What would a radical pedagogy feel like? Have we forgotten? Did we ever know? Perhaps, in the moments we do experience it, we don’t recognise it as being anything like pedagogy, learning or understanding (that is, the collective and collectivising transmission and production of ideas, strategies and practices.) What we need […]
In August 1985 my late partner went to the dentist. They told him they were concerned by how swollen his glands were. It was at the height of the initial AIDS panic in the UK and there was quite a lot of alarm among gay men, so we feared that […]
I didn’t get my first job until I was part-way through my degree. My impaired mobility meant I couldn’t do the kinds of work young people traditionally do, like bar work or stacking supermarket shelves. So I claimed benefits until I was educated enough for people to be willing to […]
Amid a mass of measures by which a government’s performance can be evaluated – unemployment statistics, credit ratings, borrowing figures – one test in particular stands out. English philosopher T.H. Green proposed that for each government action, one should ask: “Does it liberate individuals by increasing their self-reliance or their ability […]
Karen Sherlock was just an ordinary woman. She didn’t have a great deal of money, her health meant she didn’t get many opportunities to go out, particularly not anywhere you might have seen her, and even if you did you wouldn’t have given her another thought. Just another woman in middle […]
Despite claims that welfare spending is ‘out of control’, the Government is handing out billions of pounds to a private sector actively involved in demolishing the welfare state. One example: Atos, the global IT company, currently receives around £100m a year to carry out the Work Capability Assessment (WCA) on […]
To do his schoolwork, the bare minimum Johnny needs is: paper, a pen, a teacher, a school, a chair to sit on, a desk to sit at, and a packed lunch. If you take away just Johnny’s lunch, he will go hungry. It would be almost impossible for him to concentrate […]
The International Organization for a Participatory Society (IOPS) is an international, nongovernmental organisation embracing values such as self-management, diversity, ecological husbandry and egalitarianism. The organisation was founded in early in 2012, and names the likes of Noam Chomsky, David Harvey, John Pilger, Elaine Bernard and Vijay Prashad among its well-known […]
A question has been gnawing at me for several months now. Can fiction, poetry, any creative writing, make a genuine difference in a social and political sense? How much of it, really, is just self-aggrandising ego? Can it, at the end of the day, enable positive change? And in the […]
Activists involved with UK Uncut, Occupy, community organisations and trade unions are about to launch a nationwide campaign – called PAY UP – against highly profitable UK companies that pay some of their staff only the bare minimum. CEO pay, and the focus on the top 1% gained a lot […]