How should historians respond to acts of violence in the official archive? Catherine Phipps considers the life of Samia, an Algerian-French teenager, arguing that the epistemic attacks she faced highlight the urgency of historical work which takes account of police violence against sex workers.
Tag: police violence
Police, Press & Race in the Notting Hill Carnival ‘Disturbances’
On the 7th May 2020, at the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic in the UK, news broke that this year’s Notting Hill Carnival would be cancelled. Set to take place this August Bank Holiday weekend, the cancellation was a first in the Carnival’s more than fifty-year history. A few weeks […]
Shackles and Handcuffs: The ‘Special Relationship’ of Racist Policing
A culture of hyper-vigilantism and the conflation of skin colour with criminality did not begin with the abolition of slavery or with the current age of mass incarceration. Joseph Yannielli and Christine Whyte explore its 18th-century origins in metal chains, runaway advertisements and the establishment of modern policing.
“Registers of eunuchs” in colonial India
Jessica Hinchy writes on how colonial officials sought to eliminate and ‘fix’ the gender identity of ‘Hijras’, who are often termed ‘transgender’, and the contemporary resonance of this process.
Navigating the Catalan Crisis: Independence in Context
As the Catalan question becomes one of the most salient contemporary issues in Europe, Andrew Dowling argues that the call for independence is remarkably new, but can only be understood in the context of centuries of dispute between Catalonia and Spain