Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale write: Last week’s post was about the powerful novel Demon Copperhead. Addiction was a central part of that story. This post is about how neoliberalism changed the ways that Americans understand addiction.
Over the last forty years the neoliberal elite have changed the ways people’s understanding of their own suffering. They have done this by making suffering seem natural and genetic.
Continue readingJonathan Neale
This post will be of interest to only some of our readers. But we hope it will be very useful for them.
It is not easy to be both an academic and an activist. The values, the audiences and the constraints are different. Sitting down to write, you can feel yourself pulled in two different ways. The result is often muddled thinking and murky prose. There is too much ranting for an academic audience, and too much gobbledygook for the movement. In many cases, there is no prose at all, only silence, and pages crumpled in the wastebasket or erased on the screen.
The first half of this post offers some advice that can make writing easier, faster and more useful. The second half explains why universities make activists feel stupid, how they do it, and how you can cope. Continue reading
Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale. To download a pdf of this paper click here NLJN31Jan15FINAL
Resistance to sexual violence is increasing globally. There have been revelations of abuse in many countries, protests against rape in American universities, a riot in Delhi, and mass protests in Kolkota. It seems a tipping point has been reached and this movement will grow. This paper offers a new, and perhaps surprising, way of understanding the roots of sexism, and sexual violence which we hope will help take this movement forward. Continue reading
Anne Bonny Pirate 