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Starmer’s election victory: from the politics of support to the politics of power
Full text linkKeir Starmer was elected Labour leader in 2020 after the party’s worst election defeat since 1935. Just four years later, the party returned to government with a landslide majority. Scholars have explained the dominance of the Conservative Party through an analysis of the ‘politics of support’ and the ‘politics of power’. This article applies that framework to Labour, focussing on how support was built in the run up to 2024. It examines the politics of support across the party organization, parliament and, most importantly, the electorate. I argue that Starmer’s bid to achieve electoral support relied on two main factors: a ‘decontamination’ strategy related to the party’s immediate past; and a cautious approach that minimized policy commitments and downplayed the role of ideology. The approach was electorally successful, but resulted in shallow support, gained in large part from removing reasons voters in target seats had previously not supported the party. The article concludes by discussing the challenges this strategy of support presents for the ‘politics of power’
Hidden Wounds, Unheard Voices: An Exploration of Men as Victims of IPV during and Post-COVID-19
Full text linkThe victimisation of men in Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) has historically received limited attention, particularly during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. This study explores the experiences of male victims of female-perpetrated IPV and assesses the support and services they accessed during and after the pandemic in the UK. Through interviews with ten participants, the data were analysed using framework analysis. The participants reported a broad range of abusive behaviours, including physical, emotional, and financial abuse. Additionally, new forms of coercive control were found to be linked to the pandemic and the unique female-perpetrator/male-victim dynamic. The findings revealed that male participants endured multiple forms of abuse and coercive control, compounded by institutional failures, which significantly affected their ability to access support
"Working in the Content Factory": Musicians’ Social Media Use and Mental Health as Seen Through the Lens of a Transdiagnostic Cognitive Behavioural Conceptualisation
Full text linkResearch shows that musicians are an at-risk occupational group for mental health difficulties and suicidality. Further, social media has become central to working musicians’ lives, and there is a growing concern that social media may be linked to the increasing prevalence of mental health difficulties within the general population. Despite this, few studies have explored the role of social media in musicians’ mental health and wellbeing, both in terms of benefits to harness, as well as harms to avoid. Drawing on a transdiagnostic cognitive behavioural conceptualisation of social media use and mental health links, this interdisciplinary qualitative article draws on semi-structured interviews with twelve musicians from across the United Kingdom building careers in genres of popular i.e. non-classical, music. Findings from thematic analysis highlighted potential benefits and harms of social media engagement, e.g., opportunities for social connection, self-expression, networking, career building, and as a source of inspiration, as well as the possibility of social disconnection, harmful social comparisons, experiences of stigma, trolling and abuse, uncertainty around the nature of the algorithm, and a sense of needing to share more and more, with a risk that it starts to displace valued offline activities. We explore these findings through the lens of the transdiagnostic conceptualisation, and highlight clinical implications aimed at supporting musicians to use social media in ways that supports their wellbeing
Literature and Conversion in the English Renaissance
No full textFollowing the Reformation conversion was an inescapable part of English culture. Conversion could refer to a change in religious identity or an intensification of spiritual feeling. The latter was understood as a stage of life for many Protestants, but the former was a source of huge anxiety and risk depending on the religious climate of the day. Conversion was explored in a variety of literary genres, giving birth to its own form of literary expression in the conversion narrative, a genre of life writing closely associated with Protestant nonconformists such as John Bunyan. Poets, including John Donne and Richard Crashaw, who had themselves undergone conversion, reflected on the soul’s capacity for change, often closely intertwining ideas of figurative turning with the turn of the soul. Conversion, particularly that of non-Christians or Christians who “turned Turk” by adopting Islam, was a source of spectacle and entertainment in the early modern theaters. These dramas evinced both fear and fascination with the Muslim “other,” depicting a fabricated and orientalized Islamic world in which souls are bartered like commodities. Shakespeare and Marlowe staged the conversion of Jews, revealing deep prejudices about the faith and commenting both on enforced conversion as a form of punishment and the withholding of true conversion from those whose racial identity and bloodline were thought to preclude assimilation into the Christian community. Conversion thus moves discursively through the literature of the English Renaissance, often reflecting powerful anxieties about religious instability
