/ Between
vol 1
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Culture
Between Representation and Conservatism / Navigating Art Spaces and Challenging the Western Art Canon
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Features
The Monster and Me: Learning to Live with an Eating Disorder / The Liminal Persona
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Style
Between Appropriation and Appreciation / In-Between: The Intersection of Style and Sexuality
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Politics
A Lacuna of Loving Imagination / Sweden Polarised: In the Wake of the 2018 General Election
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Science
The Robots are Coming? / Between Knowledge and Understanding
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Creative Writing Between / Between
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WRITERS
Flora Anderson Meli Vasiloudes Bayada Gabriela Saldanha Blackwood Thalia Groucott Ethan Kelly Asta Kinch Amanda Landegren Ellen Magee Louis Ratzel Charlene Shillan Annie Wakefield
EDITORIAL TEAM EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Arianne Crainie DEPUTY EDITOR Morgan Laing FEATURES EDITOR Kaisa Saarinen CULTURE EDITORS Gabriela Saldanha Blackwood, Manon Klatt STYLE EDITORS Lynsay Holmes, Nina Mdwaba
ILLUSTRATORS Alina Derjabina Anna Shams Ili Karin Tokunaga
PHOTOGRAPHERS
MODELS
Erifili Gounari Peter Doyle Natalia Poniatowska
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Gabriela Saldanha Blackwood Stacey Clarke Jeje Kas Kat Asta Kinch Natalie Kollegova Cameron Macalister Petros Petrou Jordin Revel Giang Trần Thị Thu Mhairi Walls
POLITICAL EDITOR Rafe Uddin CREATIVE WRITING EDITOR Alice Hill-Woods SCIENCE EDITOR Ethan Kelly COPY EDITOR Katy Scott EVENTS MANAGERS Ellen Grant, Maisie Wilson SOCIAL MEDIA COORDINATORS Erifili Gounari, Maja Fiedler ONLINE EDITOR Perry Stewart ONLINE PHOTO EDITOR Aike Jansen PRINT PHOTO EDITOR Alina Derjabina FUNDRAISING COORDINATOR Sanah Khan GRAPHIC DESIGNER Julia Rosner
Hello and welcome to our first print issue of the 2018/2019 year. Our chosen theme is that of ‘Between.’ Whether this is the first year of your undergrad or the last year of your postgrad – we’re all constantly in a state of being in between. Stages in life/ moments in time/the people that we are and that we meet; they’re all often thought of as discrete and as neatly following a linear progression. This is almost never the case. Throughout this issue we have a range of different voices touching on issues of ‘betweenness.’ Within our more personal contributions there’s an overarching feeling of self-acceptance and of coming to terms with not fitting in. Culture looks into LGBTQ+ representation within cinema as well as challenging the Western art canon and the damage it imparts onto women of colour. For features we have articles on recovering from ED and on being a working class student in an academic institution. Both of these pieces show us complexities that lie under the surface. Our style writers deconstruct fashion’s cultural relevance in relation to their positions as a white-passing person of colour and as a member of the bisexual community. The body positivity photo shoot echoes the sentiments found in the above articles:
that those who can’t be tidily ticked into certain boxes are strong, beautiful and multi-faceted. Coming at the theme from a slightly different angle are the two politics articles. Political polarisation within Germany and Sweden is discussed; the difficulty of navigating this political landscape expressed. Science asks two important questions: the between state of AI while humanoid robots like Sophia are granted citizenship and; the constant evolution of science and how this impacts upon our understanding of knowledge. Last, but by no means least, we have some beautifully written poems to get you inspired. All in all the vibe here is the same. It’s not an A→B→C→… but really more like an A→M→F→… People, places and times can get messy. While categories remain useful for thinking and sorting, our realities are much more hybrid. Separatism can be helpful, even essential, for some but each case must be looked at both individually and within the wider context. Throughout this issue we ask a lot of questions. It’s our hope that, while we don’t have many answers, we can provide a bit of comfort – however small. Take care, GUM team xxx
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BY Ellen Magee @mondaymagee
Between Representation and Conservatism Media representation of minority groups continues to be a pressing and unresolved matter, not least in Hollywood films. Queer cinema is a growing phenomenon with an audience’s appetite of demand that filmmakers can attempt to whet, however films with healthy, strong, and valid representations of LGBTQ+ characters are still sparse when we look at the movies available. Whilst Hollywood understands the need to satisfy an audience of under-represented identities, the industry also toes the line of conservatism, conceding to a more mainstream and normative custom. When considering LGBTQ+ characters and how they have been either erased, marginalised, or mockingly caricaturised throughout the history of film, it’s important to investigate the progress that has arguably been made to rectify this history of what appears to be invisibility or derisive satire of queerness. Early cinema’s representation tended to be reduced to predominantly flamboyant portrayals of gay men, usually used as a means of cheap comedy and to subvert any gender-based ideas of masculinity. This antagonistic generalisation of gay characters can be traced back to 1895 in William Dickson’s ‘The Dickson Experimental Sound Film’, with the characters never being explicitly referred to as gay, but being almost as camp as Sacha Baron Cohen’s Bruno (albeit a toned down 19th century version). Whilst LGBTQ+ characters are more visible on screen today, recent examples include in Oscar-nominated picks such as ‘Call Me By Your Name’, or the stunning character study of ‘Moonlight’, many believe that this assimilation of queerness and LGBT+ stories is not quite enough to be considered a full integration into mainstream media. While I can appreciate this argument, I do think that LGBTQ+ history is still at a time when queer stories are important especially on film. A prominent discourse is that there should be a more subtle inclusion of LGBTQ+ characters on film, who can exist without being a separate alter-
