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In this issue, Renewal’s Cathy Elliott and Emily Robinson call for us to give as much attention to the politics of time as we have to the politics of place. They focus on the strange temporality of the pandemic: its inequities and its possibilities.
This theme runs through the issue. Andrew R. Hom, urges us to think of timing as a political act. In a follow-up to his blog on the timing of the US election, he now turns to Brexit, Covid-19, and Black Lives Matter. The conjunction of these latter two are also the theme of Michael J. Flexer and Lisa Baraitser’s piece, which notes how the moment of the pandemic has given us time to pay attention to movement of BLM.
If Flexer and Baraitser show how long histories of racial injustice have been laid bare in the present moment, Hannah Elias looks at the struggles to acknowledge them in the National Curriculum for History. She welcomes Kate Green’s commitment ‘to mandating the teaching of colonial history’, and Keir Starmer’s to ‘a diverse curriculum’, but makes a powerful case that this must go beyond including more diverse stories within existing frameworks. It needs to reject a linear story from an imagined White past to a multicultural present, and show that race, history, and nationhood are not fixed concepts, but constantly being made and re-made.
The issue also includes Kavita Maya on race and the country house, Luke Martell on Starmer, Rajiv Prabhakar on Covid-19 and Child Trust Funds, Cathy Elliott on industrial action, and Heather McKnight on the School Strikes for Climate. David Klemperer reviews David Lammy’s Tribes, and Jonathan Symons on Holly JeanBuck’s After Geoengineering.
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