Everybody seems to want solidarity, solidarity with Gaza, with Ukraine, with local marginalised communities... But what is solidarity actually, and why is it such a good thing? As director of the UM Diversity Office Constance is often asked to be in solidarity with many people, groups and causes, but what does this mean in practice, what are the demands that solidarity places on us? As individuals but also as institutions? We spoke to Francesco Tava, one of Europe's most exciting solidarity researchers and tried to figure out what is this thing that everyone wants more of? How do we get it, and can we have too much of a good thing?

Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT seem to be awash in ethical problems like bias, hidden labour, lack of transparency, energy use…but since when did they become too Woke? When Constance and Darian enlisted ChatGPT to expand their horizons into conservative and far-right ideas they ended up in the same liberal bubble as always, what gives? Thankfully, data scientist Jerry Spanakis was on hand to try to explain what’s going on and how both training data and tweaking by socially liberal engineers can lead to a liberal status quo being reproduced by some models. Is this such a bad thing? Listen and find out.

Sometime this Spring (2024), Maastricht University will have to submit a plan to the Dutch government explaining how we will “considerably decrease” the amount of English Language programmes. Why is this happening? What’s the problem with studying in English? According to researchers René Gabriëls and Bob Wilkinson, it’s got a lot to do with feelings of linguistic injustice. We were not so easily convinced and invited them for a talk.