Category: Article types

“Without money, without income, there is no social existence, no existence at all in fact, material or physical. […] The paradox of capitalist societies is that the economy is the main source of exclusion but that this exclusion not only excludes people from the economy, it excludes or threatens ultimately to exclude them from society itself” Godelier, 1998:2[i] In today’s society, money is the non-plus-ultra. There is no way around it. You use it every day to buy a morning-coffee,...

I recently had my carbon footprint calculated over the phone with a member of an environmental NGO called the Surefoot Effect. It was an interesting experience. The conversation was going well. I was asked questions about how I heat my flat (answer: I’ve never turned the heating on), how I commute to work (I cycle), how much meat I eat (I’m vegetarian) and my carbon footprint came in at roughly half the UK average, until I was asked about the...

  Piketty is everywhere. Both the French professor himself – always impeccably dressed in smart suits and equipped with the cutest French accent imaginable – and his latest book ‘Capital in the Twenty-First Century’ are all over the media, intellectual book-clubs and university common-rooms. He is #1 on Amazon (or on several Amazons in the US, the UK and France) and the hard cover version is sold out both in French and English. Piketty spoke on Reuters TV, CNN Money,...

  In early March, I interviewed Nancy Fraser for the King’s Review. Fraser, professor at the New School specialising on critical theory and feminism, is currently writing three accounts of the recent (financial, global and specifically European) crisis. In the interview, she was ardently arguing for a more holistic understanding of crisis: we shouldn’t see the recent turmoil in finance as an isolated economic problem but as connected with ecological – climate change – and socio-reproductive issues, such as enduring...

  Stretto: “When the entry of the answer occurs before the subject is completed, overlapping with it” Oxford Dictionary of Music. Avery Gordon  introduces a unique musical device that is characteristic of fugal compositions in her discussion of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo.  One of the accomplishments of the Mothers was their ability to give voice to the silenced by interrupting the dominating discourse of the state. During the 1970s, the state systematically massacred thousands of young men...

  Exposition – “The first statement of the subject by all the ‘voices’ in turn” Oxford Dictionary of Music. Exposition  Academia prepares graduate students to become experts in their fields.  Through this practice students become disciplined, learning the appropriate language, literature and methods that must become a part of their work.  Although this is a necessary part of the learning process, it creates brackets of knowledge, often related but isolated by area of study.  In this post, I will illustrate the...

    Fall is here and farmer’s markets will soon be closing for the season. Realizing that I will be forced back into supermarkets for my sustenance I have been pondering what is it that makes farmer’s markets unique. My pondering led me to Jürgen Habermas’s ideas of a “representational culture” and the “public sphere”. I think the marketing of food within the conventional food system (i.e. in supermarkets) can be understood through the lens of a representational culture. That...