Geeta Patel is a Professor of Gender Studies at the University of Virginia. Her work is informed by translation theory, gender and sexuality studies, diaspora and subaltern historiography, and the history of science. On June 14th, 2018, Professor Patel gave a talk, titled, 'In Theory/In Deed: Radical Philosophy in Action', which was co-hosted by Critical Theory and Practice, and Cambridge University and College Union. KR editor Ayşe Polat met with her the following day, to discuss the possibilities of radical action in distraction, moving from her own experience organising in Sri Lanka.
Taking its cue from the furore surrounding Logan Paul’s now infamous ‘suicide forest’ video, this article examines an online culture of memes and vlogs and subreddits and asks just why it is so jarring when this and the ‘real’ world collide. It asks why we seem so ready and willing to avoid the latter, and what the politics of doing so might be. However, it also questions the legitimacy of those who dismiss this culture out of hand as ‘low-brow’, and proposes that this may in fact be another strategy of avoidance, a means of forestalling engagement with material does not (or does not want to) understand.
Elegy, a term that means in its strictest sense a verse lament for the dead, is in practice applied to the wide variety of writing that enacts the work of mourning. If grief is a problem of narrative and nothing more, then elegy is rendered a purely productive tool; a mediating force to curb emotional excess.
La Revo is Seville’s first non-mixed occupation. It was established in 2015, not intended for permanent habitation, but as a social centre that would be home to community workshops, debates, fiestas, a crèche, a kitchen and a library. PhD student Roseanna Webster reflects on her year with the collective in Spain.
King’s Review’s editor Giulia Torino and King’s College’s fellow Felipe Hernández met Jorge Pérez Jaramillo, Colombian architect and urbanist, during his visiting fellowship at King’s College to write his latest book. The work will deal with a critical overview of the widely celebrated post-1991 urban transformation of Medellín that became a planning reference for cities all around the world, under the soi-disant appellation of “the miracle of Medellín”. Drawing […]
“I didn’t find who attacked my great-grandfather with an axe. But I think I learned who didn’t." History bleeds into the present in Tanya Zaharchenko's investigation of her family history in Ukraine's eastern town of Kharkiv, replete with axe-wielding criminals, chandelier-adorned mansions, and a long-unsolved assassination.
This piece explores the critical consequences of popular feminist imaginaries in the current #MeToo climate. Through a comparative film review of The Beguiled and The Handmaiden, it asks what we achieve by entertaining multiple feminisms, and questions whether a politics of representation makes space for ideological contestation in contemporary popular media.
Learn little by perusing this essay on the criss-crossing narrative that played out one day between two masks displayed at the Sir John Soane's museum. Intruige, scandal, tomfoolery and ultimately the realisation of the author's own attitudes towards sex are central to this completely solipsistic review, not of a museum, but of the subjective experience of one.
Before he arrived in 1952 to study history at King’s College, Cambridge under the supervision of Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, Neal Ascherson was conscripted into the Royal Marines at age 18 to defend British colonial interests in Malaya against Chin Peng’s communist insurgency. It was Hobsbawm who, in his benevolently probing way during their first encounter, helped Ascherson confront his own feelings of remorse, later calling him “perhaps the […]
In the second interview for the series 'The Good Life: Conversations for the King's Review,' Jonas Tinius and Johannes Lenhard invited anthropologist and social entrepreneur Edward F. Fischer to reflect on the core themes of his latest book The Good Life: Aspirations, Dignity, and the Anthropology of Well-Being (Stanford, 2014). We spoke about the imperfect but valued opportunities of entrepreneurship for realising desires for a better life; hopes for a better future, and the role of economies and markets in thinking about well-being.
