There are many stories of friendship during the miners’ strike. The importance of this was in part the sense – in the middle of extraordinary hostility from multiple directions – that they weren’t alone. The long-term, mutual and egalitarian relationships signalled by the word ‘friendship’ during the miners’ strike should be embedded in our organising, anticipating the type of world we want to make.
‘It began with an email of simple praise. A senior scholar reached out to me about my academic writing. Her words were hospitable and soft; and, I responded. Now, almost a year later, we continue to write…’ Celeste Henery on the radical importance of friendship for Black women writers and scholars.
This is the first in a series of pieces about Radical Friendship. The feature is intended as an exploration of different configurations of friendship, both intimate and symbolic, and the radical potential of these relationships.
COVID-19 is not an equal opportunity disease. Even as politicians, managers, and UN officials give us pep talks about how we’re all in this together, segments of our society are having vastly different experiences of this pandemic.
With Italy on the frontline of Europe’s Coronavirus outbreak, Rosa Salzberg examines how Renaissance Venice established world-leading measures to combat the plague, strategies we are still relying on today.
How can the history of the response to the 2009-10 swine flu epidemic illuminate the British government’s response to the COVID crisis? Virginia Berridge explores.
What can the British provincial press tell us about the way pandemics have historically been experienced at a local level? Andrew Jackson proposes that such coverage offers vital insights into community-led responses to global public health crises in 1918 and 2020.
