critique
Zahra Deera, LLB Law For those of you who are unaware of the storyline, 50 Shades of Grey centres around Anastasia, a senior in university, who meets Christian Grey – a young multi-millionaire who enjoys practising BDSM. And as I’m sure you can guess, Anastasia gets caught up in this
Europe
Sparsh Pandya, BA South Asian Studies The European political zeitgeist has undoubtedly been gripped by austerity. This is not an illogical phenomenon by any means – since the 2008 financial crisis, harsh austerity measures have been carried out by governments all over Europe. These measures have been facilitated by the ‘Troika’
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
Opinion
Harriet Freeman, BSc, Economics Since the effusion of late 20th century consumer technology into our lifestyles, computers, mobiles and the internet have transformed the concept of ‘time’ as we knew it. Rather than lending us more of it however, we seem to be saying ‘why aren’t there more hours
Commonwealth Journalists Association
Kay Lee, LLB (Law) The Impartiality in Journalism event hosted by the Commonwealth Journalists Association made clear that with rise of internet journalism, distinctions must start to be made between evidence-based journalism and the growing sector of “civilian” journalism. Chaired by former BBC radio host Robin Lustig, the panel included
MH17
Yun Hin Choi, BA History and Politics The past several weeks have marked the international carnival where we’ve seen the world’s leaders gather for a number of lavish occasions, kicked off by the Asian-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in China and ended with the G20 meeting in Brisbane,
culture
Miriam Hicklin, BA Arabic and Persian I have recently embarked upon a journey that has necessitated my being fearless in the face of judgement, throwing away my old inhibitions, and falling in love with Taylor Swift’s music. Blank Space is the killer track on the new album 1989 – mocking
centrism
Kenneth Noronha, LLB (Law) Here’s a sweeping, potentially controversial, and wholly amusing statement: people who exist on political extremes do so only because they have no sense of perspective. No, the Tories aren’t all trying to steal your welfare to build estates made of gilded peasant children. By
Cleaners
Shadia Edwards-Dashti, Msc International Politics SOAS Justice for Cleaners (J4C) re-launched their campaign this year with a series of successful events over the past week. Over 40 students mobilised outside SOAS yesterday, for a protest against the exploitation of the cleaners, urging the SOAS management to directly hire and bring
Opinion
Sai Englert, NUS PGR rep When I saw Luke McManus’ piece, Does the Political Correctness of Students’ Unions Undermine their Decisions? in the online edition of the SOAS Spirit, I almost stopped reading there and then. The juxtaposition of an attack on the ‘Political Correctness’ of unions with a picture
bouattia
Luke McManus, BA Arabic and Social Anthropology I quite like the idea of a Students’ Union. Knowing that I can have a say in the affairs of my university makes me feel included, valued and proud of what we are – a fantastically diverse body of students that can democratically achieve