In my two previous posts, I considered how the exclusion of both cats and old women from society and the gendering of cat ladies and feline behaviour become the locus of solidarity between species.

In my previous post, I considered how the exclusion of the cat lady from society becomes the site of an inter-species companionship that is subversive of this regime of biopower, particularly in Doris Lessing’s short story ‘An Old Woman and Her Cat’.

What does it mean to have a cat? Timothy Morton describes living with a cat as a mutual intersection of porous worlds, that the ‘cat isn’t a guest in my house […] we are both guests of each other’ (93).

One piece of advice I was given when I started my PhD was to keep up with some form of regular exercise, preferably a team sport as that would also be a social activity to balance the monastic isolation of research.

Last week, my university’s Students’ Association organised its annual Mental Health and Wellbeing Week on the theme of #LetsTalk to facilitate conversations around mental health and action towards self care.

A few weeks ago, Nature published the results of its biennial graduate student survey, an elaborate exercise where they canvassed thousands of PhD students about their experiences with their programme, their career ambitions and their views on their future.

On Tuesday and Wednesday this week, I attended a conference on the intersection between literature and philosophy, suitably titled the OverLAP Conference 2017, about ‘Forms of Knowledge’.

I came across an article in The Atlantic recently by Ed Yong about how domesticating dogs has weakened their pack instincts.

This being the twentieth anniversary year of the publication of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, there were a number of prominent celebrations of the books over the course of the year.

There was a minor tiff on Twitter recently which was instigated by a controversial response to a survey by Times Higher Education on the work-life balance of academics.