Rites of Spring
Springtime: The New Student Rebellions is under no illusions that capitalism is effectively re-socialising the question of higher education to embrace all of humanity as engineers of profit and not much else. The book is a critical firebrand of a rebuke to clich éd right-wing reaction to student activists’ ‘uncivilised’ rioting, exposing the fact that the real violence lies at the heart of the system and not with them. Clare Solomon’s and Tania Palmieri’s role as editors is as democratic as recent events have been: beyond brief but incisive introductions, they stand back and allow a rich diversity of voices — young and old, historical and contemporary, non-academic and tenured academics — the space to determine the record of their own history.
Christopher Madden reviews Clare Solomon and Tania Palmieri‘s Springtime: The New Student Rebellions.
Snapshots
You are supposed to look at the unimproved and think about the way that we dismiss so-called ‘chavs’ and certain immigrant classes that are considered unworthy, the “undeserving poor”. Those kind of prejudices are getting worse. Social mobility decreased under Labour and under the current government it is reversing. The differences between the poorest and richest are returning to Victorian levels. We don’t have open sewers and infant mortality rates at fifty percent but in economic terms we’re getting to a level of disparity we haven’t seen for a couple of hundred years. And we’re getting there very quickly.
Max Liu interviews Jonathan Trigell.