Category Representation
“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 […]
Not That Innocent: fertility, vengeance and serpentine symbolism within pop music
By Mac Spencer In the summer of last year, globally scrutinised pop star Taylor Swift quietly deleted every piece of content from her online accounts. A brief social media blackout ensued, ultimately broken by a pan-platform teaser video showing an extreme closeup of a snake. Predictably, the video kicked off a cleverly manufactured frenzy amongst […]
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 […]
All Hail the Entrepreneur!
by Thomas Chambers In an article in last week’s Guardian, Stuart Heritage argues that “without The Apprentice, Donald Trump would still be a failed boardgame salesman”. Heritage accuses the show of creating politically toxic monsters and of elevating “hair gelled bell-ends” to the level, albeit temporarily, of sainted heroes. He is right. They are bell-ends! However, there […]
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 […]