Image: Ben Kucinski, Flickr After the largest protests on the island since 1959, the Cuban government took what, for some, has been long-awaited steps to further liberalise the economy. The Cuban Communist Party has now announced that private enterprises with up to...
The author climbing outdoors, credit: Hannah Zia Just over ten years ago, my mother stepped foot in a climbing centre for the first time. The overwhelming friendliness of the counter staff towards my mother, dressed in her head to toe hijab with her two kids, hooked...
Photo credit: Peter Burka Understanding the cycles of social movements helps us to contextualise what has happened since the wave of protests in response to the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis last summer. Social movements ebb and flow like tides:...
Members of the Afghan National Police being trained by the US army in Ghazni province, May 2007 (Credit: Justin Holley) Located in Afghanistan’s remote south-eastern Paktika province along the border with Pakistan and the western edge of the Sulaiman mountains, the...
Promotional image for the 1936 People’s Olympiad Hitler’s 1936 Olympics were, in many ways, the first truly modern Games and set the tone for subsequent iterations: infrastructure as national pride, the inception of the torch relay and the first to be televised (by...
Can ridiculous music be sublime? As music and film critic Lesley Chow argues here, traditional music criticism tends to be taxonomic, ‘placing and summarising work rather than being overwhelmed and struggling to make sense of sounds’. In You’re History, Chow...
Photo credit: Arne Müseler / arne-mueseler.com / CC-BY-SA-3.0 When the Tokyo 2020 Olympic bid team was wooing voting members of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), it tendered lofty promises designed to entice. On the first page of the bid’s introduction, the...
Image credit: lolostock So far this year, I have not exchanged sexual services for money. I tend to call myself a retired sex worker. The jargon du jour refers to me as having ‘exited’ the industry. Exit schemes, strategies and services are a current preoccupation for...
Deliveroo riders demonstration in Shoreditch, London (Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0) Back at the beginning of March, the chancellor Rishi Sunak was breathless in his praise for the forthcoming stock market debut of Deliveroo. Despite long-standing complaints from riders about...
Surinder Bassi and other strikers on a march through Smethwick, 1992. Photo: Inqilab magazine The workers involved in the 1992-3 Burnsall strike, which took place at a small car part factory in Birmingham, gained national support in their fight for union recognition,...
A parade at the 2019 Durham Miners Gala, held annually on the second Saturday of July Imagine the mixture of pride and elation at getting a letter from the Durham Miners’ Association, asking you to speak at the annual Durham Miners’ Gala – the ‘Big Meeting’ I have...
Mark Ruffalo’s Twitter climb-down on Palestine At the grassroots level, support for Palestinian rights appears to have grown louder this year, thanks partly to support from other social movements like Black Lives Matter. Yet, despite Israel’s two-week bombing of Gaza...