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	<title>The Zahir</title>
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	<description>The University of York&#039;s Culture Magazine</description>
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		<title>Urban Kenya? &#8211; Rachel Knighton</title>
		<link>http://zahir.org.uk/?p=478</link>
		<comments>http://zahir.org.uk/?p=478#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 18 Jun 2010 10:26:08 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Zahir Magazine</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Features]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Urbanaisation]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[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 was Kenya. Growing up in Kenya, life seemed idyllic. My family lived next to a small village in the foothills of Mount Kenya. It is only now, though, that I can look back over my upbringing &#8211; replacing those rose-tinted glasses instead for a critical eye &#8211; and ask myself whether my experience of Kenya reflects what was written on that page. On paper it was just statistics. In real life, I knew it to be true: the rate of urbanisation in Kenya is one of the highest in the world.  Nairobi, the capital city of Kenya, has burgeoned in recent years. If you drive along any of the main roads through the city, you will see that it is rife with street-sellers trying to sell their wares. Every convenience any tourist could want and need is readily available through your own car window during a [...]]]></description>
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		<title>Urban Poverty and Gender Perspective in The Wire &#8211; Alexandra Reynolds</title>
		<link>http://zahir.org.uk/?p=476</link>
		<comments>http://zahir.org.uk/?p=476#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 18 Jun 2010 10:24:28 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Zahir Magazine</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Features]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Urbanaisation]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[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 Simon’s acclaimed sociopolitical series The Wire (2002-2008) highlights not only the expected public fascination with sex, drugs and violence, but takes its appeal from a refusal to glamorise such facets of urban poverty.  This programme seeks to create a brutally realistic vision of an urban environment, based upon the private experiences of Simon and his writing partner Ed Burns.  What I ask is this:  where do women stand in Simon’s depiction of the “faces and voices of the real city”? The words which head this article, spoken by D’Angelo (Larry Gilliard Jr.), are highly illustrative of the exclusion of women from Simon’s urbanity.  Though the cast is not entirely male, all the characters inevitably operate in “masculine” discourses of power, legal control and violence.  D’Angelo’s description of his “people” alludes to a social order founded upon domestic relations, but nonetheless his words demonstrate a complete absence [...]]]></description>
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		<title>A life with my Dad and Daddy &#8211; Josephine Rust</title>
		<link>http://zahir.org.uk/?p=474</link>
		<comments>http://zahir.org.uk/?p=474#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 18 Jun 2010 10:23:03 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Zahir Magazine</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Politics]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://zahir.org.uk/?p=474</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[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 for children if it had to comply with the legislation. Other Catholic adoption agencies have either given up adoption or severed their ties with the Church because of the rules, which were introduced in 2007. Mr Justice Briggs, sitting at the High Court in London, allowed the society’s appeal and ordered the commission to reconsider its case. The verdict was welcomed by Catholic Church authorities, but was met with dismay by gay-rights campaigners and secular groups. The Bishop of Leeds, the Right Rev Arthur Roche, said outside the court: “Our case has not been brought on an anti-gay agenda of any sort. We respect, and would not want to diminish, the dignity of any person.” But Jonathan Finney, the head of external affairs at Stonewall, the gay-rights charity, condemned the judgment: “It’s unthinkable that anyone engaged in delivering any kind of public or publicly funded service [...]]]></description>
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		<title>D:Reaming of &#8217;97 &#8211; David Clarke</title>
		<link>http://zahir.org.uk/?p=472</link>
		<comments>http://zahir.org.uk/?p=472#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 18 Jun 2010 10:21:27 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Zahir Magazine</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Politics]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[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 questionable 1990s dance track seems to belong in another age, along with Tony Blair’s impassioned defence of free market capitalism and wide-eyed devotion to the City of London. (If the last 13 years have taught us anything, it’s that Brian Cox is much more suited to a physics professorship and that an ec=onomy based so surely on the financial sector may not be the best strategy.) But 1997 is still significant. Labour’s election campaign captured the public’s imagination in a way that no-one had seen for a generation. I remember it well. As a seven year old, I took my first slightly confused steps into political consciousness when our local MP visited my school and shook my hand. Impressed by this, I promptly announced to my visibly horrified Mum that I was a Conservative. But watching the results come in a few weeks later (now a [...]]]></description>
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		<title>The State of Care &#8211; Sarah Dean</title>
		<link>http://zahir.org.uk/?p=470</link>
		<comments>http://zahir.org.uk/?p=470#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 18 Jun 2010 10:20:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Zahir Magazine</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Politics]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[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 a rather rude awakening to the future that lies before us all. It is understandably difficult to imagine yourself in a position where you need continuous care and attention from strangers.  But for many elderly people, this is reality. The quality of the care we receive when we are older should be an issue we concern ourselves with now. So with the beginning of a new government, I want to find out what is in store for us when we are all old and grey. My first concern with the care system came with the lack of training I was given as an 18 year old. I was let loose upon poor un-expecting elderly people after a mere two days training. I started by assisting another carer but by the next day I was on my own. I would be expected to wash, dress, feed, and [...]]]></description>
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		<title>Setting the poverty agender &#8211; Alexandra Khoo</title>
		<link>http://zahir.org.uk/?p=468</link>
