International News
Mel Plant, BA Arabic and Turkish “We will fire bullets on you if you throw stones at us”, police officers in Cizre were quoted saying to local children. Cizre, a town located on the Syrian-Turkish border, has experienced a haze of tear gas and live ammunition over the past few
free education
SOAS Students took a stand for free education at a recent demonstration by creating a wall of books at the march • Credit – Himasha Weera Tom King, BA Politics University bosses have criticised plans likely to be set out by the Labour Party which would see tuition fees at English universities
BDS Working Group SOAS is buzzing with conversation about the academic boycott of Israel referendum, which is to be held on campus from 23-27 February. The referendum will be school-wide and will call on students, academics, and other staff members to vote in favour of boycotting Israeli academic institutions. The
Kay Lees, LLB Law The BDS movement (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions), calls for international support to help achieve its goals of boycotting Israeli academic institutions and academics in order to chastise Israeli treatment of Palestinians— from human rights violations to the marginalisation of academics and activists. Taking into account the conflicts
Sport and Societies
Isacco Cividini, MA Near and Middle Eastern Studies Coach (Head Honcho): Rabah Tahraoui Mascot: Maurizio the Minion – find him, and us, on facebook! Current league position: 3rd, not bad considering SOAS as an academic institution is ranking 35th! Plans for this term: Beat LSE. Beat Greenwich. BEAT EVERYONE! WIN THE
culture
Image credit: Michal Louč – CC BY 3.0 Sukaina Kadhum, BA English 1945, August 6, 8:15 Japan time, a bomb plummeted into central Hiroshima. A young man called Toshio Fukada captured the mushroom cloud that hovered over the city in a photograph. This is one among many pieces that
features
Kevin Quigley, BA Linguistics and Japanese Studies Have you slapped a bran muffin out of your flatmate’s grimy, gorilla fingers after he compared your love life to that of Dobby the elf’s? Do you spend Saturday evenings watching You’ve Got Mail over two (three) bottles of white
culture
Jenny Williams, BA Social Anthropology It is hardly what you would deem subversive. The nature of the display reflects the norm of a modern art museum in a major city, perhaps not what you might expect from the traditional V&A, with its grand cases of costumes through the
dissertation
Jon Galton, MA Social Anthropology Recently I met a girl who was in the middle of a PhD on the melodic ornamentation of seventeenth century English barrel organs. During the very same week I talked to another studying interracial relationships as depicted in contemporary Bollywood films. “Ah, academia…” I thought,
Mel Plant, BA Arabic and Turkish Though the #BringBackOurGirls campaign, which followed the abduction of about 300 schoolgirls from Chibok in Nigeria’s northeast, may have spread rapidly across social media and permeated television networks, sooner or later news of Boko Haram dropped off the radar. 219 of Chibok’s
International News
Mel Plant, BA Arabic and Turkish Last winter saw the Middle East coated in an unprecedented amount of snow. Social media was flooded with images of snow-fights at the Dome of the Rock, with major cities like Cairo covered in snow for the first time in a hundred years. Many
Foreign Office
Mel Plant, BA Arabic and Turkish “I believe firmly in the two-state solution,” began Sir Vincent Fean, ex-Consul General to Jerusalem, although, he continued, it “is in very severe danger of disappearing before our eyes.” The London Middle East Institute holds talks every Tuesday evening that seem to attract people