Rachel Knighton speaks from personal experience I remember sitting in a geography class, several years ago, learning about urbanisation. The textbook in front of me told of the rise in migration from rural to urban areas, as people flocked to the city in search of a higher income for their families. The case study...
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Alexandra Reynolds questions how gender is hardwired to urbanity. Accelerated urbanisation has inevitably brought with it a rapid growth of urban poverty; a poverty produced not only by poor provision for housing, health services and education, but from socially conditioned constructs of equality, gender identity and criminal activity.  The recently fevered support for David...
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Josephine Rust tackles LGBT adoption Recently a Catholic adoption agency won the right to be exempted from legislation which would have forced it to consider homosexual couples as parents. Catholic Care, which serves the dioceses of Leeds, Middlesbrough, and Hallam in South Yorkshire, claimed it would be forced to stop its work finding homes...
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David Clarke recalls the spirit of  change of 1997 “Things can only get better”. Did they? Perhaps, but it all seems a long time ago. D:Ream, the band behind New Labour’s election anthem is now best known for the former membership of Brian Cox, who currently presents programmes about physics on the BBC. The highly...
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Sarah Dean considers our future care. As a student old age seams a far and distant fate, detached in almost all ways from the lives we are currently living. However during my gap year I found myself working at a care home and giving home visits to elderly and disabled people in my area. This was...
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Alexandra Khoo looks at the patriarchal bias in the fight against poverty. The portrait of poverty is often given a female face, and it is a fact that women are over-represented in poverty. Yet, women’s agency is rarely given much thought in poverty-reduction projects. It is falsely assumed that they benefit equally in regaining control...
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The Guardian’s Greg Freeman looks at an unusual election. Libservative … Cleggeron … Con-Dem-nation? Whatever term you come up with to describe the new coalition government – and there have been quite a few others – there is a sense that no one knows quite where we are heading for yet. Just as we didn’t...
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Richard Lemmer composes a love ballard. What could we do with Central Hall? Could anyone see past the cute ducklings and the picturesque weeping willows to reveal the darker side of our artificial lake? In short, who could turn the grey, uninspiring blocks of our university into the setting of disturbing fiction? If anyone...
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Harriet Evans magnifies James Quinton’s contracted cities. The city is the dominant trope in modern poetry and the rushed, hectic city life, the life of the poet. In 1798 Wordsworth began ‘Lines Written In Early Spring’: ‘I heard a thousand blended notes / While in a grove I sat reclined’. Today, modern city-dwelling poets...
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Richard Lemmer identifies the present mood of British literature. The satirical news website The Onion’s very own atlas – ‘Our Dumb World’ – describes England as ‘Surging Ahead To The 19th Century’. A little reductive? Maybe, but looking at last year’s Booker short list, The Onion’s shallow description may sum up deep problems with...
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