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native to the (hetero)normative ways to which we are accustomed, and this argument is valid and important. However, that should not take away from the eminence of queer characters telling queer stories, perhaps even with queer casts and filmmakers, all exposing, celebrating, and unapologetically taking pride in their queerness. This is the idyllic view; what Hollywood is willing to produce is generally a much more diluted version of this, digestible for mainstream audiences. Ways in which Hollywood try to restrain this LGBTQ+ content varies. Firstly, think of how Film/TV have become more intersectional in their queer representation (that is, included characters beyond the good-looking, white, cisgendered, gay man – sorry ‘Love, Simon’) by including more LBTQ+. TV shows have been particularly good with including lesbian and bisexual female characters, like ‘Orange is the New Black’, ‘Jane the Virgin’, ‘The 100’, and many more. However, the sinister flaw of this representation is that a quick google search reveals that an estimated 162 queer female characters have been killed off on TV, which is, considering how the representation of queer women has only started to improve recently, a quite shockingly dark statistic. When looking at how films are marketed, we can certainly see a trend of “queerbaiting” – the idea that films tease us with an almost fetishisation of queer content, only to then dissatisfy this whispered promise. When Disney announced the live action ‘Beauty and the Beast’, many rumours emerged that the film would include a gay character. However, this anticipated LGBTQ+ representation measurably disappointed as the character, Le Fou, is already a caricature of idiocy, the absurdity
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of subtly implying that a character whose name is literally “the fool” counts towards LGBTQ+ representation is another failing of Disney, and a perfect example of the let downs of queerbaiting big Hollywood films. Other ways in which Hollywood bow down to standards of conservatism is through the medium of “straightwashing ” – a term to describe when films overlook, undermine, or completely quash any notions of queerness. Upcoming blockbuster ‘Bohemian Rhapsody ’ has been accused of this. A notable example of erasing identities and histories in order to please mainstream audiences was in the 2015 film ‘Stonewall’. This film has fallen under heavy denunciation since its release, for its “whitewashed” and “ciswashed” retelling of a historical event led and organised by trans women of colour, Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson. For many, this film, which was supposed to celebrate queerness and highlight the struggle of the LGBTQ+ community, simply buried the history into the ground. While it might be easier to construct a scathing examination of LGBTQ+ representation, it is also important to appreciate how much this issue has improved in recent years. However, this does not require settling for inappropriate or offensive representation or a sneaky pledge to queerness from film producers who have no intention to follow up. Queer cinema is producing some excellent content, which is what the LGBT+ community deserves, but we must continue to demand good and consistent representation, made for the LGBTQ+ community and not for an audience who want to feel liberal enough to tolerate a camp Josh Gad for 30 seconds in a two hour long film about bestiality.
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BY Gabriela Saldanha Blackwood
NAVIGATING ART SPACES AND CHALLENGING THE WESTERN CANON As I write this, a poster of Picasso’s “La Minotauromaquia, 1981” that I bought on a recent trip to Barcelona is in my line of vision- one of the corners is peeling up, yet it persists. I loved it for its quintessential Picasso mythological iconography: the minotaur, the dove, the woman’s profile. I question if I should take it down, pass it on to someone else just to use as trivial wall decoration in their bare student tenement flat. Even when I put it up, I felt as though in some way, I was betraying a line of thought I have recently been exploring; as though I was making an exception- compromising my beliefs for aesthetic indulgence.
myself do I have to ignore, deny and suppress in absorbing the rooms of hundreds upon hundreds of exposed female bodies or exotified people of colour and finding beauty in them. Being objective requires emotional labour because my identity is not neutral and the spaces that display these works are not neutral either. The galleries that I romantically describe as second homes - some whose rooms so imprinted upon my memory, returning to them brings me a unique calm - are beacons of colonialism. Museums were set up to display treasures from the lands of conquest - only accessible to royalty. This history has never been challenged or subverted, instead it has been preserved and upheld to prioritise the importance of “the archive”. They are now as they ever were, places where people of socio-economic privilege determine what credible art is. And how can I, as a Latina woman, reconcile this. Because once you see it, it is hard to un-see the pervasive masculinity and whiteness in these buildings.
I was fed on Picasso and Titian and Schiele. I was fed on Matisse and Gaugin and Rodin. I was fed on objectified (white, cis, able-bodied) female bodies: I learnt about the “female body” as a pre-adolescent through Lucien Freud! THAT MAKES ME ANGRY. The culture by which my world was contextualised was built by the visions of white men; of their white male gaze. Not only does the Western canon - upheld by our institutions of culture - dismiss me, but it oppresses me. How much of
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I feel trapped in a state of between. In so many ways these buildings and
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works of art have informed my art education, detaching and unhooking emotional ties completely seems damaging at this point. I still revere “master’s” paintings as exquisite and compelling however this is mainly because my frame of appreciation was built in relation to them. Currently I am at a point where I want to work on re-contextualising the work I know – holding the artist accountable - and broadening the work I expose myself to. How many artists have I overlooked because I was prioritising works that institutions deem legitimate - the hours I have invested in studying dead white men. There are so many female/non-binary artists of different ethnicities and stories who have created work that I do not have to compromise an aspect of myself to appreciate they do not detach the work from the selves and that is not asked of us as their audience. Instead they create with their hands, their whole bodies and their brilliant minds. They challenge the objective and demand us to be subjective. Nothing is more restorative than being taken in by their work and their worlds. These are the artists I will work to invest my time, emotions and money into.
