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New Gaelic Speakers in Nova Scotia and Scotland: A Q&A with Stuart Dunmore
Read more: New Gaelic Speakers in Nova Scotia and Scotland: A Q&A with Stuart DunmoreStuart Dunmore discusses his motivations for researching new Gaelic speakers, and the incredible places and experiences this led to.

Multiculturalism Isn’t a Dirty Word
David Cameron has been avoiding the m-word. In his recent speech about extremism, the word ‘multicultural’ was noticeable by its omission for two reasons. First, Cameron said that Britain was a ‘successful multiracial and multi-faith democracy’ and a term like…
Politics – An Extract from The Badiou Dictionary
The problem of how philosophy is to approach the word politics is especially difficult, as it is itself a stake of political struggle and thus steeped in equivocity. The question of just who is and who is not considered political, and what objects are part or are not part of political consideration, is itself always intrinsic to politics. Philosophy thus encounters the word politics as inherently equivocal or, in Badiou’s terms, as a ‘split word’.

Finding offence
How are we to assess the impact of activities (e.g. words, songs or gestures) associated with sectarianism in contemporary Scotland? In the increasing absence of easily attributable effects such as crimes or disorder, or blatant forms of discrimination in the…

Community Experiences of Sectarianism
In the August 2015 issue of Scottish Affairs, a team of researchers explore the findings of a study they carried out for the Scottish government on community experiences of sectarianism. Here, one of the authors, Kay Goodall, sets out some…

‘Nobody Needs French Theory’ – an extract from Jean Baudrillard: From Hyperreality to Disappearance
Jean Baudrillard on Muslims in France, the simulation of freedom in America, the demise of the intellectual and why French theory is like the Statue of Liberty.

The Post-Mortem of Labour Scotland
Three years ago, Gerry Hassan and I published a book entitled ‘The Strange Death of Labour Scotland’. We envisaged that, unless radical steps were taken, Labour’s influence in Scotland would steadily decline. Speaking personally, I did not envisage a total…

From the archives – ‘Insiders’ and ‘Outsiders’ in African Christianities
Our featured article this week is the editorial from the April 2013 Studies in World Christianity which is currently available to download free. It focuses on the perceptible shift in the centre of gravity of Christianity from the global North…
From the Scottish Affairs Archives: what factors influence the decision to support Scottish Independence?
Throughout 2014 we published a number of articles about the then impeding referendum on Scottish Independence in our journal Scottish Affairs. As we move towards a general election, the research and data contained within these articles hold as true now…

The Political and/or Politics
By Jean-Luc Nancy “As an opening, a quick overview: if our politics [la politique] is no longer simply and strictly that of sovereign states, then it is no longer ‘politics’ as we have known it for a very long time…