The toxic ideology of longtermism

The intellectual movement that calls itself longtermism is an outgrowth of Effective Altruism (EA), a utilitarianism-inspired philanthropic programme founded just over a decade ago by Oxford philosophers Toby Ord and William MacAskill. EA, which claims to guide charitable giving to do the ‘most good’ per expenditure of time or money, originally focused on mitigating the […]

Defund culture

Following the spread of the Omicron variant this winter there have been renewed calls for the UK Government to fund the arts and culture through the Sars-CoV-2 pandemic and beyond. ‘We are in crisis mode’, Nicolas Hytner, former artistic director of the National Theatre, told the BBC’s Newsnight programme. ‘We need to see short-term finance, […]
Outline of gun filled with machines early twentieth-century machines on a read background with the text Weapons of Mass Creation below

On not becoming Chinese: The racialisation of compliance

As philosophy departments in the West come under greater pressure to provincialise themselves, calls to give ‘non-Western’ philosophical traditions their due have grown louder – and rightly so. But for all that is surely right about ‘diversifying the curriculum’ as a project driven by the relentless work of anti-racist and decolonial activists, the institutional co-optation […]
Tapestry of Emperor of China glanked by elefant and servants and a fanastical architectural structure

‘Brazil above everything, God above all’

Dossier: Grammars of Bolsonarismo

Religious influence in the Brazilian state is hardly new, but it has become more evident with the 2018 campaign and subsequent election of Jair Bolsonaro, whose slogan was ‘Brazil above everything, God above all’. It was not the first time a presidential candidate had run a campaign with straightforward religious overtones, but it was the […]

Amefricanity: The black feminism of Lélia Gonzalez

Dossier: Grammars of Bolsonarismo

Though a quarter of the total population, black women represent just 2% of the legislative body of Brazil’s federal government, the National Congress. Yet their visibility in public debate has grown radically in recent years with younger activists beginning to occupy spaces in media, academia and the arts. Lélia Gonzalez (1935-1994) has become a major […]

Problem and solution: Occupation and collective complaint

Dossier: Decolonising the University

In the spring and summer of 2019, a group of Black and PoC students from Goldsmiths, University of London formed Goldsmiths Anti-Racist Action (GARA) and occupied Deptford Town Hall – a key administrative building on campus – to push back against the institutional racism they experienced in the university. We, two junior academics situated in […]

Destruction styles: Black aesthetics of rupture and capture

Dossier: Decolonising the University

I think that I and many others involved with the RhodesMustFall (RMF) movement at the University of Cape Town – and beyond – might have preferred, on the 9th of April 2015, to see: A. cecil’s head explode, blast-site of bronze shards glistening in the afternoon sun, on the sprawling, clambering, continually inaccessible grounds of […]

The Palestinian Museum

How are we to think about a museum that represents a people who not only do not exist on conventional maps but who are also in the process of resisting obliteration by one of the most brutal military complexes in the world? What is, and what can be, the role of a museum in a […]

Crimes of solidarity: Migration and containment through rescue

‘Solidarity is not a crime.’ This is a slogan that has circulated widely across Europe in response to legal prosecutions and municipal decrees, which, especially in Italy and France, have been intended to act against citizens who provide logistical and humanitarian support to transiting migrants. Such criminalisation of individual acts of solidarity and coordinated platforms […]

‘The money follows the mum’: Maternal power as consumer power

In her 1984 article ‘Pregnant Embodiment: Subjectivity and Alienation’, Iris Marion Young contended that ‘pregnancy does not belong to the woman herself’ within patriarchal Western institutions of modern medicine. ‘It is a state of the developing fetus, for which the woman is a container; or it is an objective, observable process coming under scientific scrutiny; […]

Anti-Genderismus and right‑wing hegemony

COMMENTARY Anti-Genderismus and right‑wing hegemony Eva von Redecker After incidents of pickpocketing and sexual harassment were reported to have taken place at the New Year’s Eve festivities in Cologne and Hamburg, and been associated with perpetrators of North African descent, public discourse in Germany turned blatantly racist. [1] This seemed to stand in stark contrast […]

The impossibility of precarity

6. ^ https://sciencefiles.org/tag/lann [archive]‑hornscheidt/page/3 (accessed 9 May 2016). 7. ^ Cf. Bożena Chołuj, ‘“Gender‑Ideologie” – ein Schlüsselbegriff des polnischen Anti‑Genderismus’, in Hark and Vil a, eds, Anti-Genderismus, pp. 219–38. 8. ^ Juliane Lang, ‘Familie und Vaterland in der Krise. Der extrem rechte Diskurs um Gender’, in Hark and Vil a, eds, Anti-Genderismus, pp. 167–82, pp. […]

Europe’s ‘Hungarian solution’

COMMENTARY europe’s ‘hungarian solution’ prem kumar rajaram In a speech at a European Union heads-of-state summit on migration in February 2016, Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s prime minister, declared that the ‘Hungarian solution’ to the migration ‘crisis’ facing Europe had now become ‘common sense’, adopted by other European countries after a summer in which Hungary’s ‘illiberal’ treatment […]