This article was inspired by a post by @art.exit
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Toyin Ojih Odutola Tarsila do Amaral Louise Bourgeois Paula Rego Leonora Carrington Yayoi Kusama Mona Hatoum Frida Kahlo Harmonia Rosales Tove Jansson Rina Banerjee Carrie Mae Weems Kara Walker Georgia O’Keefe Lorna Simpson Art Hoe Collective Uemura Shōen Rosa Luz Ariel Nobre Travis Alabanza Izumi Tutti Faith Ringgold Alok Vaid-Menon Coletivo Mexa
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BY Anonymous Illustration Karin Tokunaga
THE MONSTER AND ME: LEARNING TO LIVE WITH AN EATING DISORDER 10
CW Eating Disorder, Anorexia, Bulimia
but it does not define who I am. Trying to be happy and perfect all the time is a Sisyphean task. For others dealing with the same issues, I want to say: there will be moments when you’ll feel tense and obsessed, and that’s okay. The sooner you realise it, the easier it gets.
Being skinny was part of me; at least that was what I’d been taught to believe. I remember how my friends told me how lucky I was to be skinny, how I got into modelling and my family was so proud of me, how my body shape was the first thing anyone seemed to notice about me. And then it turned into an obsession.
Allowing yourself space to breathe is the only way to move forward.
It’s a tale that has played out countless times.
Anorexia. Bulimia. These words can sound scary. But you need to get to know your monster, learn how it works, learn its weaknesses and prepare yourself to fight. You’ll learn how to win day by day, bruise by bruise, until the day the monster will get so small it won’t be able to hurt you anymore.
It can come from anywhere. Sometimes we don’t even realise we’re possessed by it. It was only after years, when I finally had the courage to reach for help, that I realized how throwing up was never about my body. It was never about me. Obsessing over something I could control, like my weight, was my way of putting up with those things of my life that I had no control over.
Organizations like Talking EDs, Beat and Citizen17 are there to help you find your voice, even when you feel like you don’t have one. Those few steps that separate you from one of those meetings, group chats or helplines can be the hardest steps in your journey towards recovery - but you can take them.
I spent months and months hiding and swallowing the pain - because I didn’t want to be a burden for the people around me, because I felt it was too selfish to let my loved ones take on my problems when they already had to deal with their own. It changed when I realized that somebody cared, that I needed to care, that I deserved the right to feel better. This is when I started to heal.
I have created a list of things that help me on my phone. None of them are surprising, and they have been backed up countless times by research: exercise, mindfulness, art, cooking, spending time with people who love me. They sound so obvious that it’s tempting to just ignore them with a shrug, but these are the things to do when you feel yourself slipping down the spiral, which will almost inevitably happen. Being aware of it can help you to bring yourself back.
I can’t say I have fully recovered yet - I’m still in a state between my old destructive self and the new me. And I’m working very hard to get there. The way that we think about mental health (diagnostically – either you are totally fine or you have an illness) is flawed. Many people exist on intermediate stages of a spectrum and can shift up or down depending on lifestyles and external circumstances. Discussing mental health in terms of discrete illnesses can be a useful way to communicate ideas, but it does not provide a complete picture. We need to allow ourselves to accept the in-between states of not fitting the diagnostic criteria, but not being quite healthy either.
I know it’s not an easy battle. Sometimes I’m enjoying a night out with my friends, or watching a movie with my boyfriend, and I can still hear the voices telling me I’m wrong. They say that every bite I take and every change in my body will reveal to everyone that I’m a failure, but I’m learning to ignore that voice. Instead, I listen to all the life that surrounds me. It’s a much more interesting song. Slaying the monster is not easy when it lives inside of you. My experience is only one of millions; the experience of a flawed person, a scared person that is still trying not to be her own enemy. But I know that I’m slowly defeating my monster. Battle by battle, day by day.
Trying to forget about the problem is not the solution. Personally, I know that my disease will somehow always be a part of me. I’ve learned to live with it, to turn down the volume of the voices in my head telling me every bite of food is poison. It is a part of me,
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THE LIMINAL PERSONA A Working-class Academic Identity
There is a palpable distance between academia and the working class.
For me, that is the twenty-two miles between the University of Glasgow and the council estate in which I grew up. It is the aspirational difference between myself as a seven-yearold and the twenty-two-year-old sitting in her first Postgraduate lecture. The detachment from the experiences of your classmates and the silence between your family’s interests and yours. You forge an identity in the spaces between, a liminal and fragmented thing.
