Happy New Year to all our readers. Thank you for you thoughts and comments on Left Flank, in what was a year of revolutions and a return to politics from below in many corners of the world. Of course we’re not all politics here, just mostly, so here are other parts of our last 12 months in photos taken by us both.
21 Dec
Comments Off
 |
| Photo of Cairo street art by Hossam el-Hamalawy. |
A new issue of the journal Interface was released last week, announcement below.
Volume 3/2 (November 2011): Feminism, women’s movements and women in movement
Issue editors: Sara Motta, Cristina Flesher Fominaya, Catherine Eschle, Laurence Cox
Volume three, issue two of Interface, a peer-reviewed e-journal produced and refereed by social movement practitioners and engaged movement researchers, is now out, on the special theme “Feminism, women’s movements and women in movement”. Interface is open-access (free), global and multilingual. Our overall aim is to “learn from each other’s struggles”: to develop a dialogue between practitioners and researchers, but also between different social movements, intellectual traditions and national or regional contexts.
17 Dec
Comments Off
Whatever criticism one may have of the Occupy Everywhere movement, its central idea that ‘We Are the 99%’ speaks to the many people who sense a deep injustice in the current socio-economic system. People do not feel they have it ‘better than ever’, even in Australia, and many point to the diminished freedom they feel — economically and politically — as a key source of their grievances. The movement has been raising concerns about both the economic situation of the majority compared to the very wealthy in society, but also about the decreasing ‘buy-in’ they have to mainstream politics. Despite the promise of freedom in the neoliberal era people feel more and more curtailed and personally diminished.
This article looks to assess what lies behind the term ‘freedom’ when it is deployed by the neoliberal ideologues. When the concept is raised in Australian political circles, it leads many to think almost exclusively of economic libertarians and hard Right think tanks who enjoy an almost hegemonic usage of the term at the moment. Traditionally it was the Left, and not the Right, that was concerned with free will and justice, at the forefront of the fights against exploitation and subjugation. Politics for the Left was supposed to represent a festival of the oppressed.
08 Dec
Comments Off
 |
| Candle-lit vigil in Oslo, soon after the 22 July massacre |
Since my last piece for The Drum, the IPA’s Chris Berg has produced an attack on our book, On Utøya: Anders Breivik, Right Terror, Racism and Europe. We haven’t formally responded, but many of the comments below his article deal with his frankly desperate and unconvincing attempt to exonerate the Islamophobic and anti-multicultural Right from creating the context in which far Right violence is more likely.
In the meantime I was asked to write a short piece about the Breivik diagnosis for weekly medical industry paper Psychiatry Update. I’m reposting here as it includes newly available detail about the psychiatric report, and because Psychiatry Update is only available to registered healthcare practitioners (you can follow its tweet stream here: @PsychUpdate).
03 Dec
Comments Off
Comments now closed on this article at The Drum, so reposting here for your commenting pleasure!
Two court-appointed psychiatrists have found confessed Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik legally insane and unfit to stand trial. The full text of their 243 page report is yet to be released, but if public statements are representative of its contents, there is good reason to suspect their assessment may tell us more about the socially embedded nature of psychiatric diagnosis and the prevailing political climate in Norway than any claim it was the result of some kind of cold, hard, value-free science.
31 Dec
Comments Off