Shameless! (just a few of the 'star' speakers)
The SHaME project have talked to some incredible people who reflect on sexual violence and ways to create rape-free worlds. You can...
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JOANNA BOURKE
Blogs
Here are my latest blogs! Enjoy.
Apr 241 min read
Shameless! Festival of Activism Against Sexual Violence
The events I have enjoyed most in connection with the SHaME project were our two Shameless! Festivals of Activism Against Sexual...
60
Apr 241 min read
SHaME: Sexual Harms and Medical Encounters
For five and a half years, I have been privileged to work with the SHaME team at Birkbeck. It has been the most intellectually rewarding...
70
Mar 176 min read
Audre Lorde: Inspirations Series
Audre Lorde changed the way generations of feminists throughout the world think about intersectional identities, social justice, and the...
170
Mar 92 min read
Lighten up! Make Coral Lace Tuiles.
Are you like me? Working on 'difficult' subjects? So.... Take care of yourself and your friends. Here is something more relaxing…. Try...
170
Mar 75 min read
Clare Shaw's Incredible Poems in 'Towards A General Theory of Love'
Clare Shaw, Towards a General Theory of Love (Hexham: Bloodaxe Books, 2022) Clare Shaw’s new, prize-winning poetry collection is their...
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Feb 1126 min read
‘It Makes My Head Jump’: Shell-Shock, Psychology, and War 1914-1945
On the 7 July 1916, Arthur Hubbard painfully set pen to paper in an attempt to explain to his mother why he was no longer in France. He...
120
Feb 1119 min read
The Killing Frenzy: Wartime Narratives of Enemy Action
William Manchester was a scared young American, flung down on the island of Okinawa during the Second World War and expected to act with...
50
Feb 117 min read
The Strange Case of George Dedlow: Mutilation, Military Surgery, and Weir Mitchell
On the 29 June 1864, a military surgeon in the 21st Kentucky Infantry wrote to his wife. ‘It has been almost one continued stream of...
110
Feb 1114 min read
History, Mental Health, and Psychiatry: 5 Shifts
Robairt Clough was a long-term patient at Holywell Psychiatric Hospital in Antrim (Northern Ireland). In the Christmas 1972 edition of...
610
Feb 1018 min read
‘Rachel Comforted’: Spiritualism and the Reconstruction of the Body after Death
Tragedy struck Edith Cecil-Porch Maturin four times between 1900 and 1917. First, her twelve-year-old son died in 1900, followed five...
140
Feb 106 min read
Eric Hobsbawm (with a nod to poetic genius Adrienne Rich!)
What do we get when we lend our ears to Eric Hobsbawm? Passion. Energy. Exhilarating sweeps of time; giddy swoops into political darkness...
140
Feb 108 min read
Sleep: A History
Sleep is necessary to life. However, it remains shrouded in mystery, despite the fact that most people spend one third of their lives...
130
Feb 613 min read
The Humanities: La Fontaine's Cat, Kafka's Ape, and the Human
What does it mean to be human? We inhabit a world that is commonly, and lazily, dubbed ‘post-human’. Indeed, in recent decades, an...
110
Feb 64 min read
Rape (a very very short history)
We are never told her name. None of the soldiers encircling her would have been interested in such niceties. The only relevant...
250
Feb 612 min read
Human Rights: Are They Universal?
God, the source of natural law is dead: long live international law, with its hallowed spectre, human rights. State-sponsored terror,...
20
Feb 68 min read
World War One: The Home Front
Fear, grief, sorrow: these are the overriding emotions of war. For men, women, and children confined to the home front between 1914 and...
50
Feb 67 min read
Mastectomy, Fear, the Body: A History
In August 1812, eminent novelist Frances Burney described with alarming precision her mounting sense of terror as she prepared to undergo...
50
Feb 621 min read
Cruelty: Pain, War, Sexual Abuse
The three sites of cruelty I will explore are (firstly) hierarchies of sentience, (secondly) wartime wounding, and (thirdly) sexual...
90
Feb 66 min read
Marianne Elliott: Inspirations Series
Marianne Elliott is one of the greatest living historians of Ireland, with books that have changed the way we think about revolution and...
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