Category Urban Space
Are slum tours doing more harm than good?
by Rachel Jackson Last year, I spent several months working in an NGO in Peru. Before travelling home, I decided to take a trip to Brazil and spend a week in Rio de Janeiro. Sat in the hostel social area, I picked up the booklet containing all the various tourism activities available. Flicking through with […]
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 […]
Rethinking chronic illness and ethnography
by Luke Walker Since my diagnosis with Crohn’s disease in 2015, I have started to re-think the relationship between chronic illness, disability, and protest in a series of blogs. Recently however, I find myself akin to the same existential crisis occupied by most anthropologists; whether my interpretation of what is a still misunderstood illness holds […]
When buildings burn, from London to Dhaka
by Rebecca Prentice There is for me a sad familiarity in the story of the Grenfell Tower fire. I have spent recent years researching garment factory fires and collapses in Bangladesh. Large-scale fires, no matter where they are, have a recursive quality to them. There is always the story of the spark that begins it, […]
When a Space becomes a Place…
According to Oxford online dictionary… Space: A continuous area or expanse which is free, available, or unoccupied Place: An area used for a specified purpose or activity Sasha Flatau, University of Sussex The street it was on, as with all the streets in that part of Seville, was narrow. Large doors, like the entrance of […]
Festival Culture: the Romanticisation of Informal Settlements?
by Tim Perkin The show ‘Borderline’, a PSYCHEdelight production, recently took part to an arts festival in the UK. The show portrayed a satirical account of the Calais Jungle, the informal refugee camp in France that hosted up to ten-thousand people. What made the political drama particularly poignant was that many of the members of […]