by Jonathan Westaway
dukepress.bsky.social
"The Good Road" by Carlota McAllister situates Guatemala’s early 1980s Indigenous uprising and the genocide that crushed it in a five-hundred-year history of Indigenous resistance to colonization and exploitation. Read the intro for free now:
buff.ly/5rm5G8l
over of The Good Road: A K’iche’ Revolutionary Theopolitics by Carlota McAllister. The cover features a mural of a red truck carrying a group of people with two people behind it pushing. The title is in white serif letters across the center. A red background fades upward into the photograph. The subtitle is in smaller white serif text beneath the title, below is a dotted line then the author’s name in pale yellow italics.
September 17, 2026 at 6:01 PM
Reposted by Jonathan Westaway
mitpress.bsky.social
New and #OpenAccess: "The Aesthetics of Machine Vision" is an interdisciplinary glossary on machine vision and aesthetics, with researchers, artists, architects, art historians, and critical theorists contributing to this critical dialogue: mitpress.mit.edu/978026205417...
Book cover titled "The Aesthetics of Machine Vision: Critical Terms and Ideas" Edited by Kathrin Maurer, Rikke Munck Petersen, Dominique Routhier, Kassandra Wellendorf and Kristin Veel. Beneath the cover, a black banner announcing "Now Available Open Access" with direct.mit.edu and a "Direct to Open" D2O logo.
September 17, 2026 at 1:16 PM
Reposted by Jonathan Westaway
brdemuth.bsky.social
“I find myself in the middle of translation, of overlapping colonial and anticolonial projects, as well as the learning of new/old languages. The Blind Man and the Loon illuminates the labors of language and the promise of story”
A @sprucehen.bsky.social stunner

placesjournal.org/article/blin...
Blind Man and Loon
A tale shared by Native peoples across the circumpolar Arctic reveals the elusive nature of language, and has come to shape many Native connections to place.
placesjournal.org
September 17, 2026 at 1:30 PM
Reposted by Jonathan Westaway
nichecanada.bsky.social
Call for Papers – A World of a Thousand Cuts: Forests, Wood, and Industrialisation Across the Globe in the 19th and 20th Centuries

6-8 July, 2027, hosted by the University of Turin
Proposal Deadline: 30 November 2026

niche-canada.org/2026/09/17/c...

#envhist #foresthistory #globalhistory
Call for Papers - A World of a Thousand Cuts: Forests, Wood, and Industrialisation Across the Globe in the 19th and 20th Centuries
This 2027 University of Turin conference re-examines 19th-20th-century global industrialisation by exploring how timber's ongoing role reshaped world forests.
niche-canada.org
September 17, 2026 at 3:29 PM
Reposted by Jonathan Westaway
mprnews.org
Pipestone National Monument preserves active and sacred quarries that Native people have used for thousands of years. But now a proposed federal rule change could make it easier for the government to disregard Native voices in discussions over projects near sites sacred to Native people.
Federal rule change may pressure Minnesota’s historic Pipestone quarry, advocates warn
Preservation advocates are lining up against a proposed federal rule change that could affect how the nation cares for historic places, including the Pipestone quarry, a southwestern Minnesota site sa...
www.mprnews.org
September 17, 2026 at 11:48 AM
Reposted by Jonathan Westaway
turquoiseroof.org
A new study finds climate change helped set the stage for the deadly Nepal–Tibet flood: warming temperatures, thinning glaciers, & thawing permafrost destabilised an already vulnerable slope, triggering a rock-ice avalanche. Koh Ewe & @tessawong.bsky.social report: www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
Nepal floods: Climate change played role in disaster, study finds
More than 1,400 people were killed and thousands remain missing following the deluge on 26 August.
www.bbc.co.uk
September 17, 2026 at 10:20 AM
Reposted by Jonathan Westaway
united24media.com
⚡ Up to 25,000 North Koreans disguised under student visas are producing drones at facilities like Alabuga for Russia, an MSMT report revealed.

The DPRK regime seizes 80–90% of their $7,500 annual wages to fund nuclear programs.
September 17, 2026 at 11:12 AM
Reposted by Jonathan Westaway
thenerve.news
“These men are not only careless people, but cruel people. They are destroying communities and ecosystems”: @natashawalter.bsky.social on @naomiaklein.bsky.social and @astra.bsky.social’s new book, and why we need to work together to oppose apocalyptic oligarchs

www.thenerve.news/p/natasha-wa...
Natasha Walter, pictured in a stylised blue and pink image: The end-times oligarchs are weary of Earth. But we should stand and fight for our home.
September 17, 2026 at 11:13 AM
Reposted by Jonathan Westaway
peterjukes.bsky.social
While most other journalists ran with the Arday story as their summer sport, we've been looking at Cambridge for years, and @hardeepmatharu.bsky.social's investigation into the impact of Arday's death on his students and fellow academics is fearless and also heartbreaking. Genuine reporting
hardeepmatharu.bsky.social Hardeep Matharu @hardeepmatharu.bsky.social · 1d
The story of Jason Arday is the story of James Orr.

Of the ideology which has found a foothold in Cambridge University, fostering the sorts of ideas that formed the undercurrents – sometimes explicit; sometimes unconscious – against Arday.