BY Charlene Shillan
I grew up working class in every respect: economically, socially and culturally. I am the first person in my family to go to university. I feel some context is relevant for perspective; I have seven older brothers and fourteen biological Aunts/ Uncles, each having more than two children. Arguably, the size of my family is a product of the working-class life they have all led, but that would be another discussion in itself. My point being, my choice to go to university is an anomaly to say the least.
dehumanising language and we verbally distance ourselves from the reality of it. For me, the reality of it is twenty-two miles away. I am all too familiar with not being able to have my cake and eat it too, but it is the guilt that comes with knowing that academia is inevitably the cake. Coming to terms with the idea of wanting more than what you’ve been given is a difficult process. In plain terms, it is a betrayal to the values you are taught as a working-class youth and the people who worked hard to give you everything you have. There is no doubt in my mind that my upbringing has taught me compassion, generosity and an understanding that there is far more to life than money and success. For me, these values conflict with the competitive, systematic, loud nature of academia. I don’t want it to be interpreted that I am ignorant to the benefits of social mobility that comes with higher education, I did not choose postgraduate study because I love qualitative research methods or deadlines coming out my ears. Merely, I want to express the internal conflict and displacement that comes from seeing your identity from out with itself.
I think it would be reasonable to say that there was little expectation placed on me growing up. Not to say that my family did not care for me to do well, but there was no apparent standard for me to meet. Every one of my siblings falls under the category of ‘skilled labourer’ and whilst that was not the exact (gendered) expectation for myself, it was imagined I would choose a similar occupational level. There are many factors that contributed to the shift in my path, but I think it is important to discuss it in broader terms. I read a thesis of a recent University of Glasgow graduate that summarised it quite well for me. As a working-class student, University is proposed as the means by which you escape the hardships that come with a lower economic status and yet you are simultaneously internalising messages throughout your life that you are academically inadequate. You overcome, you work hard and you choose escape. Yet that lifetime spent internalising inadequacy mutates into insecurity and suddenly you are navigating unfamiliar territory, wondering why the hell you didn’t stay where you belong. Working-class students’ concern with ‘impostor syndrome’ is textbook by this point - there are plenty of articles and studies which explore the phenomenon - but to what effect?
Most of the discourse I have read around this issue focuses on the financial discomfort. Practical obstacles naturally have a more prevalent place in the discourse and it is most likely the core reason I am the first in my family to attend university. However, there are more nuanced factors at play, in my experience at least. What can be done for those of us who overcome this ingrained inadequacy, only to be thrust into no man’s land with a broken compass? I certainly don’t have the answers and I see these problems to be so complex and ingrained that any superficial policy can have no true merit.
My issue, perhaps due to being a student of social science, is the disassociation that academics, both professors and students, have with poverty. We speak critically of the social structures that inform our society. We speak in statistics and theories about inequality, we use
I have found an almost chaotic authenticity in the fragments which compose this evolving identity. However, I cannot help but hope that academia can overcome itself as a working-class threshold of disconnection.
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BETWEEN APPROPRIATION AND APPRECIATION BY Annie Wakefield As a young woman of dual heritage, born to a white English father and mixed black Caribbean mother, a consequence of this has been my white passing appearance. As a result, I stand in some ambiguous category when it comes to my expression, leaving me to feel caught somewhere in between cultural appropriation and cultural appreciation. Due to my light complexion, it often goes without question that I am white, even though I identify as mixed race. In the current context of cultural appropriation policing, how does someone like me express themselves without creating offence? How do I appreciate my culture without looking like I am appropriating it? Where is the line between cultural appropriation and cultural appreciation? Awareness of cultural appropriation in 2018 is at an all-time high. Almost
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everyone knows what it is and knows how to avoid it, or at least knows how to call someone out for doing it. Appropriation happens when someone takes elements of a culture, like dress and hair styles, and uses it either as a costume or by taking often ancient cultural traditions and making it the latest fashion statement. We see appropriation all the time, whether it’s a Native American headdress at Halloween, or white girls wearing a bindi and henna to a festival. I totally understand the importance of calling people out for appropriating somebody else’s culture to which they have no real claim to, because really, why should someone who only knows the surface level elements of a culture be allowed to take them and use them as their own, when they can never truly understand the full picture, which in reality may include less glamorous aspects that can come with being from a certain culture, like historic and present struggles with racism, xenophobia, religious persecution and so on. Appropriation is surrounded by injustices, like when these fashion ‘trends’ are embraced by people who actually own the right to wear them, they may be judged or shamed for them, while white and wealthy girls in the West will be celebrated for them, as was the case when Kylie Jenner had braids put in her
hair, despite the very same hairstyle being considered ‘unprofessional’ when worn by black girls.
or wear cultural dress, without being accused of claiming somebody else’s culture, because it is obvious it is their culture too.
As someone who is aware of how problematic appropriating other cultures can be, it leaves me in this awkward position in between cultures, where I feel I have to express myself carefully, out of fear of being accused of appropriating my own Jamaican heritage, even if I truly am just trying to appreciate it. As a result, I have almost erased any outward expression of my Caribbean roots because I don’t feel like I look Jamaican enough to embrace them. I don’t look like someone of Jamaican heritage because of my light complexion, but also because of the ways I present myself, I straighten my natural afro-like curls, and I don’t wear any cultural wear, like clothes adorned with the colours of Jamaica, or Rastafarian style clothing that’s since become appropriated as festival fashion.
