I came late to riot grrrl. It was 2004 and there was a rush on tickets in Brisbane to see a band called Le Tigre. It seemed like every lesbian in the city was going. “What kind of music is it?” I asked my then girlfriend. “They’re girls”, she answered, “they shout a lot.” This…
As I sat down to write this piece on some of the less credited and understood sonorous movements in the UK and their affecting encounters with law, snippets of David Cameron’s pronouncements on ‘blitzing poverty’ and ‘bulldozing the UK’s worst sink estates’ transmute my rainy January Sunday a few weeks ago, and immediately there exists…
Locke’s philosophy worked to entrench slavery as a politically justifiable practice, effectively extending property rights to a select few while encouraging the political legitimacy of race-based persecution. John Locke is considered the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers and a leading philosopher of British empiricism – in other words, the theory that knowledge is primarily derived from sensory…
Do our academic creations belong to us? Should we think of them as property? Amidst debates about how to cite properly, and circulating fears of ideas being stolen, do we risk losing touch with wider questions about how ideas emerge and develop, and the limits of provenance? Public action may provide a better way of…
The events discussed below took place at the University of California Santa Barbara, on 4th March 2014. I had planned to meet Mireille Miller-Young, a professor in Feminist Studies, who was chairing a talk I was giving. When I arrived, Mireille was in the seminar room looking upset and frightened, and visibly trembling. She’d just…