In this podcast our Digital Fellow Mark Carrigan speaks to Gurminder K. Bhambra about the common threads uniting the UK referendum and the US election: Originally posted 9th December 2016
Read MoreBy Akwugo Emejulu Trump’s presidential campaign and election have confounded those who are supposed to know things. When Trump announced his candidacy, various media pundits dismissed him. When he called Mexican migrants rapists, when he insulted the family of a dead soldier, when it emerged his wife plagiarised a speech by Michelle Obama and when it was […]
Read MoreBy Gurminder K Bhambra Class has come increasingly to the fore in explanations of outcomes of the UK referendum on leaving the EU and the US Presidential election. Much of this commentary has been prefaced with a criticism of the privileging of identity politics over socio-economic inequality. As a consequence, the white working class, the […]
Read MoreBy Laurence Cox and Alf Gunvald Nilsen Something remarkable has happened in the Anglophone countries where neoliberalism first came to power. After over two decades of popular resistance to trade deals, from the Zapatistas’ 1994 rebellion against NAFTA and the 1999 Seattle WTO summit protest, the US has elected a candidate openly opposed to such […]
Read MoreBy Tracy Shildrick For many the vote by the UK to leave the EU was seriously unsettling, if not shocking and even devastating. The election of Donald Trump in the United States was an even bigger international earthquake. Many, included me, are still reeling, trying to process the magnitude of these two important votes and […]
Read MoreBy Emma Briant An extreme right fringe has influenced American politics for far longer than many care to admit. This ‘shock’ election victory had a very slow creep. Neoliberal hegemony dug in its heels despite the pain of the 2008 financial crisis, repeating that there is still ‘no alternative’. Even moderate reforms such as Obamacare […]
Read MoreBy Kate McNicholas Smith In a period widely celebrated for its queer progress and inclusion, recent years have seen legislative and social change around LGBT rights. In popular culture we have seen new LGBT visibility and, in perhaps the most iconic symbol of social change, we have seen same-sex marriage legalised or soon to be […]
Read MoreBy Peter Bloom and Carl Rhodes Donald Trump’s election as President of the United States begs a profoundly paradoxical political question. In an election defined by an intense anger at Wall Street and the neoliberal establishment, how did a silver spoon-fed executive emerge as the champion of those ‘folks who feel left out’ by corporate globalisation […]
Read MoreBy Karen Soldatic and Kelley Johnson ‘She got in in the big cities. Look it up! She got in the big cities.’ ‘There is red everywhere! Who would vote for Trump? He is racist and sexist. Who would vote for him? OMG everything is red… look at this!’We turn to the Grade 5s (girls, boys, […]
Read MoreBy Mark Featherstone Like many people I have spent the last four or five days trying to make sense of the result of the American election. In thinking through the fantastical result I found myself asking two inter-related questions. My first question was, how could Trump win, when Clinton appeared a racing certainty up to […]
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