Learning and unlearning: how does the radical left build its understanding?
How does the radical left build its understanding? Who are the theorists? Sølvi Qorda makes the case for Vygotskian pedagogy as a way of understanding our problems and also of finding better cultures to replace them. For many of us, school is a humiliating experience made worse by testing. Upon leaving compulsory education, this experience […]
Policing the Planet – charting changes to policing under neoliberalism
Sølvi Qorda reviews Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter, edited by Jordan T. Camp and Christina Heatherton Police killings have reached a shameful apex this week, the highest number in one week in an already-murderous year. How can we begin to comprehend a world where Americans will apparently express […]
Reclaiming the future
Sølvi Qorda argues the “millennial” generation needs to shoot up a flare and embrace the idea of human liberation if we are not to abandon the future to fear. My most enduring memory of the student movement was of the power and the creativity that it brought. At Millbank, on Day X, in the university […]
Our existence is not up for debate: A reply to Germaine Greer and her defenders
Activists at Cardiff University started a petition a week ago to cancel a talk by Germaine Greer on the grounds of Greer’s transphobic hate speech. Greer has since cancelled, but not before many liberal and left commentators came to her defence. Sølvi and Shanice argue that with violence against trans people at appalling levels, solidarity with them should be […]
This story of a trans life is a step towards imagining real liberation
Sølvi reviews Trans: A Memoir by Juliet Jacques (Verso, £16.99) When Juliet Jacques started writing her Transgender Journey blog in the Guardian, I’m reasonably sure I didn’t even know what transgender was. I wish, in hindsight, I had. Perhaps it would have explained some aspects of my life. The fact that Jacques’ blog was the first […]
“Are you like wearing mascara?”
As part of rs21’s ongoing series on trans liberation, Sølvi, a teaching assistant in a London secondary school, tries to grapple with what it means to be non-binary when working in education I work in a London secondary school. I’m a teaching assistant for students with special educational needs. We’re in a particularly inequal borough in […]
Not ‘crazy’ as in wacky, but ‘mad’ as in ‘fuck this’
A Marxist analysis of the mental ill health epidemic has to lay the blame squarely at the door of class society, and the alienation, injustice and misery it causes.