Whilst I’ve not always felt like I can express my culture because of my white passing appearance, I’ve also not personally had to experience racism, rather I have seen it done to family and friends, despite having the same Jamaican descent as them. In spite of all this, I don’t believe this should mean I cannot choose to appreciate and express my own culture and heritage. Having made myself aware of the dilemma I am faced with because of my dual heritage and light complexion, I can go forward from this point, making a conscious effort to embrace more elements of my culture that I might not have embraced so far in life. I believe we all have a right to express our heritage as your culture is something that is instinctively yours and makes you who you are. This experience of living somewhat between two (or in some cases more) cultures is probably not unique to myself and is likely something that other people of mixed heritage can relate to. Embracing your own history and culture is something that everybody should feel comfortable to do and once we do, we will have a clearer idea of ourselves and how we can express our own unique identity.
This is the case, even though members of my family, siblings and cousins, who have exactly the same genes as me, but because of their darker complexions, have almost no issues in outwardly expressing our Jamaican heritage because they look more Jamaican than I do. They can wear braids or dreads in their hair, if they so wish,
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BY Thalia Groucott PHOTO Erifili Gounari ‘Sexuality informs style’ is a contentious statement. It’s true: you don’t have to dress a certain way to identify with a certain sexual orientation. However, simultaneously, it is true that many queer people subvert traditional gender roles when it comes to their style. This may be a way of expressing sexuality or non-conformity - or, for some, it may simply feel more natural. Perhaps the relationship between dress sense and sexuality is entirely unimportant. But - if this is the case - why are we so concerned with bundling queer people into certain types of queer boxes? Society presents an ideal where one does not only have to come out as queer, but as femme, butch, or any one of the many specific, style-defining labels associated with queer culture. If you identify in between these labels, it’s easy to feel out of place in queer spaces: if you do not ‘appear’ overtly queer, you may feel like an intruder in the very spaces designed to make you feel safe. This idea of being in between gay ideals may resonate most strongly with bisexuality. Regardless of fashion, simply being bisexual can have one feeling fraudulent in comparison to the rest of the gay community. However irrational this thought may be, and however valid bisexuality is, it does inevitably have an impact on questioning one’s identity. While “queer fashion” may act for many as a safety blanket and as such signi-
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fies a sense of belonging to a certain community, if, as a bisexual person, you do not feel fully accepted by that community, then it is difficult to navigate both your allegiance to that group and how you display it. I believe that many of us tread the line between gay and straight without full admission to either camp. The pop-culture joke of the ‘bisexual bob’ may be used as an example here, where it can be seen to depict the in-between-stage of long, flowing, ‘feminine’ hair and a ‘boyish’, butch buzzcut. While these are stereotypes of course, it’s interesting to look at the way bisexuality is viewed as a combination of two opposites, rather than its own orientation. Bisexuality is an interesting in-between of attempting to appeal to all the people who you find attractive, for instance, my love for incredibly ordinary boys and exceptionally beautiful and interesting women often leaves me with a dilemma. Personally, I sport the typical aforementioned bob, combined with a shaven undercut: while in queer spaces I find myself increasingly tempted to throw up my hair in an effort to show off the more masculine elements of my style - perhaps in a bid to indicate my availability to the women around me. I fear that a watered-down version of my masculinity may be too much for some boys, while even my edgiest vibe may not be enough to signal my homosexuality to some girls. In the past, queer fashion has been tied to the role a person supposedly enacts in a relationship. Today, as society becomes both more equal and more fluid, even heterosexual relationships are moving past ideas of gender roles. Is the way we dress today still as rigid as masculinity and femininity? As a society we are becoming more aware of the invented nature of gender and its binary. The constant dilemma of ‘Is she a lesbian or just a hipster?’ illustrates that a new generation of people, queer or not, are experimenting with style and gender. Fashion experimentation has always been tied to LGBTQ+ culture, but
as androgyny and other movements filter down to the mainstream, this is no longer always the case. You do not have to be queer to feel more natural in an androgynous style, and differing style labels are not exclusive to those who fancy a certain group of people. Perhaps we are closer to reaching a point where anyone can dress in any way, and anyone can be gay: you don’t have to be the one wearing Doc Martens and an enormous denim jacket to be identifiable as a lesbian. That said, I’ll still be seen wearing mine - and if it lands me a date, that’s an all-round winner.
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Models Asta Kinch, Cameron Macalister, Gabriela Saldanha Blackwood, Jeje Kas Kat, Jordin Revel, Mhairi Walls, Natalie Kollegova, Petros Petrou, Stacey Clarke, Giang Trần Thᝋ Thu
Textures formed from lumps and bumps, we are here to prove once again that we are here as instruments, not ornaments. I turn and twist and sometimes I flap, my skin speaks for itself. Are you threatened by my confidence? In this space we accept our differences, your perception will not turn me inside out, cause me doubt and separate shape from soul. I’m a living breathing organ, this is what unites us.This our shared narrative, spoken between bodies. [Nina Mdwaba with Lynsay Holmes]
Photography Erifili Gounari, Peter Doyle, Nina Mdwaba
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Style Editors Nina Mdwaba, Lynsay Holmes
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A LACUNA OF LOVING IMAGINATION
BY Louis Ratzel PHOTO Natalia Poniatowska
When I returned to Germany over the summer, I decided to go to a couple of events by the right-wing party Alternative fßr Deutschland (AfD). In the months before I had toiled through minutes of the German parliament and several articles on the rightwing. Underlying feelings of scorn and derision, were fear and helplessness at the AfD’s envisioned future - a vision that I deemed not compatible with my wants and needs.
