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Articles


Levelling the Playing Field: Border Carbon Adjustments and Emissions Leakage
Introduction The 2015 Paris Agreement was a pivotal moment in the struggle against climate change. While previous climate agreements...

Callum Winstock
15 min read


Re-Examining the Critical Analysis of Indian Society and the Caste System in Swades: We, the People (2004)
For far too long, Ashutosh Gowariker’s Swades (2004) has maintained its status as an Indian cinema cult classic. It is a film about a...

Richa Kapoor
14 min read


A Life of Art and Travel: Frances Spalding in Conversation with Mark Cazalet
Mark Cazalet, born 1964, trained at the Chelsea and then Falmouth Schools of Art, after which he held scholarships in Paris and India. He works in a variety of media, including engraved glass, paint, prints, mosaics, and graphic media. He has taught in several art institutions and has been a Senior Member of Faculty at The Royal Drawing School since 2012. Travel has always played an important role in his art. Through the experience of his journeys, he has opened up rich collo

Frances Spalding
21 min read


Splendid Isolation or Fish out of Water? Fishing, Brexit, and the Iconography of a Maritime Nation
1. The fish are alright Historically and presently, the United Kingdom has identified and presented itself as a maritime nation.[1] Fisheries, historically a significant source of employment, cultural identity, and economic output, are a vital component of the UK’s seafaring character. Amidst the decline of other British coastal industries, fishing, also in a state of ‘managed decline’,[2] is perhaps the UK’s final remaining material link to this maritime heritage. Our ar

Aadil Siddiqi and Nathan Davies
19 min read


On Feeling
Every year a flower painting finds its way into my art. The Sunflowers started with a creature I drew in charcoal straight onto the...

Gabriella Kardos
7 min read


(Un)natural Archives: Botanical Gardens, Photography, and Postcards
This paper examines contemporary Singaporean artist Marvin Tang’s project The Colony – Archive (2019), a part of his ongoing research...

Constance Koh
9 min read


Opening the Cave: The Necessity of Art in Society
If the doors of perception were cleansed then everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he...

Willow Winston
10 min read


Waiting for Saddam
One of Adolf Hitler’s favourite musicians was Richard Wagner. His thunderous compositions were meant to instil a violent pride within the...

Keshav Srinivasan
6 min read


‘A heap of broken images’: The Possibility of Connection in TS Eliot’s The Waste Land
Eliot’s work is filled—especially the poetry—with masks, role-playing, and multiple voices. Yet it is saturated everywhere, too, with...
Asseel Darwish
15 min read


Famous Lost Artworks
Modern commerce takes place at supersonic speed. It therefore surprises many that most of the world’s traded goods are still, at some...

Serhan Handani
8 min read


The Cultural Logic of Statues
A statue tumbles and, with an almighty splash, sinks below the water. Those responsible cheer with joy. Onlookers are captured in a range of emotions: confusion, rage, wonder. What is taking place? Is this an anti-historical act of violent vandalism, or the liberating removal of a relic of the colonial era, an enduring reminder of oppression? When Black Lives Matter protesters in Bristol toppled the statue of the merchant and slave trader Edward Colston in June 2020, it was

Jack Graveney
12 min read


Steering the Royal Academy in Pandemic Times: In Conversation with Axel Rüger
Axel Rü̈ger is Secretary and Chief Executive of the Royal Academy of Arts. He is a former Director of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam...

Louisa Stuart-Smith
6 min read


Leonardo the Myth alongside Leonardo the Architect
Leonardo da Vinci is a constant of the Western cultural tradition. We grow up with a vague sense of Leonardo’s achievements, knowing him...

Ruairi Smith
10 min read


We the People? The Conservative National Identity and its Role in American Political Polarisation
Identity drives human agency. Who we consider ourselves and the groups we are part of determines the choices we make. This principle is...

Christopher George
13 min read


Institutions for the Long Run: Taking Future Generations Seriously in Government
Introduction This article sets out the case for taking future generations seriously through our political institutions. We make three central claims. First, future people matter, and political institutions ought to reflect this. We make this case by appealing to the importance of broad political enfranchisement, and then to the more general moral significance of future people. Second, our political institutions do not yet take the interests of future generations sufficientl

Fin Moorhouse and Luca Righetti
26 min read


Remediation
The will to transparency, the scopic drive to see through, to scrutinise naked truth, encounters a significant impediment in the dead letters, the literae mortuae, of law. The puppet show of juridical interpretation, the marionettes that are pulled as heavy signifiers, gothic black-letter dogmas from the pickle jar of precedent, perform a spectacle that is always a trope and costume, a stage and screen away from the viewing subject. As the pop philosopher and ‘narcotheorist’

Peter Goodrich
21 min read


Egalitarianism and the Neoliberal Work Ethic: In Conversation with Elizabeth Anderson
John Dewey Distinguished University Professor and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan, Elizabeth Anderson is famously redefining egalitarianism in the field of political philosophy. Conventionally, philosophical debate has imagined the two concepts of equality and freedom to be polar opposites. Anderson has sought to challenge this perception by subordinating the popular egalitarian notion of distributive equality to tha

Teresa Turkheimer
15 min read


The Retrial of Dante: In Conversation with Count Sperello Alighieri and Antoine de Gabrielli
Count Sperello di Serego Alighieri is an astronomer descended from Dante Alighieri, author of the Divine Comedy. Antoine de Gabrielli is a prominent French businessman descended from Cante dei Gabrielli, the judge who condemned Dante to exile. Dante Alighieri lived from 1265 to 1321. During his lifetime, he was a pharmacist, a poet, and a politician. His study of medicines nourished an already scientific mind and allowed him to stock pharmacy shelves with his works. (Book

Alexander (Sami) Kardos-Nyheim
10 min read
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