I returned to my alma mater for an in-depth exploration 👇
The Two Professors and a ‘War On Ideas’
The different stories of the Cambridge academics Jason Arday and James Orr reveal the wider cultural and ideological forces around hierarchies and structural power – and who gets to belong in our inst...
bylinetimes.com
September 17, 2026 at 11:19 AM
Reposted by Jonathan Westaway
nbr.org
The Shaksgam Valley is a sparsely populated region north of the Siachen Glacier disputed by China, India, and Pakistan. Daniel Markey discusses its importance in the region and how control over the area aligns with China’s interests. strategicspace.nbr.org/the-shaksgam...
September 16, 2026 at 5:06 PM
Reposted by Jonathan Westaway
himalsouthasian.bsky.social
Out now: a new Himal Southasian investigation by Erin L Thompson (@artcrimeprof.bsky.social) on how Mary Slusser, a celebrated US scholar of Nepal's cultural heritage spent years illicitly buying sacred artefacts and smuggling them out of the country.

Read the full story: ow.ly/jWLO50ZO8Ym
Mary Slusser’s secret loot of Nepal’s sacred art and heritage
A US scholar made her name as an expert on Nepal’s cultural heritage – while illicitly buying sacred artefacts and smuggling them out to the United States
ow.ly
September 16, 2026 at 5:43 AM
jonwestaway.bsky.social
Ghost marriage...

Zuan Ou, Yuqi Liu, Ziyu Wang, 'The Ritual Logic of Gendered Rules for Solitary Burial: Ghost marriage in North China' Folklore: Electronic Journal of Folklore Vol.99, 2026, 193-222.

doi.org/10.7592/FEJF...
doi.org
September 15, 2026 at 8:38 PM
Reposted by Jonathan Westaway
rensbod.bsky.social
The Making of the Humanties XII Program is Out!

This year’s theme could hardly be more fitting for the birthplace of Copernicus:
The Structure of Humanistic Revolutions

Come and join us in Toruń!
📅 7–9 October 2026
📍 Nicolaus Copernicus University, Toruń, Poland
👉 mohxii.umk.pl/pages/Confer...
The Making of the Humanities XII
mohxii.umk.pl
September 13, 2026 at 8:00 PM
Reposted by Jonathan Westaway
eandtbooks.bsky.social
Paul French speaks to Cindy Yu on the Chinese Whispers podcast about his book #TheLastEmperorOfChina. Discover the story of Emperor Puyi and his life in the Forbidden City before his expulsion in 1924:
🎧 www.chinesewhispers.uk/p/the-last-e... @chinarhyming.bsky.social
The Last Emperor of China
In conversation with historian Paul French on his new biography
www.chinesewhispers.uk
September 14, 2026 at 11:58 AM
Reposted by Jonathan Westaway
biotay.bsky.social
1/9 Not attacks

This study brings together evidence suggesting that Iberian killer whales are not aggressively attacking boats. What is happening seems far more complex, and closer to a cultural tradition of play.

(paper) onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
September 12, 2026 at 7:32 PM
Reposted by Jonathan Westaway
united24media.com
❤️‍🔥 South Korean veteran Li Byang-Hoon lost an arm defending Ukraine, but he hasn't let it slow him down for a second.

Today, he plays amp football in Ivano-Frankivsk and recently scaled Mount Hoverla alongside fellow wounded service members.
August 26, 2026 at 12:41 PM
jonwestaway.bsky.social
This is heartbreaking. Planetary boundaries exceeded. The earth remakes itself. Himalayan communities destroyed. The video of flash flooding at Gyirong Port border crossing in this CNN report requires a recalibration of language itself. #ClimateActionNow #Himalaya
edition.cnn.com/2026/08/26/w...
Hundreds missing and many feared dead after massive flash flood hits Nepal-China border | CNN
A huge flash flood has swept through villages in Nepal. Police say at least 17 people have been killed but there are fears the toll will rise. Follow for news updates.
edition.cnn.com
August 26, 2026 at 1:07 PM
Reposted by Jonathan Westaway
outsidemag.bsky.social
High-altitude porters located the remaining missing climber three weeks after the July 30 catastrophic slide, which claimed ten lives on the world’s 12th-highest mountain.
Crews Just Recovered the Remains of Sarah Mallory Geis, the American Climber Killed on Broad Peak
High-altitude porters located the remaining missing climber three weeks after the July 30 catastrophic slide, which claimed ten lives on the world’s 12th-highest mountain.
bit.ly
August 24, 2026 at 7:10 PM
Reposted by Jonathan Westaway
publicdomainrev.bsky.social
Peter Fabris’ exquisite illustrations for William Hamilton’s Campi Phlegraei (1776–79), a report on the 18th-century eruptions of Mount Vesuvius: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/campi-phlegraei
August 24, 2026 at 2:16 PM
Reposted by Jonathan Westaway
mpiwg.bsky.social
New book by Director emerita Lorraine Daston: "Diversity: The History of a Wandering Value" 💐

"The long history of #Diversity as an #Aesthetic and economic value helps explain the recent rapid rise of diversity as a #Moral and political value."

🔗 tinyurl.com/yke6f86z

#HistSci
Book cover. The title and the author's name are featured in white letters on a blue background. Below, there is an oil painting of a bouquet of flowers in red, pink, yellow, white, and blue.
August 24, 2026 at 1:21 PM