Identity

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.
29th May 2020

Recovering Reality: Fact-Checking the Traveller… (tether your scapegoat here…)
by Candace G. Thomas

In part two of her extended essay on the prejudices and stigma still faced by contemporary Travellers, Candace Thomas challenges the callousness both casual - and causal - of media and policy makers in a way very recently, proven to rattle those in power: checking the facts and recovering reality.
9th May 2020

Traveller crime – or a crime to Travellers?
by Candace G. Thomas

It's a story very familiar to anyone from a Traveller culture; with depressing familiarity sections of the British media dust off every shopsoiled prejudice and trope to demonise a culture already far off on the margins. But as researcher and activist Candace Thomas explains, Travellers are no longer inclined to suffer in silence.
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.
19th March 2020

Paris, Capital of the 19th Century
Walter Benjamin

The introduction to Benjamin’s Arcades Project, was written in 1938 but not published until long after his death. It is an attempt to categorically reveal how, through the apparent chaos and convulsions in 19th century Parisian culture and society, great explorations and exposés of the realities of the epoch and its ramifications for later generations, are afforded us by examination of the lives and works of its inhabitants.
27th February 2020

Parallel State: Lines of sight beyond the territory
by Simon Poulter

Until one month ago, British people were among the few lucky individuals on this planet that could count themselves to not only one, but even two citizenships. Facing a deterioration of the positive powers that are granted to UK-citizens, it begs the question of who has really benefitted from taking away these ‘bonus rights’. Would it be possible to reinstate this safety-net by connecting mobile and transitory points of resistance to connect to a new form of citizen-power? Meet the emerging Parallel State. Simon Poulter gives a recap of the day on which the ambitions of the Parallel State were drawn out and reviews the territory it was inescapably born into.
20th February 2020

Aesthetics, Technological Politics and the Video Age
by Ravi Sundaram

In an age of surveillance capitalism is it no longer viable to put hope in the creative possibilities Walter Benjamin believed were opened to humanity through technological advances in media? –Or can a new poetics of infrastructure disrupt the sinister operations of corporate power? Ravi Sundaram surveys the will in the media.
13th February 2020

Confessions of a Thug: Pakiveli

The hybridiser needs history as a pantry of costumes, wrote Nietzsche, that hymnographer of the Will. What is artist Hardeep Pandhal cooking up for us at The Tramway?