Nicole Rothwell Guerra embarks on an ambitious project to deconstruct the enduring institutionalised racism that haunts contemporary Guatemalan society. Her critical analysis exposes the trope of the ‘Communist Mayan Indigene’ as a construct to justify their domination and exploitation. She implores that her essay promotes understanding and support for indigenous liberation movements.
In Hunger within the Communities that Feed Us, Aaira Mitra applies a historical materialist approach to examine hunger within the very nations and communities that produce food. Mediated by Marx and Harvey, her paper takes the reader on a veritable journey through capitalist agriculture and the global food network, probing the pathways and mechanisms responsible for asymmetries in food access.
Gabija Bubnyte explores the pressing matter of revenge porn in An Eye for a Nude Picture. She examines the extant legislature in the United States but finds it desperately wanting. For Bubnyte, the culprit is the cultural discourse that views women as binary ‘virgin’ or ‘whore’, and it is the social perceptions of women that must be targeted to address the issue of revenge porn.
In Perverse Media, Roos Volkers takes as her point of departure the censorship of an Instagram post depicting bathing Arab women. Using gaze theory and medium theory, Volkers traces how patriarchal structures inherent to Instagram can imbibe an empowering photo with a perverted message.
Nabeel Khan and Linde van Noord investigate the possible ethnic, religious, or cultural biases in the representation of refugees across the Facebook thumbnails of Aljazeera and the BBC. Their robust and extensive semiotic analysis reveals some interesting visual tropes that differ between the Qatari and British networks.
In his poignant paper, Stan Hillen addresses the enduring and often overlooked femicide in Mexico. Making use of Rancière, Hillen explains how minorities are silenced and how art and, in particular, the heartrending poems of Maria Rivera, may upend the status quo to give the oppressed a new voice within the social order.
Alisha Verghese guides us through the daunting world of international law. She presents a slow and detailed analysis of the judgement of the International Court of Justice in the case of Germany vs Italy (Greece Intervening), but ends with a critique of the Court’s decision to grant Germany state immunity for crimes committed during the Second World War.
Maurits van Halderen’s far-encompassing essay is a must-read for all admirers of Nietzsche. Drawing from a broad spectrum of Nietzsche’s works, Animal All Too Human meticulously charts how human consciousness triumphed over animal instinct, and how our divergence from animality is hardened by our moral system of good vs. evil.
Bente Wiebing examines the intersections and contrasts between three postcolonial voices – Souffles-Anfâs, Présence Africaine, and Frantz Fanon – and their answer to the challenge of defining a national culture after years of colonialism. She exposes the obstacles placed in their path when the answer threatens the enduring power of the former coloniser.
Through Critical Theory and its Adversary, Philipp Spengler offers a concise analysis of the concept of fascism: that great – yet theoretically neglected – spectre of critical theory. Philipp Spengler offers a robust compare-and-contrast of fascism as understood in critical theory, from Adorno and Horkheimer to Deleuze and Guattari.