Charlotte Fraser

Has anyone written anything good about the return of 'affordability' as a political concern from a cultural perspective? its affective contours, what residual narratives it's tapping into?

The eight Palestine Action hunger strikers have now been held without trial for months, and three have been hospitalised. Here's a toolkit with 11 proposed actions you can take to support them.

The man who accelerated his car into a crowd of people in Liverpool admits simply to having “lost his temper.” The most recent example of what the Zetkin Collective called the “great driving right show” - the political, social and environmental debasement of the car. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

actual bluesky challenge: post your favorite work of art from fifty years before you were born.

"The power & agency delivered by Milei’s chainsaw, which makes his political platform possible, thrives on his closing of the gap btw the tenor of the metaphor & its vehicle, between wild-eyed demagogue & heavily armed vigilante." - @charlottefraser.bsky.social reframe.sussex.ac.uk/statesofcult...

Brilliant open-access collection of essays on 'The Cultural Location of Fascism' here including by @gavant.bsky.social @charlottefraser.bsky.social + many more I couldn't find on here!

reframe.sussex.ac.uk/statesofcult...

thanks for sharing!

Amongst many others in the 'Future of Cultural Analysis' collection! Which is open access and available here: library.oapen.org/bitstream/ha...

Quote: 'Despite the meticulous and inspirational methodological premises that surround social relevance, the notion itself is often not comprehensively unpacked and it appears as a rather broad concept that implies some form of contemporaneity, connectivity, and functionality. In its varying connotations, it seems to suggest a preexisting social field to which analysis is pertinent and applicable, and in which what is relevant can be known in advance. To be “relevant to” implies a prior knowability of the tenets and needs of a context according to which the (ir)relevance of knowledge/analysis can be measured. Perhaps this is also what makes social relevance, beyond cultural analysis, a useful term for the administrative bodies to talk about how knowledge/research/departments contribute to the (cultural and economic) vibrancy and prestige of the institutions. In this sense, relevance comes rather closer to other beloved notions of the neoliberal university such as efficiency and impact.'

Preparing for the 'Cultural Analysis in the World' symposium in Amsterdam next week and have really enjoyed reading Aylin Kuryel's excellent essay on the field's vexed relationship with 'social relevance'.

This is terrible news

Say no to bullying of NHS staff Treatment of striking NHS staff This helps to explain the treatment of NHS workers on strike in Gloucestershire in recent months.  A small but mighty group of workers have been on strike since...

Ok I know a lot of yous were surprised you hadn’t heard of the longest strike in NHS history happening in Gloucester, now here’s your chance to make a difference - a local petition like this is really important, please sign

www.megaphone.org.uk/petitions/sa...

Also travelling to Aarhus for the @dkmarxsoc.bsky.social conference on Abolition and pleasantly surprised to report no delays from the deutsche bahn (!) so far?

Look forward to talking crisis, debt and social reproduction tomorrow morning provided I haven't just jinxed my travel 🛤️

Young lives cut short on an unimaginable scale: the 18,457 children on Gaza’s list of war dead Every name on a list compiled by health authorities in Gaza of the child victims of Israel’s offensive

This is devastating but hard to think of more important journalism. 18,457 children have been killed in Gaza (many more not accounted for). Here, The Guardian prints their names and beautiful faces and tells us what they were like before Israel stole their lives. www.theguardian.com/world/ng-int...

In food history, we notice how super-refined foods--gelatin, vienna sausage, white bread--lose class and become horrifying once they become industrialized. Suddenly, fingermarks in bread dough demonstrate skill, not clumsiness.

Post-chatGPT, I'm feeling this about writing. Smoothness feels gross.

yes, my (French) mum had a copy of it. I feel like it did the rounds in countless magazine/paper headlines in the UK for years after - and i remember a debunking of it from a french author profiled in the Guardian that I found extremely refreshing

every time there's political violence discourse i think about how jo cox was assassinated in broad daylight by a fascist who shouted "britain first" as he shot her, and now nine years later her party is dedicating every moment in power to placating the ideology of her murderer

Forwards! To the Lime-bike critical mass singularity In defence of the most annoying cyclists in London

'In short, Accidental Lime-Bike Critical Mass (ALBCM) is making our streets safer in general. Bad cyclist behaviour is conditioning bad driver behaviour, for the better.'

danhancox.substack.com/p/onwards-to...

Love this!

Your Party democracy toolkit A living toolkit, resource bank, and directory to help you organise Your Party

there's a crowdsourced directory of branches on yourparty.tools

Police condemn 'intolerable abuse' at Palestine Action protest - as more than 425 arrests made Hundreds of Palestine Action supporters were "sat around, lying around, waiting to be arrested but with so many people here, it's taking a long time", Sky News' Laura Bundock, who was at the protest, ...

If you're a police officer and you don't want to be spat and kicked at, don't be a police officer. Your job at these demos is literally to make supporting genocide easier for the British state, what do you expect? news.sky.com/story/police...

Are there any meetings like this or groups getting together across (N) London?

I'm not, but I signed up to the mailing list!

I can't make it but would love to come to the next one!

if you want something feel-good!

🚨COMRADES!🚨

It's finally time to register for the 10th Danish conference for marxist studies on oct.10th-11th through link below!
This year the theme is on "Abolition" and we are so 🎉HYPED🎉 for this year's line-up which includes our great keynotes @genderhorizon.com and @brosef-stalin.bsky.social 🔥

No, with respect, the buck stops with him. He's the leader. Not McSweeney, not the comms guy. He sets the strategy, tone and values. He is responsible. Either Starmer and his whole crew are ousted and are replaced by something very different or its Vichy Labour from here until doomsday.

NICA recommends | SCCS-ASCA Workshop - with a keynote by Ben Highmore: Cultural Analysis in the Wild - Netherlands Institute for Cultural Analysis (NICA) (It’s a truism that cultural studies is different wherever it's practiced. In this workshop, two institutions come together to compare notes on how the field

ASCA based PhD researchers! I would love to hear from you for the PhD panel part of this workshop between ASCA and the Sussex Centre for Cultural Studies 👇

Fascinating

The West is that place on earth where an army killing civilians on a massive scale creates less outrage than calling for the metaphorical death of that army. The actual is trumped by the imaginary.

Big Tech's data centres will take water from world's driest areas Amazon, Microsoft and Google's data centres use vast amounts of water in some of the world’s driest areas and they are building more.

New from me: I've spent the last 6 months compiling a map of data centres, whose locations are generally secret, operated by Amazon, Microsoft and Google.

Cross-referencing that map with areas of water scarcity shows many are in the world's driest areas.

www.source-material.org/amazon-micro...