How do we know nature and how has this been political, in the past and today? Vinita Damodaran and Harriet Ritvo discuss the rise of scientific expertise, its entanglement in projects of empire, and how it has interacted with indigenous and local knowledge.
Author: Elly Robson
The Political Environment
As the global ecological crisis deepens and spreads through virus, fire and flood, Elly Robson introduces a new HWO series on The Political Environment. How have politics shaped the way we identify ecological problems and solutions, and how have ‘natural’ events generated new forms of politics?
Queer Education: Section 28 and its Legacies
In the final episode of the Queer Activisms podcast, Elly Robson is joined by Nazmia Jamal and Syeda Ali to discuss queer education: the violent silence of Section 28, how it was resisted, and what lessons we can draw from it today.
Deluge and disaster: the politics of risk
As Britain is wracked by another winter of flooding, Elly Robson looks at how deluge in seventeenth-century Yorkshire led to a contentious politics of risk.
Making Radical History in 2018
From #MeToo to migrant solidarity, HWO editors select ten moments in which radical history was made in 2018
Radical Books: ‘An Agreement of the People’ (1647)
Debated in the 1647 Putney Debates, in the wake of the first English Civil War, the ‘Agreement of the People’ proposed radical democratic, legal and religious reforms; most significantly a written constitution between the people and their representatives.
Radical Books: The Luther Bible of 1534
In 1534, Martin Luther combined radical theology with revolutionary technology to publish the first vernacular translation of the Old and New Testament. It was a seminal moment in development of the Protestant Reformation, print culture, and the German language.