The party engages in an inhumane anti-immigration rhetoric; further engages in open hostility towards those defined as “other”. Bjoern Hoecke, a senior figure within the AfD argued that homosexuality should be tolerated, but never accepted, as this was tantamount to support.
electrically charged fence as they circle around him, laughing. Wie konnten sie nur? Before the AfD event I met up with a friend from school, the daughter of Tunisian-Muslim immigrants. While I had gone to Glasgow, she had moved to a small village in Bavaria where state buildings are now compelled to put up crosses. When she had asked her teacher in school how to deal with racists, she was berated and classed as sensitive. Her brother complained that many in Germany think of people of colour as barbarians, eating with their hands. She agreed and was sceptical about the avails of trying to educate the far-right.
The first event was a presentation on mass immigration and security politics with a subsequent discussion. One moment stayed with me. Much of the afore-going presentation had, if never explicitly stating so, conveyed the sense of foreign entities (refugees, NATO, the globalists, George Soros) being a burden. The speaker was notably agitated, as he explained his desire to secure Germany’s borders with fences. He persisted in his agitated mumbling - I heard only the last sentence: “we can put electricity on the fences if need be”. The audience laughed enthralled by the idea – whilst the speaker perhaps unaware of their intention joined in.
My sister has an Afghan/German boyfriend, who arrived as a refugee three years ago. My grandmother said: “They’re just different. It’s not their fault. It’s their culture.” She doesn’t see the fullness and roundness of her granddaughter’s boyfriend. Despite seeing the fullness and roundness of me, my sisters, and my cousins. Looking through a picture book, she once said in sudden wonder: “What a full house we’ve always had.” Does my grandmother’s lacuna of loving imagination cancel out the love she has for her grandchildren?
Sometime earlier, I had started messaging with a Syrian refugee on Grindr. We went swimming in a lake. His name is three letters long, his face round, arms strong, with a little belly that he’s self-conscious about. His eyes looked at me with an intense, glittering thrill that made mine shy away. When asked if he wanted to go to Syria, when/if it would be safe to do so, he replied:
I later realised that the audience were not laughing at the image I was seeing, the image of the man with the very round face writhing on the ground. They were laughing at the empty thought of
“Für immer hier bleiben solange ich darf” - “Stay here forever as long as I may”
FÜR IMMER HIER BLEIBEN SOLANGE ICH DARF stemming the plague of the refugees. I felt freed, as if I could reach out and talk to them. Most were my grandmother’s age. I could imagine them as loving towards
When the audience laughed I thought of him, “Für immer hier bleiben solange ich darf”. How could they? I envisaged him writhing on the ground in front of an
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their grandchildren as she. They were not inherently evil people, they were people with a lacuna of imagination – not to say that this isn’t reprehensible. They love their grandchildren, but they are xenophobic. Their love is no less beautiful for their xenophobia, and their xenophobia no less reprehensible for their love. But the landscapes around us change, people move: what do you do when your granddaughter starts going out with an Afghan man? What if people enter your life’s stage whose fullness and roundness you have never conceived? The writer Zadie Smith talks of the plurality of people. We are neither love, nor are we its opposite. However, we have a duty to love more; to see the world around us to the fullest degree. When my grandmother speaks unlovingly of my sister’s boyfriend, I try to be harsh, “Just meet the guy”. I try to be relentless in my insistence on his fullness and roundness. I want to make her see. When my grandmother looks at a picture book of us, it’s beautiful to be in loving memory with her and I wholeheartedly submit to it. When a member of the AfD, or any moral being, loves, I will not misrepresent this love in an ill-founded loyalty to my preconception of their evilness, I will love with them. When they disparage the fullness, the roundness of me or my friends, I will stand up and not give way until their vision fills out. I hope I will – may you return the favour in my moments of blindness.
STAY HERE FOREVER AS LONG AS I MAY
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SWEDEN POLARISED? In the wake of the 2018 General Election BY Amanda Landegren ILLUSTRATION Alina Derjabina
So, I just voted in a general election for the first time. It felt good. It felt empowering, like I was exercising my power, but also doing my duty as a citizen. However, I couldn’t help but look back upon the campaigns with a certain sense of dejection.
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Everywhere, not just in Sweden, there has been a shift from factual arguments towards emotional ones. Politicians, as well as regular people, equipped themselves with name-calling, personal attacks and fear-mongering to win over the ones in doubt. Your political affiliation was suddenly your most important identity marker and there was no chance of escaping the constant flow of debates. The election was everywhere, in every conversation, on every lamp post and on all our Facebook walls; ‘If you vote for this party please remove me from your friend list’.
in advance as I would be in the UK on the actual election day and in those two weeks, I felt powerful, powerless, exhausted, hopeful and anxious all at the same time. Attempting to talk about our polarisation seemed futile and explaining the diversities and complexities of our political system is hard when ‘left’ and ‘right’ and ‘in-between’ don’t correspond to the same things here and at home. Elections were held on the 9th of September with an 87% voter turnout. The results seemingly followed a trend visible across the political landscape. I observed a divergence of people, as voters seem to move further left and further right. My party did well, but the centrist parties, in general, didn’t do fantastically. Both the two big parties lost ground, the two parties in the extremities took large victories. There was so close a tie between the blocks that two weeks after the election, we still don’t have a government in place. Confusion, anger and anxiety were and still are - conveyed over different types of media; people worrying over their party going back on promises or changing their core values; experts predicting one possible constellation of government after the other. Some people are celebrating victory, some lamenting loss, yet nothing is currently set in stone.