		<comments>http://zahir.org.uk/?p=468#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 18 Jun 2010 10:18:10 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Zahir Magazine</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Politics]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[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 over their lives as do their male counterparts from the projects. Poverty is gendered in its experience and impact and any projects that fail to recognise this almost inevitably have a pro-male bias. Specifically targeting women in poverty-reduction efforts is a more moderate move than having an overt element of women empowerment, but it is an effective start to helping poor, disadvantaged women obtain control and attain a better future. Impoverished women tend to be harder hit by poverty. Adopting a women-orientation in poverty-reduction projects would help level the playing field for women in providing them with a fairer chance of regaining control. Gender-based power relations translate into impoverished women generally  experiencing poverty differently and more intensely than their male counterparts. Within the household, the ‘anti-female bias’ results in a male preference when allocating food and healthcare. Inequitable distribution of household resources extends to poor men [...]]]></description>
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		<title>Forward the Libservatives &#8211; Greg Freeman</title>
		<link>http://zahir.org.uk/?p=466</link>
		<comments>http://zahir.org.uk/?p=466#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 18 Jun 2010 10:13:27 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Zahir Magazine</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Politics]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://zahir.org.uk/?p=466</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Guardian&#8217;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 as I went home at 5am on the morning after the election. As a backroom journalist at the Guardian &#8211; a news sub-editor who has worked on every general election at the paper since 1983 &#8211; I can’t remember a night quite like it. On normal election nights, you always knew the result by the time you set off home at the end of the shift. In the 1980s I would drive through the streets of south London and out into Surrey, another blue dawn breaking, another Conservative landslide to contemplate. In 1992, as soon as Basildon stayed Tory, we knew that the exit poll prediction of a hung parliament was wrong and, whether thanks to the Sun or not, Neil Kinnock had missed out: the air of trounced expectations in the Guardian office the next day was palpable. New Labour’s triumph in 1997 included the [...]]]></description>
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		<title>J. G. Ballard: the Bard of Central Hall &#8211; Richard Lemmer</title>
		<link>http://zahir.org.uk/?p=463</link>
		<comments>http://zahir.org.uk/?p=463#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 17 Jun 2010 13:56:21 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Zahir Magazine</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Literature]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://zahir.org.uk/?p=463</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[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 could, it would have been the late Prophet of Sheepteron &#8211; James Graham Ballard. Despite leading a quiet, windowed life raising two children in the south London suburbs, JG Ballard dared to imagine cannibalism behind every office block. He dared to imagine JFK’s assassination as a downhill motor race – ‘Kennedy was disqualified at the hospital, after taking a turn for the worse…’ High Rise. Concrete Island. Kingdom Come. Behind these seemingly banal titles lay the same violence and decay that is to be expected from those more provocative: Crash. Cocaine Nights. The Atrocity Exhibition. Supermarkets, high-rise apartment blocks, and seemingly endless stretches of motorway &#8211; Ballard claimed them all as his fiction’s disturbing settings. So much so that his name has entered into our language: Ballardian, an adjective Collins dictionary defines as “suggestive of the conditions described in Ballard’s novels; dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes [...]]]></description>
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		<title>Urban Rhythms &#8211; Harriet Evans</title>
		<link>http://zahir.org.uk/?p=461</link>
		<comments>http://zahir.org.uk/?p=461#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 17 Jun 2010 13:54:18 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Zahir Magazine</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Literature]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Urbanaisation]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://zahir.org.uk/?p=461</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[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 have little opportunity to be similarly inspired by nature.  Instead, their urban environments fill that void in the poetic process and urbanisation infiltrates the very rhythms of modern poetry. James Quinton is a modern poet in every sense of the word.  His first collection of poetry, Street Psalms, was published last year and the verse contained within that slim volume is as bare and distilled as it could possibly be.  Every word is charged with raw emotion and there is no trace of that ‘poetic diction’ Wordsworth so sought to reject in Lyrical Ballads. Quinton’s primary concern is city life: his poetry throbs with the rhythms of urban existence. In ‘Between The Cracks In The Floorboards’ Quinton admits he doesn’t ‘like to go outside’ and wishes to confine himself ‘behind the door / of a locked room / an existence enclosed’. Urbanisation has provided the poet [...]]]></description>
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		<title>The British Novel: 500 years out of date? &#8211; Richard Lemmer</title>
		<link>http://zahir.org.uk/?p=459</link>
		<comments>http://zahir.org.uk/?p=459#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 17 Jun 2010 13:52:55 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Zahir Magazine</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Literature]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://zahir.org.uk/?p=459</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Richard Lemmer identifies the present mood of British literature. The satirical news website The Onion’s very own atlas – ‘Our Dumb World’ &#8211; 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 the modern British novel. A.S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book is set between 1895 to the First World War; Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall revolved around Thomas Cromwell’s rise to power in the 1500s; Simon Mawer’s The Glass Room is set in 1930s Czechlovakia; Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger is a ghost story set in 1940s Warwickshire; and Adam Foulds’s The Quickening Maze features Lord Tennyson visiting a mental asylum in the 1800s. Maybe your highlight of 2009 was protesting outside the bank of England or watching the inauguration of the first black American president of the USA. For the British literary world, 2009 was all about The Reformation. It’s a sad fact that novels, no matter how speedily written, find it difficult to capture the modern moment. Speaking to Adam Foulds, current Writer in Residence at York, he reiterated that ‘it isn’t fiction’s job to provide reportage’- [...]]]></description>
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