‘Don’t tell women what to wear, tell men not to rape’: an anti-rape protest in Delhi. Painting by Sarbjit Johal During an art workshop I ran for women at the Tamil Community Centre, Hounslow, in 2015, I asked participants what they wanted from the political parties...
Graffiti depicting martyrs of the popular uprising in Tahrir Square, Cairo. Image: Tungsten, via Wikimedia Commons Alaa Abd el-Fattah has spent most of the past eight years in detention in Egypt – most recently as a ‘captive’ rather than a prisoner, since prisoners...
The author with a drumming band at a protest in London, August 2021. Photo by Jonathon Vines In my activism and doctoral research in the London samba-fusion community, my goal is to learn how to use culture as resistance. Samba, as a Brazilian music genre and culture,...
Algeria’s Islam Slimani challenges for the ball at AFCON 2013. Credit: Magharebia Algeria’s performance during the 2021 FIFA Arab Cup offers a number of interesting insights into the social and political context of the country itself. The tournament was won by a...
Image via unitelive.org As a teenager, incensed by the half-wages paid to young workers on the Liverpool docks, Len McCluskey organised a successful strike among his fellow clerical workers to remedy the inequity. He was soon elected as shop steward, cancelling his...
Placard at Global Climate Strike in Germany, 2019. Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash The final weekend of September 2021 saw the return of the long awaited left-wing political festival, The World Transformed (TWT). Labour’s left turned up in force, including MPs,...
A watchtower overlooking the Guantanamo Bay Detention Centre (Credit: Gino Reyes) Ashish Ghadiali: You’ve said you don’t want to just go back to ‘normal’ after the pandemic. What has got to change? Sohail Daulatzai: Well, first off, you and I both know that ‘normal’ –...
Image: Jonny Gios via Unsplash When the late Rhodri Morgan, as Labour’s First Minister of Wales, said that there was ‘clear red water’ between his administration and the Blair government in Westminster, he was attempting to put distance between the two countries and...
Photo: Rwendland If you told someone there was a sovereign nation where the only way the opposition party could apparently gain power was to win the approval of both the armed forces and the man who owned two of the biggest selling newspapers, they might reply, ‘Is it...
Image: Penguin Books Freedom is the beguiling yet nebulous concept at the core of a spate of recent publications. Maggie Nelson’s On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint muses on and revels in the word’s indeterminacy, while Olivia Laing’s Everybody: a Book...
Photo courtesy of the Raymond Williams Society 2021 marks the centenary of the birth of Raymond Williams, an important thinker and writer on the British left. Born in the village of Pandy on the Welsh border, he went on to study at Cambridge, fight in the second world...
Dawn Foster, who died suddenly at home in July, was so much more than a talented journalist. Raised in Newport, Wales, she was the rarest of public figures – a high-profile, working-class voice in Britain’s media landscape. On television and in print, Dawn was one of...