Coping with and resisting everyday inequalities in the UK
This post is written in collaboration with outdoor, travel, and landscape photographer Sam Knight who joined me for some of my walks and has provided all the photos for this blog. See his full website: http://www.samsknight.com. Like many others, when lockdown was first proposed, I was scared. I am one of those people who rent …
Continue reading "Living on the beautiful edge: Escape routes from the city"
This blog was written in collaboration and conversation with a friend, who would prefer to remain anonymous. We will not tolerate any form of abuse… I started reading the sign in the waiting room of the Centre for Health and Disability Assessments. Back before the Covid-19 lockdown I was waiting with a friend for an …
“Stay at home”, the government tells us. The message is everywhere: Spotify adverts, and messages on people’s homes, businesses’ windows, and Facebook walls. Every time I read it or hear it, there is a shooting of fear down to my stomach. As Carter, Green, and Speed point out, it is a difficult, and somewhat ironic, …
Continue reading "Home is where the front door is: Corona homemaking in the UK"
Good News. Disruptiveinequalities.com is back - we are relaunching our blog. Given our own mobility and involvement with other national contexts our future accounts will also involve stories of banal inequalities and everyday resistances that we find in other parts of the world. Whilst our ethnographic explorations began in London, we are excited about taking …
“This wedding is going to change the world” The BBC reporter in Los Angeles was telling us of the joy and amazement everyone there was feeling after Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s wedding ceremony. I was watching “The Royal Wedding” in a pub in Brighton, with half-ironic union jack bunting over the bar, and I’d …
Continue reading "For richer for poorer: An insincere promise from the royals"
In my first week of my PhD at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine I made a terrible mistake. We were all settling in working on our literature reviews and I’d gone out into the courtyard for a cigarette. Suddenly an unidentified voice from a few stories above started shouting down at me: …
Continue reading "Being a Dirty Smoker: How public health academia villainises the poor"
“Nice cans love!” A guy wearing a rainbow garland just walked past my friend who was holding her and her girlfriends’ can of beer, one in each hand out in front of her chest (the normal way to hold cans of beer). “Woah… this is Brighton Pride you can’t be making comments like that.” Of …
Continue reading "Homophobic rainbow garlands: the homocommercialism of Brighton Pride"
I was going back to Hangleton, where I grew up. It is a residential area on the outskirts of Brighton which has rudely been skipped by the waves of gentrification moving out from the city centre. Brighton Festival was putting on a weekend of performance art at the community centres both here and in Whitehawk, …
I was in the middle of a dull day shift at the pub I used to work at in Hove. The company running the pub had just hired a new landlord – and the community was starting to hear about it. A woman came in, middle class. She hovered by the door, holding back from …
Continue reading "You’ve got no money? That’s no excuse not to come to the pub!"
Disruptive Inequalities 