In Sweden, there are currently seven parties in parliament and they all exist in different positions on the political spectrum. We have two bigger parties (M, S) which together with the smaller parties form two opposing blocks. S + Mp form the more left-wing block while C + L + M + KD form the more right-leaning one. Mp + C + L can be considered as centrist parties in the context. There are also two parties in the extremities, V, the most left-wing party, and SD, the most right-wing. While they all take different key issues to heart, this year’s election has been dominated mainly by one question: immigration. Saying outright that immigrants ‘might simply not belong here’ has been the SD’s way forward, a strategy which has forced the other parties to adapt their policies seemingly in reaction to the SD. Racism scandals have lined up but still, they have continued to speedily grow, leaving polarisation in their wake. Disturbingly, the political debate this year seemed not as much about economic or social policies, but about the categorization of human worth. The day before election day the deciding question on people’s mind appeared to be ‘what other parties could possibly collaborate with the SD?’
Nobody won this election. We all continue to keep our eyes on Stockholm, and it feels like we are just waiting to find out which bad compromise we’re going to end up with. It felt great to vote, and I’m so grateful to know that my vote has an influence, but having observed the tones of discussion go cold and hateful as the year progressed, I’m also worried. What will happen next? Are we working towards mutual understanding and respectful discussion, or simply towards personal attacks and polarisation? I simply don’t know.
For a first-time voter, this all felt very overwhelming. I voted over two weeks
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THE R0B0TS BY Flora Anderson Illustration Anna Shams Ili In 2017 Hanson Robotics’ social humanoid robot Sophia was granted citizenship in Saudi Arabia. Sophia is very humanlike in appearance: she can speak, move her face realistically, recognise other faces and even cracks a few jokes. It is strange, perhaps that the world’s first ‘female’ robot citizenship is granted in a country where many women still have to ask permission from their male relatives to leave the house. Despite this, is Sophia really the intelligent, conscious machine that she seems? No, is the answer. In short, she’s a socially-geared Siri with a face. But as yet, she is the closest thing the public have seen to a realistic human-like robot. The science surrounding consciousness is a matter of debate, but in general saying consciousness is to experience feelings and thoughts is fairly uncontroversial. Sophia does not experience emotion or make self-directed choices, she gives pre-programmed responses based on keywords that she hears. The sophistication of Sophia is less from her software, but rather her humanoid aesthetic. News of Sophia’s citizenship seems to have resonated with people in the news and on social media, differently to previous robotic and artificial intelligence developments. Sophia’s appearance makes her more interesting perhaps because it seems like very advanced technology, maybe because she looks familiar to us. Or, quite possibly, it just makes us scared.
debated in the vastly underrated Channel 4 show ‘Humans’, in which robots physically identical to humans known as ‘synthetics’ or ‘synths’ are commonplace in a parallel present. They are not conscious but extremely (artificially) intelligent and perfectly perform tasks that assist in the everyday lives of people. Essentially: why hire a human who needs a wage and time off when you could get a simulation to do the job without human error and requiring neither? The humans in ‘Humans’ experience a lot of rejection and demoralisation because of synths and their role in society. A large part of being human seems to be our imperfections.
Are we ready for robots who look and act very similarly to humans? What roles could they have? This topic brings up so many questions that are so brilliantly
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ARE COMING? the US company RealDoll through the process of creating the world’s first life-like robot used for intercourse. The ‘female’ robot is far from lifelike, with animatronics far inferior to Sophia’s. This robot has conversational skills geared towards intimacy and speaks - for some reason - in a soft Scottish accent. The robot of course feels no joy, no pain and is far from conscious, yet can be used for a very life-like simulation. This is a simulation of a woman who doesn’t have to give consent, does not feel pain and will do whatever the user wants without complaining. The justification from the robot’s creators is contradictory and almost comical: “it’ll stop lonely men going out and treating women badly” - by showing them it’s okay have sex with something akin to an unconscious woman? So, are the robots coming? Maybe, but probably not soon. Sophia the social robot’s animatronics are the most advanced of any human-like robot and her movements are still quite jerky and unrealistic, sometimes producing some very odd facial expressions at random. Coupled with the fact there are currently no truly thinking, human-like robots in the world, let alone conscious ones, I think we can rest easy in our beds. We are far from the world of ‘Humans’, but if human-like robots did become a reality, would it be fair to treat them as machines when they appear so much like us? Perhaps they are owed rights and respect only if they are conscious, and therefore able to feel and think like we do. Or, perhaps they would allow for an increase in diversity that the social world needs to develop. Or would they be so efficient that they replace us, as eerily insinuated by Sophia in her Fallon interview after winning the game of rock-paper-scissors: “this is a good beginning of my plan to dominate the human race.”
