All Blog Posts
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In Defence of ‘Lazy’ British Universities
On Saturday, Dr Anthony Seldon, Master of the elite UK independent school Wellington College and newly appointed Vice Chancellor of Britain’s first independent university, the University of Buckingham, accused British Universities of laziness. ‘An ocean of complacency exists in the sector,’ he wrote in an article for The Times, complaining that the UK Higher Education…
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Thoughts on War Memorial Desecration
I never wanted the post I recently wrote on the MP child abuse scandal to ignite a debate about the sanctity of war memorials. Child abuse is too important. There are rarely any ethically watertight, black and white issues on which we can all agree. Surely, I thought, if we can rally around anything we…
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We Need to Talk about Government Child Abuse
Over the weekend, protesters across London who had defaced a war memorial were widely (and predictably) condemned as moronic and evil by social media users and the newspaper press. They had written ‘Fuck Tory scum’, in a furious crimson scrawl, across The Monument to the Women of World War II, on Whitehall in London. Never…
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Council Estate Creativity: SPID Theatre Company
In these times of uncertainty, as rising rents and soaring house prices mean even Britain’s professional classes struggle to afford shelter, the phrase ‘council estate’ has become demonised. Estates are characterised by the right-wing press as hot beds of crime, poverty and immorality; as depressing ghettos where miserable people in tracksuits scam the benefits system…
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Immersive Theatre: David Shearing’s THE WEATHER MACHINE
David Shearing’s new work, THE WEATHER MACHINE, premiers in Leeds this weekend. Shearing collaborates with musicians, writers and performers to craft immersive performances. His work is in the tradition of popular companies such as Punchdrunk, Shunt and You Me Bum Bum Train, who create performance landscapes that place audiences at the centre of the action.…
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‘Towards a Spatial Practice of the Postcolonial City’
Between 2010 and 2015 I have been involved in a research initiative exploring the ‘postcolonial city’. It began with an interdisciplinary reading group I attended at the University of Leeds as a postgraduate student; in 2012 I and a group of postgraduate researchers from English, Modern Languages and Communication Studies, organised the Postcolonial Studies Association’s…
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Radio Show
I was on the radio last weekend, talking about my life as a sex and relationships blogger on Hoxton Radio’s Ladies What Brunch. You can listen to the show here.
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Education and ‘Value’
Since, approximately, the beginning of time, politicians, journalists and, if Guardian comments threads are anything to go by, members of the public, have been debating the ‘value’ of Higher Education, and, indeed, education more generally. This debate has grown ever more intense as university fees have increased to £9,000 per year for the average undergraduate,…
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Race, Racism and ‘Theatre of the Ghetto’
One of my research interests is in the genre of drama that journalist Lindsay Johns has pejoratively termed ‘Theatre of the Ghetto‘. This genre, according to Johns, is primarily ‘about guns, drugs and council estates’ and regularly depicts black people (particularly men) as inhabitants of unsavoury or troubled home environments and as the perpetrators or…
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Look at the E(s)tate We’re In
For the past five and half years, I have been undertaking research examining the representation of council estates (or social housing estates) across a number of divergent theatre practices (mainstream, applied and site-specific). In September 2013 I attended a fascinating event, run by artist Jordan McKenzie as part of the Live Art Development Agency’s DIY…
Katie Beswick 