Manchester, the Met, and #MeToo
Just as #MeToo was gaining mainstream attention in late 2017, a petition was launched to remove one of Balthus’ most iconic portraits. The painting, Thérèse Dreaming (1938), depicts a young girl sitting with her underwear and groin area deliberately exposed. Her white underwear contrasts with th
China’s Third Way
Shenzhen, the fourth largest city on the Chinese mainland, and one of the largest cities in the world, is contemporary China at its most bizarre and contradictory. Straddling the border with Hong Kong, and part of the broader geographic and economic region known as the Pearl River Delta, Shenzhen is
Funding Under Fire
Walking out of Oxford train station, the first building you see is a sleek three-storey structure, its polished modernity incongruous with its modest surroundings. The Saïd Business School, built in 2001, oversees teaching for Oxford University students in business, management, and finance. Only th
The Politics of Urban Music
Taken from Teardrops: [Darcus Howe]: We have complained to the police about police and nothing’s been done, we have complained to judges about judges and nothing’s been done. Now it is time to do something ourselves. [Chorus] In love and war All is fair where I’m from The weak won&
“I get a constant deluge of death threats”
Robert Mugabe was still alive when I spoke to Peter Tatchell back in late August. We had spoken about the former Zimbabwean President during our conversation, specifically Tatchell’s two attempts at placing Mugabe under citizen’s arrest, first in London in 1999, and again in Brussels in 2001. Af
The Politics of Space in Oxford
It is perhaps not a surprising statistic – Oxford is the UK’s most expensive city to live in, with an acute lack of affordable and social housing. Over thirty people have died sleeping rough on its streets over the past five years. And the social and economic inequalities in the city are mor
A Lesson in Simplification
As a regular Twitter user, my timeline is an erratic blend of breaking news and memes. For better or for worse, the intense flurry of tweets that accompanies any news updates has become one of my main sources of information. On 5 August, before news outlets had begun to report on the Kashmir lockdow
The New Face of Resistance
In the last week of June 2019, Stormzy became the first Black British solo artist to headline Glastonbury festival. In a politically charged performance, he paused during his track ‘Vossi Bop’, and allowed the crowd to finish his lyrics – ‘I could never die, I’m Chuck Norris’. They c