Sketch and poster of Anwar Ditta by Mukhtar Dar Anwar Ditta was a British-Pakistani woman who fought – and won – a case against the Home Office after it refused entry to her three children, leaving them stuck without her in Pakistan. Her treatment at the hands of the...
Red Pepper
Volt Rush: The Winners and Losers in the Race to Go Green by Henry Sanderson – Review
A lithium mine in Chile. Lithium is a vital component of many ostensibly ‘green’ technologies About two-thirds of the way through Volt Rush, Henry Sanderson interrupts his description of the pack of corporate scavengers picking over central Africa’s copper belt to...
Cinema on the move
The Order of Things (2017) At the London Migration Film Festival (LMFF), we have found that people most commonly associate the term ‘migration’ with politics and tragedy. For example, when we approached a new venue with the hopes of holding screenings there during the...
Tunisia’s struggle for energy democracy
A wind turbine farm in Tunisia (Credit: Dana Smillie) Since the 2011 revolution Tunisian governments have consistently failed to implement progressive public sector reforms and succumbed instead to the demands of global institutions such as the IMF. The Société...
A new Italian era
Giorgia Meloni speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference The greatest tragedy of the far-right’s victory in the Italian general election was its inevitability. Italian electoral law favours coalitions of parties. More than a third of Parliament is...
A new Italian era
Giorgia Meloni speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference The greatest tragedy of the far-right’s victory in the Italian general election was its inevitability. Italian electoral law favours coalitions of parties. More than a third of Parliament is...
Key words: Magical voluntarism
Image: Tim Mossholder on Unsplash Around a decade ago, Mark Fisher invoked the psychologist David Smail’s term ‘magical voluntarism’ to describe the trajectory of mental health discourse. This concept draws on the individualistic notion that we are all masters of our...
Preparing for the apocalypse the rational way
A help station run by the Common Ground Collective in the Lower 9th Ward, New Orleans. The collective was founded in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 to provide aid to provide aid to vulnerable communities in the absence of state assistance (Credit:...
Boris Johnson and loving our exes
Boris Johnson as Foreign Secretary in Tokyo with an ASIMO robot (Credit: British Embassy Tokyo) When a senior politician is kicked out of office, something special can happen. If they play their cards right, they can become an Elder Statesperson through the magic of...
Time to shut down the education factory
The University and Colleges Union (UCU) has just achieved the first national mandate for an education union since the Trade Union Act 2016. In aggregated ballots on pay and conditions and separately on pensions, yes votes topped over 80% on turnouts of 57.8 per cent...
At a crossroads, Brazil looks left and right
Presidential candidates Lula (left, photo by Lula Marques) and Bolsonaro (right, photo by Isac Nóbrega) In the first round of Brazil’s presidential election, held at the start of this month, leftist candidate Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva fell just short of the 50 per...
Black British history is much more than Windrush
At a Black Lives Matter protest in Surrey (photo by Martin Pettitt). This October marked the 35th year of Black History Month being observed in the UK. The brainchild of Akyaaba Addai-Sebo, a Ghanaian journalist and pan-Africanist, the month has become a time when we...