Our slowed-down, cooled-down, scaled-down lives during the pandemic are evidence that quality of life does not depend on high productivity and frantic consumption. Suddenly, it has become respectable – and realistic – to talk about reforming society and the economy.
The US has no monopoly on under-serving and over-policing minorities. Police brutality is reported from the French suburbs to the Bulgarian countryside, and neo-Nazi resurgence is threatening European Roma in Hungary and Ukraine. Europeans must not wait for another horrific murder to draw attention to our own systemic racism.
Finding time and space for literature and reflection: Mererid Puw Davies’s poetry review advances the merits of literary fragmentation that cuts chronology and slots into layered lives.
The Movement for Black Lives has influenced public opinion about racism in American life, changed policy, helped reduce police violence and reshaped the politics of social justice. Finally, the wider public is coming to understand the need for a radical political transformation.
The spatial limits of speculation have been broken and the world is constantly combed for investment opportunities. The aim is to create the image of prosperous, dynamic cities, but for the majority of the urban population, it’s more a curse than a blessing.
Bellingcat’s pathbreaking work on the shooting down of MH17 and on chemical weapons use in Syria has led to open source investigation being recognized as a vital journalistic technique. Eurozine talks to Bellingcat founder and director Eliot Higgins about both stories and the disinformation around them.
When crisis hits, vulnerable groups suffer. And sex workers, already enduring precarity, have become the scapegoats of COVID-19’s health focus, facing heavy fines, police abuse and deportation threats. Boglárka Fedorkó investigates the lessons that can be learnt from the solidarity and organization of those facing adversity.
Rents are usually considered affordable when below around a third of a household’s income. But this rule of thumb is tailored to middle-class homes, ignoring the financial realities of low earners who struggle to cover necessities.
Australia’s recent bushfires are the country’s ‘most serious environmental disaster since colonization’. John Keane considers this megadisaster the product of democracy failure, rather than natural forces, which raises questions about political culpability, economic impacts, deep environmental damage and cultural accountability.
The ruling of the European Court of Justice on the controversial reform of the Supreme Court of Poland was a victory for liberal opponents of PiS. Then came the judgment of the German Constitutional Court, and the prospects for the independence of the Polish judiciary have again worsened. On the latest escalation of a longstanding conflict.
Housing is part of the foundation upon which all other human social relations are built. Like sustenance and sex, society can’t be reproduced without shelter. Vikerkaar editor Aro Velmet announces the new Eurozine focal point ‘Room temperature: Housing in crisis’.
The notion that India has much to offer Europe spiritually but little politically has been prevalent for centuries. However, a history of multiculturalism is incomplete that does not include the Mughal emperor Akbar’s enlightened and inclusive view of society and religion, revived in the Indian constitution of 1950.
Can street protests communicate justice for all? Political theorist Nikita Dhawan criticizes global movements where only ‘certain individuals are well positioned to express their aspirations’.
Some musicians choose not to perform in support of others. Others do so to highlight their own plight. But their silence needs an audience: ‘For disruption to work, there must be witnesses with thwarted expectations.’
Instead of uniformity, commoning urban spaces offers an inclusive life, open to differences. Through self-managed initiatives, the ‘right to the city’ becomes the right to collectively produce it through creative cooperation.
Tenants are the new proletariat. Rents are among the main sources of global capital accumulation, and tenants’ vulnerability is increasing. Using their shared experiences as a basis for struggle, School of Echoes tells the story of organizing against gentrification, taking issue with the affordability discourse and the institutionalized housing movement.