Stop, Look, and Listen #36
A round-up of what I have been reading and listening to this past week.
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This post is part of the newsletter’s ‘Stop, Look, and Listen’ series, a digest of articles and podcasts that I’ve found engaging and insightful over the past week.
Content warnings: Anti-migrant violence
Five things to look at:
Melvyn Ingleby, Ylenia Gostoli, May Bulman, and Mesut Tatuz have written for New Lines Magazine about the inhumane treatment and irregular deportation of Syrian and other refugees in Turkey, and the complicity of the European Union in financing and facilitating Turkey’s hard-line turn in this area of policy.
- has written this piece for his Global Inequality and More 3.0 newsletter about Nikolai Berdayev’s notion of an apocalyptic messianic strain in Russian political thought, bestowing different transformative missions upon its people, and its significance to understanding contemporary Russian politics.
In this post for his A Few Thoughts On... newsletter,
has written about the Gulhane Edict of 1839, the domestic and international political considerations that facilitated its passing, the liberal and Islamic intellectual currents that influenced it, the dissent it provoked, and its contested legacy today.Kushtrim Istrefi and Luca Pasquet have blogged for EJIL: Talk! about Albania’s plans to create a microstate for the Bektashi Muslim Sufi order in Tirana, obstacles to its establishment in domestic and international law, and the extent to which Vatican City offers a parallel through which to examine its prospects.
Nilab Saeedi interviewed Marinos Sariyannis for the Journal of the History of Ideas blog about the disenchantment of Ottoman thought from the late seventeenth century, the persistence and evolution of different divinatory practices, and the underlying social conditions that underpinned these changes.
Five things to listen to:
On the Called to the Bar podcast, Juliette McIntyre, Tamsin Phillipa Paige, and Aoife O’Donoghue discussed proposals for reform of the United Nations Security Council, and the inherent limitations of such a programme when the UNSC was established to shore up the Allies’ dominance after the Second World War.
Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz reflected on The Apprentice, the new film portraying Donald Trump’s early rise in the world of real estate, for the New Yorker’s Critics at Large podcast, our broader contemporary concern with origin stories, and the extent of their explicatory value in politics.
Michael O. Johnston interviewed Lisa-Jo Van den Scott about her book Walled-In: Arctic Housing and a Sociology of Walls on the
podcast, the imposition of colonialism on indigenous people in Nunavut through domestic architecture, and the agency they express in reinventing those spaces.On the BBC World Service’s The Fifth Floor programme, Selin Girit joined Faranak Amidi to explain the symbolism of the ‘wolf salute’, its association with Turkey’s far-right ‘Grey Wolves’ movement, and why several states have clamped down on both the organisation and the gesture among their Turkish populations.
Christopher Holliday and Alexander Sergeant examined the place of the city in animated and fantasy films on this instalment of the Fantasy/Animation podcast’s ‘Footnotes’ series, the inherently fictionalising nature of representing real urban environments on screen, and their role in our relationships with those spaces.
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Thank you for including me in your round-up Dion! I appreciate it. I hope you enjoyed the piece.
And there are some very interesting articles on here so I'll check them out.