Coping with and resisting everyday inequalities in the UK
How much is a human life worth? Susan asked me at the bus stop. We had just taken each of our children to kindergarten, and were waiting for the bus to take us to our respective workplaces. Bianca and I decided to move back to Switzerland for Lele to attend Kindergarten in German, the language …
Continue reading "How much is a human life worth? Societal divides in a capitalist pandemic"
I want to buy a car. I want my freedom back. Freeeee! The government has announced a softening of the lockdown. People can move now within their region. The radio clarifies that social distancing still needs to be maintained, it has become part of our ‘new normality’. Wear masks, keep distance, don’t hug, stand in …
Continue reading "Freedom, Oppression, Sacrifice: Chronicles from the Italian Lock Down (Part two)"
This month we have a contribution from educator and thinker, Arnaldo. He currently teaches in London where he also researches and writes about the London Latinx community. It is my first time in a London police station. My nerves are crackling like water on hot grease, however, on the surface I am stoic. I have the impression …
“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"
Don’t call them unemployed, please. The charity’s management invited me to East London to talk about their employability programmes. Don’t call them unemployed, repeats one of the managers. I have only recently taken over my position as a lecturer in London, having previously lived and worked elsewhere in Europe. I am not accustomed with the …
Continue reading "Making Happy Job Seekers – Precarity and Emotional Resilience"
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"
“Do something today that your future self will thank you for.” I am sitting in the small meeting room of an old town hall in East London that is rented by a charity providing employability programmes to young people from the neighbourhood. “If you don’t find time, if you don’t do the work, you don’t …
Continue reading "Be SMART│ER – The everyday craziness of running an employability programme"
For our first guest contribution we've invited Natassia Brenman, a PhD student from LSHTM, to share her work on access to community mental health services in London. I don’t think I ever met the two homeless people who had been sleeping outside the counselling service I spent time volunteering at last year. I’d been there …
Continue reading "At the edge-lands of mental health care, whose vulnerability counts?"
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!"
