News archive

News Strategies for language? Being a modern linguist is a pretty rotten business. Applications to study modern languages in UK universities have fallen by over a third in the last decade. Whilst Spanish and to a lesser extent Italian have fared reasonably well, other languages are in rapid decline. University applications have directly reflected falling […]

News The unmaking of a treaty The convention on biological diversity The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), formulated in 1992, was a toughly negotiated international treaty. Although negotiated in the global political ambience of the new unipolar world order and the first, unopposed Western victory in Iraq, the Southern negotiators displayed unusual unity and negotiation […]

News The dispute at LMU The current unprecedented polarization between lecturers and executive management at London Metropolitan University (LMU) is due to a bullying management style that culminated in the imposition of a new employment contract that is probably the worst in the HE sector. Recent action has included a weeklong strike in May, timed […]

Thereʼs no denying the images are dreadful: a naked child hanging from his motherʼs empty breast, large eyes under attack from flies, screams of pain and hunger. We have seen a lot of them since the end of July when the Western media woke up to the hunger crisis in Niger. It made a change […]

News Women’s Philosophy Review, 1997–2005 In August 2005 the editors and editorial board of the Womenʼs Philosophy Review (WPR), the journal of the UK Society for Women in Philosophy (SWIP), decided to cease publication, at least for the foreseeable future. WPR grew out of the Women in Philosophy Newsletter that had been circulated to members […]

News In for the longue durée The graduate labour struggle at NYU On 9 November 2005, the majority of New York Universityʼs 1,000 graduate student employees went on strike in order to force NYU to bargain a second contract with our graduate student employees union – the Graduate Student Organizing Committee of the United Auto […]

News A Haitian boat disaster Every now and then something happens which serves to illuminate with particular clarity the way our newspapers distinguish between what counts as news and what does not. Consider the way the British press handled two very different disappearances, on the nights of 3 and 4 May 2007. In early May […]

News Walking into wallsAcademic freedom, the Israeli Left and the occupation within In March 2006, Radical Philosophy published a piece by the Israeli architect and writer Eyal Weizman, now director of the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. Entitled ‘Walking through Walls: Soldiers as Architects in the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict’ (RP 136, March/April […]

News Rebellion of Greek youthThe rebellion of Greek youth in December 2008 has already secured a place in the history of modern social movements, not because of the extent of the rioting, but rather because it came as an expression of deeper social tensions, political ruptures and ideological displacements amidst a growing capitalist crisis. In […]

News University occupations over Gaza At the end of December 2008 a wave of protest occupations swept across UK university campuses in response to the Israeli attacks on Gaza. The ‘occupation movement’ started on 13 January 2009, when students at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London occupied the Brunei Gallery and issued […]

News Iran and the Left Iran’s current rulers are the latest in a long line coming from the peasantry. The small clique of village elders headed by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei enjoy control over all state activity thanks to a politics of strategic marriages between philosopher kings, a model now reflected throughout Iranian society. With a […]

A Marxist footballer in Turkey? A player who is as comfortable reeling off critical theorists of the Frankfurt School as he is of his favourite footballing colleagues, such as Messi, Ronaldinho and Zidane? This is particularly anomalous given Turkey’s history of political and ideological repression for most of the twentieth century. Adopting Mussolini’s Penal Code […]

News Faint signal The student occupations in California and the Communiqué from an Absent FutureFrom 24 September to 2 October 2009, students from the University of California, Santa Cruz occupied and blockaded the University’s graduate student commons: nominally in protest against the cuts in education spending in the UC system, more generally against the entire […]

News UniveRsities in cRisiseducation is not for $A£€Student protests in GermanyIn November and December 2009 – responding to the signal from Vienna, where the University‘s main lecture hall was occupied – buildings, lecture theatres and seminar rooms in fifty West German colleges were occupied. The number of participants in these occupations, some of which lasted […]

Toni Prug reports on the student occupations of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb in 2009.

Reports from the protests by those campaigning against the cuts to educations, including Nina Power on the centrality of women.