Political Exhibitionists - Ethical Considerations in the Display of Political Art
No full textWhen promoting politically engaged exhibitions, are museums also upholding the same values in internal practices? One museum's controversial censorship decisions are a case study for the author on why true ethical alignment requires institutions to support political expression beyond curatorial decisions
Labour's AI Action Plan - a gift to the far right
No full textCritical computing expert Dan McQuillan argues that, on top of the clear social and environmental harms associated with the technology, Labour's vapid fixation on AI-led growth in lieu of real change will further enable the far right. Instead, he proposes an alternative strategy of 'decomputing'
Seam Echos: Artistic response and digital preservation
No full textIn May 2025 I had the pleasure of representing the Goldsmiths Special Collections, and presenting at the inaugural Sensory History Conference, an engaging and thought provoking gathering of scholars exploring how the senses have shaped human experience across time. Held at UCL, the conference brought together historians, researchers, and practitioners from diverse fields to examine the role of sound, smell, touch, taste, and sight in archival contexts. A online experience was created for the Goldsmiths Textile Collection and presented at the conference, it is available on spatial.io
Styles of thought in healthcare governance: A situational analysis of English PrEP discourse 2016–2020
Full text linkAttending to competing styles of thought in healthcare controversies may be helpful to critical health scholarship. This article reexamines the debate over the introduction of a new HIV prevention technology in England as a tension between epidemiological and molecular style of thoughts. I argue English HIV services were organised according to an epidemiological style of thought. The introduction of biomedical pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) to the health system brought this rationality into question in ways the English health system was ill-prepared to manage. A situational analysis of English PrEP discourse in the lead up and following NHS-England’s ‘U-turn’ on PrEP illustrates a split along epidemiologically and biomedically informed styles of thought. These networks have their dedicated administrators, experts, activists and ways of thinking about their target population and preferred organisation of HIV services. Though they often collaborate, these two groups have distinct moral and political agendas that relate to their style of thinking. This analysis further nuances existing critical interpretations of the PrEP controversy in England. Beyond England, this debate suggests a potential departure from the conventional biopolitical subject and rationality of advanced liberalism
Preface: Space Invaders Revisited
Full text linkThis is the preface to a special issue of The European Journal of Cultural Studies on Space Invaders revisited, edited by Nirmal Puwar, Jo Littler and Anamik Saha
Living Your Animal: Listening to Wild Gender and Sexuality
No full textThis paper addresses Jung's use of the quote “nothing human is alien to me” as an epitomizing statement on the ethics of analysis. Certain failures of listening in analytic practice are identified, typically experienced by queer and trans patients, using as an example a psychoanalytic paper on cruising and anonymous sex. Three themes that often emerge in analytic theory that pathologizes transgressive gender and sexuality are discussed, alongside contemporary psychoanalytic and Jungian-informed attempts to rethink them: the discourse on ‘part-object relating,’ the fixation on aetiology and what has termed a ‘traumatophobic’ approach, and the charge that wild gender and sexuality are theatrical and ritualistic. The author argues in favour of revisiting Jung's ideas on sexuality through a queer reading of references to animals in The Red Book, and a playful redefinition and repurposing of anima as animx, denoting psychic discoveries related to gender and sexuality that bring us to life and carry a numinous quality. A brief sequence in the film El Principe is used to illustrate Jung's observation that one doesn't have a sexuality and spirituality; instead, sexuality and spirituality have, or possess us. This queer Jungian epistemology of gender and sexuality allows for a less heroic vision of the role of the analyst, and one that values discomfort in the service of analytic change for both participants in the analysis