• Profile half-length photograph of a man facing to the left wearing a dark jacket and tie, holding a cigarette in his hand, with a white handkerchief in his jacket breast pocket. The man has a prominent straight nose, slicked back hair and his tie forms a slight arch from the knot. In the background, on the left side of the image, there is another half-length frontal portrait of a man. He has white hair, also wears a jacket and tie, is looking to the right, and is smiling.
Challenging Cosmopolitanism

Challenging Cosmopolitanism

The temptation to look longingly to idealised visions of Islamic cosmopolitanism as the antithesis to the militant communal solidarity associated with contemporary groups, such as the Islamic State (IS), can be quite powerful. Many scholars and popular writers have pointed…

Class and Feeling in the Films of Jia Zhangke

Class and Feeling in the Films of Jia Zhangke

In 2008, I saw Jia Zhangke’s film Still Life, and it changed my life. I had never seen a film that had affected me so intensely and knew that, after that moment, I needed to research this director and his films further. What impacted me the most about Jia’s films were their emotional and affective qualities, and how they evoked feelings that lingered long after the films had ended.

British Youth Cultures and the Wider World

Pop music and youth culture are known to be among the great British exports of the late twentieth century. Be it teddy boys/girls or The Beatles, mods or the Sex Pistols, football hooligans or the Spice Girls, the seemingly rapid…

Utopia: A round-table discussion

Sir Thomas More (1477 – 1535) was the first person to write of a ‘utopia’, a word used to describe a perfect imaginary world. The term was first published in 1516, and became the short title of his book about an…

Commercial Agriculture and Law Reform in Nigeria

My article “Promoting Commercial Agriculture in Nigeria Through a Reform of the Legal and Institutional Frameworks” in African Journal of International and Comparative Law examines the efficacy of the extant legal and institutional frameworks in addressing the challenges that have stifled the…