After handing over the reigns to Dr Jara Carrington for a great episode on Queer Anthropology, and to Ruthie Flynn for an insightful intro to Hunters & Gatherers, I’m back in the Producer role for our latest bite-sized overview of a key concept in anthropology: NGOs. I spoke to Dr Mark Schuller about the foremothers and groundbreakers in feminist anthropology, and about the politics of citations.

Click here for resources, links, additional background, and episode transcript. Earlier episodes, on Feminist Anthropology, Sovereignty and on Scientific Racism are also available at the Society for Cultural Anthropology.

Immensely proud of our latest issue of Red Pepper, which takes an extensive look at feminist futures, presents and pasts.

The Culture Section addresses Museums from a number of important perspectives, from the importance of decolonising and dissenting methodologies, to industrial actions protecting our institutions, to an appreciative exploration of the People’s History Museum in Manchester.

In the latest Red Pepper, we focus on exciting new strategies embraced by unions in and beyond the UK, and discuss the rise and impact of Brazil’s new right-wing President.

The Culture Section is on Cinema, with excellent pieces on new films Sorry to Bother You and Peterloo as well as an in-depth look at The Star & Shadow, a community-run cinema in Newcastle embracing a DIY ethos.

Very proud to have my research published in the Political and Legal Anthropology Review. The journal is doing an impressive job responding to current trends and events without long delay, and is making a great deal of material Open Access.

Full citation: McGuirk, S. (2018), (In)credible Subjects: NGOs, Attorneys, and Permissible LGBT Asylum Seeker Identities. PoLAR, 41: 4-18. doi:10.1111/plar.12250

Please get in touch if you would like to read a copy of the article, or would like to share your thoughts on it.

Now I’m back in the UK, I’m able to return to contributing more regularly to Red Pepper magazine – a vital outlet for non-partisan leftist debate and analysis. I’ve been involved with the magazine for ten years, and am proud to be a member of the Editorial Collective.

My commissioning focuses on Culture. As we move to a quarterly publishing cycle, I’m embracing a different theme for each issue. This gives us the chance to take a deeper look into topics rather than an overview. I will also be writing a regular column introducing the section.

This month, following a summer of World Cup fever, our Culture theme is: Football. Other sections of the magazine focus on The World Transformed and new socialist trends across Europe.

Working through an intense lead-in time of just under two months, we launched our exhibition Exchanging Cultures of Equality to an extremely positive response from GlobalGRACE project partners and the general public alike.

You can explore the exhibition in detail through the dedicated website, which I made to act as a virtual guide and archive. It includes a behind-the-scenes gallery and video overview of the exhibition, as well as audio features and detailed explanation of the conceptual grounding for the project.

We will continue building on and experimenting with these concepts as we move towards our larger-scale, multi-sited ‘Global Museum of Equalities’ exhibition, scheduled to open in Cape Town, South Africa, in 2021.

Proud to see our co-authored, academic-activist collaboration “Centering Intersectional Politics: Queer migration activisms ‘after marriage'” included in this brilliant book – one in a three-volume series exploring queer politics, experience, and activism in post-‘marriage equality’ USA. Co-authored with my continuously brilliant colleagues/co-conspirators Jara Carrington, Claudia Cojocaru, Jamila Hammami, & Marzena Zukowska.

To my mind, this is what publicly engaged academic work looks like: collaboration, and co-authorship, and articulating how theory underpins our social justice work. Given the rapidly evolving cultural and political context in the USA, such approaches seem more pressing than ever.