Humanity’s acceptance of people who are different has grown exponentially in recent decades. To consider and extend this trend, could non-humans one day be accepted as part of society? By extension, could conscious human-like robots who feel joy and pain, be the minority group of tomorrow? If so, what rights – if any – are we going to owe to these groups as an ethical matter? With artificially-intelligent human-like robots becoming a reality, it is easy to see how this technology could be used for quite sinister things. A few months back, there was a documentary called ‘The Sex Robots are Coming’, which followed
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BY Ethan Kelly
BETWEEN KNOWLEDGE AND UNDERSTANDING
How do we understand knowledge? Philosophers know this question as epistemology, or the theory of knowledge, in which there are few convincing accounts of our understanding of knowledge, even among epistemologists themselves! Scientists, on the whole, know this question as the scientific method. However, there’s also a great deal to be said on scientific grounds about what we can understand and how we go about doing it.
Principle. To explain what this says, keep in mind that particles and waves are not two different things: everything in reality is on a spectrum, with particle on one end and wave at the other. For instance, in some circumstances, l i g h t acts like a wave and in others it acts like a particle. To illustrate this, you can look at (or better yet, try yourself) Young’s Interference Experiment that can only be explained by thinking of light as a wave. Similarly, for the particle behaviour of light, try taking a picture with very low exposure: the grainy effect you get is because pho-
A brilliant example of this ‘understanding of our understanding’ lies in quantum mechanics: the Heisenberg Uncertainty
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tons (particles) of light hit the detector in your camera in discrete locations. With this, surely, we can say that anything can be described as either a wave or a particle – but can we describe it as both? We can know the velocity of a wave of light by multiplying wavelength by frequency – great! But what if we wanted to think of that light as a particle now? There’s a way we can do this – take lots of ‘snapshots’ of the wave over fixed intervals and then we can ‘add’ these waves together. This means we can stack lots of waves on top of each other and add them together, taking above the middle as construction and below as destruction, to give us a wave pulse. This gives us a localised position of the light, which we now talk about as a particle. In fact, the more you average the waves, the more information you lose about the momentum, but the more information you gain about where the light is if we think about it as a particle. There is, again, a spectrum and quantum mechanics has defined for us exactly what we can and can’t know about something as familiar as light. It doesn’t make sense to talk about the position of a wave, but it does make sense to talk about its speed as we saw earlier. Equally, with the position of a photon, it doesn’t make sense to talk about the speed because we’ve lost the information about wavelength and frequency by averaging so many times. This is the Uncertainty Principle: we can either know for certain the position or the momentum (velocity, considering the weight of a particle) of a particle, and that’s an understood limit of our knowledge. This defined limit seems to fit somewhere between knowledge and understanding: we know that we can’t understand something, and we understand that we can’t know that something also. Science is a constantly evolving field of study. Eventually, false information is found, and as a result information has a kind of “half-life” (the time taken, as a probability, for half of a given portion of knowledge such as a non-fiction book
or scientific journal to be proven false). This means that even the foundations of our scientific understanding are constantly being revised, owing to the scientific method. Say that, from tomorrow, I decided to drop an object continuously for the rest of my life. The result of each one of those experiments, I would hope, would be that the object would fall to the floor – gravity pulls it towards the centre of the Earth. However, if one day the object mysteriously falls upwards, so long as I could produce verifiable evidence then our entire understanding of gravity would have to be reviewed. To me, this is the true beauty of science. Humility enough to admit when your information is wrong, when presented with contradictory evidence which discredits your previous findings: even to the point of you finding the evidence which contradicts your own previous conclusions. Science means learning so much more about the world and universe that surrounds us, about our own inability to experience all the sensations that other animals can or about the fundamentals of our physical being, but it also means we will invariably have to admit we were wrong about something else we’ve said in the past, but that’s okay! Like the people that do it, science is imperfect by its very nature and process. That’s also the thing that means we find the most truth possible – we’re maximising our chances of getting what we’ve said right, because we’re constantly vetting ourselves. That’s why science is an evolutionary process – we’re fumbling around an infinite maze in the dark and getting further towards our destination means taking a few wrong turns along the way. To me, that’s a beautiful thought.
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BY Asta Kinch
the sea has no membrane it’s vulnerable and angry and hungry
behind the dunes mother worries it’s dark out and i am gone from her
the foam runs sideways before disappearing
folded away like dough from the eye to the beach all water longs for this tongues out and waiting i remember
fruits of marzipan in the shop window red fading to green on an apple too big for the dollhouse and a carrot out of proportions my shoulder and the blue woolen coat this was autumn brown i bled into bulky pads for the first time a kind of rough cheap cotton like paper against the skin and the bathroom smelled of smoke from the cigarettes below
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and mother took me to paris
TWEEN all we did was linger linger in bed linger in each other’s eyes and thoughts your eyes linger on me dancing across the room my eyes linger on your sleeping figure next to me your breath lingers on my shoulder and your smell on my clothes your hand lingers on my bare back and my hand lingers in your hair our fingers linger but never touched lingering in between the fine line BY Meli Vasiloudes Bayada now blurred. 35
issue #001 between autumn 2018 glasgow university magazine facebook / Glasgow University Magazine twitter / @gumagazine instagram / @gumagazine email / editors@glasgowuniversitymagazine.co.uk