taCity

Author: Oli

  • Nurses 1% Pay Decision: Letter Template

    Dear [Your Conservative MP] I am writing to you to convey my utter dismay at the 1% pay rise that your government announced recently for nurses in the UK. As you will no doubt be acutely aware, our NHS nurses have been, and continue to be, totally vital in the…

  • MSc in Global Futures: Showcasing Student Work

    The inaugural year of Royal Holloway’s MSc in Global Futures has been a challenging one, largely because staff, students and administrators have had to constantly adapt to what the pandemic has thrown at as. But it is testament to the resolve and intellectual agency of the student cohort that they…

  • Planetary Safe Mode? Turning Lockdowns into a tool to fight Climate Change 

    The pandemic that currently grips our world has been many countries go into unprecedented lockdowns multiple times. Characterised by stay at home instructions, education going online, the closure of non-essential businesses; they have caused misery for millions. However, in some parts of the world they have had unintended benefits such…

  • Whose bailout is it anyway? Saving the Arts may not save Culture

    The recent announcement by the government that they are giving a £1.57bn ‘bailout’ to the UK’s arts and cultural sector has been hugely welcoming. As far as traditionally culture-shy and fiscally prudent Conservative governments go, it is a huge amount; it is almost three times the annual budget of Arts…

  • Geography isn’t dead. It’s the future…

    For a time, it was fashionable to talk of the ‘end of geography‘. In the brave new financial and globalising world of the late 90s, the world wide web and telecommunications were going to obliterate borders and usher in a new ‘global village’. We all know how that turned out.…

  • Walking Roosevelt: An autoethnographic exploration

    What does it mean to do autoethnography? What even is it? To the critics, autoethnography is rather disparagingly labelled ‘mesearch‘ and a form of personal story-telling that is far too narcissistic to be considered proper research. However, such a view tends to resolutely align traditional scientific objectivity with truth, and so…

  • Fight Club 20 years on: suicide and empathy

    David Fincher’s Fight Club is now 20 years old. And that the film still manages to talk directly to the issues of today is a testament to the foresight of Chuck Palahniuk’s original novel, but also to the incisiveness of Fincher’s film-making. There are countless blog posts, papers, books, online documentaries,…

  • CfP RGS19 – The Final Frontier? The Enclosure of a Commons of Outer Space

    The Final Frontier? The Enclosure of a Commons of Outer Space CfP for the RGS-IBG Annual Conference at the Royal Geographical Society, Exhibition Road, London, 28 to 30 August 2019.   “Space: The final frontier” (Star Trek TV Series, Opening Monologue) “Capitalist production constantly strives to overcome these immanent barriers,…

  • Don’t be surprised, mobilise

    When President Trump called refugees coming into the US ‘animals’ on live TV, it wasn’t a surprise. When Roseanne Barr, a prominent Trump supporter likened a Valerie Jarrett – an African-American advisor to Obama – to an ape, it wasn’t a surprise. When it broke that the UK government has been deporting…

  • Glass War: The New Materials of Gentrification

    Stand on London Bridge on a sunny day and look East, you’ll see the towers of Canary Wharf glistening in the distance, the Shard looming to your right slicing into the sky, and the bloated curves of the Walkie Talkie shimmering like a newly blown glass vase. Walk further west along…