Ideas

18th July 2020

Murdo MacDonald on Patrick Geddes :
His Intellectual Origins
by R J Morris

Powerful personality and polymath par excellence – Patrick Geddes has been plastered with so many labels that it sometimes seems that he’s all but disappeared from public perception. How should we rate Geddes and his work now? R J Morris puts the new critical work by Murdo MacDonald in context.
16th July 2020

Metaphor as Parasite:
on ecologies of love, language and disease
by Daisy Lafarge

Too complex to be just romance, too full of personal feeling to be only philosophy, Daisy Lafarge’s Metaphor is a peerlessly accomplished take on love in literary and biological history, gripped with a social scientist’s certainty and the passion of a votary. As an extract from a longer work-in-progress, Lovebug, due to be published in the near future, it was written prior to the global pandemic, so was not intended as a comment or an analysis on current events and all resonance therewith, happy or otherwise, is entirely fortuitous.
9th July 2020

Imagination in the Contemporary Society of the Spectacle by Jacob Lund

We are currently witnessing some fundamental changes in the conditions and the status of images: More and more images are networked; cameras and screens (portable or fixed) are everywhere; image data is geotagged; databases can be navigated in real-time; the prevalence of the phenomena of operative images and "machine vision" detached from human control and sense-perception rapidly increases, etc.
25th May 2020

Judith Butler’s ‘The Force of Nonviolence’ by Johnny Rodger

How long will the patriarchy last? -How long have you got? The universal quality of Butler's work demands, ironically, that you find it, not as some pristine, independent, already perfected example, but as situated in the relational context of, and with all the potential of, your own local world.
10th May 2020

While Absent
by Elizabeth Murphy
and Adrien Hester

On what would’ve been the last day of Glasgow International 2020, and in lieu of Teneu Radio, a radio play originally commissioned for and reflecting on the festival, Adrien Lester and Elizabeth Murphy reflect on the experience of absence, and the gaps left in the city as it’s in the process of reimagining itself.
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?
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...
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.
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.