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learning/unlearning
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(Don’t) Be Naughty!
In a world that systematically dehumanises children and their misbehaving, we should strive to celebrate it and grow confident in our acts of disobedience. To be naughty, is to attract attention by performing a disobedient act against authority. We are condi- tioned out of this natural expression of frustration and boundary pushing as we are…
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How can we learn hope?
I am finding mustering hope for the future difficult. We’re living in a time made up of quilted existential crises’, whose impacts will be born by a public whose stitch unpickers have been confiscated. Walking around with that knowledge makes it an uncomfortable act to place my body into the futures our present asserts. At…
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It’s Always Playtime!
Inspired by the reimagining of the Young V&A archive, this project sought to deconstruct, reassemble and reclaim boundaries and authority over play by redesigning the confiscation cabinet from their collection. We aimed to critique how the museum as a whole acted as a sight of authority. This project produced wooden play parts inspired by broken…
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Unlearning Language: The Ordered Chaos of Finnegans Wake
‘riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.’ Is how James Joyce’s novel Finnegans Wake begins. A strange, almost algebraic mosaic of text, this first line is one of the most coherent sentences of the seventeen…
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What’s Sacred is Chosen
When I was 8 or 9 years old, my family took a holiday to Wells, a beautiful seaside town on the coast of Norfolk. It’s a town surrounded by nature. The sea and the sand are everywhere – in the air, the salted walls, the people. On one of our walks along the sea wall…
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Memorising the Night Walk Alone
I love you on every tube to Oval station, and when I blow a kiss through the closed glass window of the northern line, two Italian ladies opposite me smile through their masks in knowing, as if to say, we have loved too, it’s okay, on the way home I make lots of lists on…
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I am still trying to learn and unlearn so much about myself. It’s almost arresting how little I know – I don’t even know if I could say I know my immediate family; I don’t think I even know what I did yesterday. I’m still coming to terms with what love means for me. Love…
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What Sort of Person am I When I am Applying for PhDs?
Imagine the worst-case scenario, the person who reads your essay has been in the field for decades. She is on the applicant committee because she has to be, and she’s read 48 essays so far that morning. You are number 49, and your reader is tired, bored, and thinking about lunch. Keep Her Attention. (statement…
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Portraits of a Generation
The documentary is inspired by Girona Province in Spain and tells a story of a generation of the past – one of social change and adaptation, that is. “La imatge d’un passat” shows how industrialisation shaped new towns, infrastructure and architecture in Catalonia, and how the movement took inspiration from neighboring Britain. Model towns –…
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un- D O I N G (or, An Education in Wordle and the Meaning of Life)
An online conversation descends into a blur of misunderstanding and nastiness and culminates in an unceremonial, undignified unfriending. You are blocked: it is your f i r s t social m e d i a b u l l y, you t h i n k; your last, you hope. But it’s also okay, because…
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Reimagining Homes: Evolving the Idea of the Family Unit
Growing up, we were taught in primary textbooks that a typical, normal, family consists of a father, a mother, and two children. This traditional unchanging family unit has conditioned our society to not think beyond the heteronormative and presents itself as an ideal definition of what it means to be a perfect family. In the…
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Unlearning Accent Bias
So when we went to London, to work, I probably did have quite a Hull accent. so if you went into a bar and you asked for, say, a rum and coke, you’d say ‘rum and kerk’ and they were like ‘What? What? What d’ya want? What d’ya want?’ So you’d have to say ‘a…
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Untruthful facts
Oh Great Britain- the greatest of them all? Great enough to take our lands, and watch us while we fall? Oh Great Britain- why’ve you betrayed me for? From Palestine to India, colonising many more. The country filled with shiny rocks; let’s begin with the Crown Jewels, Though they were stolen from India, ‘they’re…
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The Loss of Haptic
I was the child combing through sea pools, stumbling over rocks with an upside-down castle bucket in one fist, sloshing saltwater, and a colourful net hooked over the adjacent shoulder. I plunged my hands after miniature krakens and holographic tails and struck limpets from their perch to reveal their soft, pearly innards. Gradually, I learnt…