Category Representation
Widening the lens: English teaching volunteering
by Ruthie Walters Overseas volunteering has received a lot of attention in academia, in the media and on social media. Yet, the focus tends to be on the volunteer, often from the Global North, whilst the communities visited are referred to as ‘the voluntoured’, ‘recipients’ or simply ‘host communities’. As a result, I was often left wondering about […]
We tend to forget – people on the other side of the world
by Hannah Schwemin One year. A couple of months more. It has been one year and a couple of months since I was working in La Paz (Bolivia), taking in every moment of the city and its people. So much can happen within one year. Still, it is short enough a time that it feels […]
Sex Sells: Female Athletes’ Use of Instagram
by Lucy Shepherd We have all seen it, female athletes being used as sex objects to sell products, pictured on billboards in bikinis or sports bras, posed in passive positions, while their male counterparts are posed in athletic stances. Female athletes have to deal with a multitude of obstacles including sexist uniforms, having their success […]
White Saviours – Do They Really Matter?
by Anne-Meike Fechter Not least since the novelist Teju Cole launched a trenchant critique of what he called the ‘white saviour industrial complex’ and the periodically reigniting debates of the legitimacy of white celebrities fronting charity appeals in Africa (david-lammy-comic-relief-stacey-dooley-white-saviour) have critiques of ‘white saviourism’ fuelled debates on race, charity, and ‘poverty porn’. So firmly established are […]
Becoming Human: Malala Yousafzai and the Politics of Representation
by Carlo Ceglia Malala. It is enough to say her first name. How did this 21-year-old Pakistani girl – the youngest, as well as the only female Pakistani, to win the Nobel Peace Prize (2014) – become one of those very few people to be known just by their first name? What about her story […]
“Red-carpet catholicism”: gendering the heavenly body
by Mac Spencer Three decades after the fallout from Like A Prayer, the relationship between pop culture and Catholicism seems on more stable ground if the pinnacle of the fashion calendar is anything to go by. However Monday night’s Met Gala theme, Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination, has not been without a backlash […]
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
…May ’68, Nuit Debout and Romanticizing Struggles by Jade Ascencio In 2016, the Nuit Debout movement in Paris installed its headquarters only two stops away from my place. Every night people gathered on the Place de la République, discussing all sorts of issues, making art, with the ultimate aim of launching France’s Sixth Republic. Feminist […]
From the Field: Mfuwe, Zambia
by Esther Mulders For the past two years, I’ve been volunteering in Zambia with Studio Zambia, a Dutch non-profit organisation that I co-founded in 2016 and currently co-run. The purpose of Studio Zambia is to provide creative means of self-expression to high school students in Mfuwe, Zambia. Studio Zambia is led by me and Annoek […]
Remembering Genocide in the Cambodian Diaspora
by Elisa Sandri ‘As the body moves where then does memory live?’ – Katharya Um For many Cambodians, the wounds of the genocide are still open and hurting. Virtually everyone in the country was affected, to varying degrees, by the brutality of the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s. Still to this day, reconciliation remains an […]
Chivalry Isn’t Dead…But it Should Be?
By Jonny Craig Let’s begin with a scenario: It’s the end of his lunch hour, and Gary from IT is walking the short distance back to his place of work after meeting an old school friend at the park for tea and a Twix. Just behind him, on the same stretch of pavement approaching the […]