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The Bear: Gentrification & its discontents
The opening shot of the highly acclaimed TV show ‘The Bear’ sees the main character Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto staring down a caged brown bear in the heart of Chicago’s downtown. The motif, evidently a dream, nightmare or general vision rather than actual events, serves a telling mark not only of…
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Exploring Blackness of the Inner City: A Review of Netflix’s “The Kitchen”
As an urban geography professor, there are some films that are so on the nose with regard the themes that pervade my teaching and research encounters that they demand a closer inspection: and Netflix’s The Kitchen by Kibwe Tavares and Daniel Kaluuya is one such film. Set in a near…
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Benjaminian Aura in the Age of Swift
Swift performs at Gillette Stadium on May 19, 2023, in Foxborough, Mass., during her Eras Tour. Scott Eisen/TAS23 via Getty Images My children are Swifties. I take this as an abject failure on my part to indoctrinate them with various hues of ‘dad rock’, but given that Taylor Swift has…
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Hauntology: The Persistent Echoes of Lost Futures and Unfulfilled Promises
I sat down over the weekend to watch a Muppet’s Christmas Carol with the kids, and despite it being a tale a about a super-rich oligarch that is essentially guilt tripped into being a charitable entrepreneur, yet maintains his exploitative corporate enterprise but with just slightly higher wages in lieu…
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Pixel 8’s ‘best take’ and the Digital Dystopia
By now, you will have no doubt seen adverts for the new Pixel 8 mobile phone. One of it’s key new innovative features is it’s AI-infused camera technology, notably ‘best take’ (advertised above, if you can stomach it). This feature, which the adverts are keen to show in a fun,…
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Juxtaposition in the Capitalocene
One of the fundamental epistemological tenants of the Capitalocene can be analysed via a rather old-fashioned motif: a geographical, specifically, a scalar narrative. That is because our current conjuncture compels us to confront a stark and often discordant juxtaposition: one that chaotically zooms from the cosmological, the planetary, the national,…
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From Le Guin to Afrofuturism via Fisher: Decolonising revolutionary futures
The late, great American science fiction and anti-capitalist novelist, Ursula K. Le Guin said in 2014 these now oft-quoted words: “Books aren’t just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the…
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In Praise of the Pub Crawl
Monopoly Pub Crawl Route: Taken from https://www.reddit.com/r/london/comments/8mjd27/we_did_the_monopoly_pub_crawl_for_my_stag_do/ In the emotionally-draining, exploitative and burn-out fuelling drudgery of modern urban capitalist life, there are decreasingly few means of escape in which new spaces of the city are explored unintentionally, and new social connections can be forged. Within this urban hellscape though, a…
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Advertising, Desire and post-capitalism
Kylie Jenner’s infamous Pepsi ad, that was pulled after a public outcry that it trivialised the Black Live Matter protests in 2017 Advertising shits in your head. It permeates every aspect of our waking (and perhaps soon, non-waking) lives, manipulating our innermost desires, and shaping our perception of what we…
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What is an Academic-Activist?
An activist-academic, as the literature outlines, at its most basic is a scholar who actively engages in social and political issues while pursuing academic research and teaching. Much of this literature stems from the radical continental philosophies of the 60s and 70s, Paulo Friere’s ‘Pedegogy of the Oppressed’ is perhaps…
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