Essays

1st May 2020

NO ALTERNATIVE or NEVER THE SAME AGAIN?
by Johnny Rodger

Some apparent tendencies and possibilities in political thinking have already emerged in the pandemic situation –as seen by current commentators in blogs, opinion columns etc – can they be viewed a broader political and historical context yet?
26th April 2020

Inequality Covid by Shannon Maree Torrens

The Covid-19 pandemic is a global health crisis yet its effects are not felt equally aross the world or throughout societies. Shannon Maree Torrens shows us how inequalities are having particularly devastating effect at this time, and makes the case for urgent change in national and international governance.
24th April 2020

BOND: JSFMBOE, FOHMBOE and TDPUMBOE
by Owen Dudley Edwards

Perpetrating an aura of unreality may be useful, writes Owen Dudley Edwards, in conceiving of the bonds that have connected and codified these island nations... Jsfmboe, Fohmboe and Tdpumboe...
20th April 2020

from Covid Conversations by Johnny Rodger

'I was born again but this time I knew it meant I was dead.'
18th April 2020

A Pandemic, Conflict and Options for Justice for Victims of the Syrian Conflict
by Shannon Maree Torrens

In the teeth of the Coronavirus pandemic, politicians and pundits insist that ‘we’re all in it together’. Yet as deaths climb, it is all too clear that equality in infection does not translate to equality in recovery. In this clear-eyed report by Human Rights researcher and advocate Shannon Torrens, we look to Syria, where this dynamic is set to play out on a truly awful scale.
7th April 2020

from Covid Conversations by Johnny Rodger

'It’s going to disappear. One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear...’
30th March 2020

ZigZag by Katalin Szavai

‘It’s the way they give birth these days, that’s the problem,’ the older bear said. Morrgh didn’t argue: it was a supermarket line and it was mid-winter; the sort of time that brings out the worst in everybody
26th March 2020

Frances Scott

Frances Scott's new book of her photographic journey round her native Orkney, 'Undertow,' was launched in February in the Pier Art Centre Stromness, and in March at Streetlevel Gallery in Glasgow.
26th March 2020

Undertow by Frances Scott

If photography is the temporal art of the gaze, what is its condition at the edge, or the limit of space? What bonds, what risk of naming can secure it from being drawn off in the 'undertow'? Frances Scott walks the native territory.