‘I have felt a chill of recognition’. Matt Cook interrogates the emotional resonances invoked by Channel 4’s TV drama serial ‘It’s A Sin’ and what this means for the recognition of memories of grief in suspension.
Histories of the Present
Women’s Streets
How do we see walking women? Using archival photography from 1950s and 1960s Turku (Finland), Tiina Männistö-Funk argues that women’s care and bodily presence shapes cities as much as concrete and asphalt do.
Whose Streets?
This opening article in the ‘Whose Streets?’ feature considers what it means to live through the jarring collapse of public life in the midst of a pandemic and how this moment might stimulate new radical histories of the urban commons.
‘A Dark, Difficult, and Shameful Chapter’
Dr Ciara Breathnach on the Final Report of Ireland’s Mother & Baby Homes Commission of Investigation Despite the fact that the poor law was dismantled in the 1920s, nineteenth-century workhouses are still prominent features in the Irish landscape. Ominous and foreboding, many became county and district hospitals and served as […]
Remembering the New Cross Massacre
In the early morning on Sunday 18 January 1981, a fire broke out at 439 New Cross Road in the London Borough of Lewisham. The fire was almost certainly the result of a deliberate racist attack. Thirteen young Black Britons lost their lives as a result.
Rap Speaks, but Who Listens? The Musical ‘Other’ in France
What does rap tell us of social change and conflict in the French Republic? Paroma Ghose explores how its themes reveal a socio-political conversation with the state.
‘An Equality of Injustice’: The Sex Buyers’ Bill and Lessons from History
The “Sex Buyers’ Bill” now pending in Parliament aims to protect women from exploitation by criminalizing men who buy sex, yet it is vehemently opposed by UK sex workers. Julia Laite explores the tangled history and woeful consequences of attempts to outlaw the trade in sex.