The Verso Podcast

Dan Hancox talks to Amina Gichinga and Linda Bellos about what it means to live in London and how, given the various challenges the city faces, it can be changed for the better. Dan is the author of The Village Against The World, and ebooks including Kettled Youth and Fight Back! Dan tweets at @danhancox. Linda Bellos is an activist and former leader of Lambeth Borough Council 1986-88 and chair of the Greater London Council's Women's Committee. She was the second black woman to become leader of a British local authority. She tweets @BellosLinda Amina Gichinga is a musician and a City & East London Assembly candidate for Take Back the City. Amina tweets at @Aminaminky

This focus panel on race and racism was recorded at Foyles, Charing Cross Rd, 23rd March 2016 at the second in the Our London event series in collaboration with Compass and co-hosted by Novara Media. One of the greatest aspects of living in London is its diversity, but at the same time the city is striated by racial politics. In London, as throughout the UK, people from BAME groups have been historically much more likely to be in poverty than white British people, as well as suffer from housing deprivation, homelessness and inferior access to healthcare and education. Meanwhile, racist violence is on the rise, with state racisms against ‘Muslimness’, an institutionally racist police and the ‘extreme centre’ of the British political elite enforcing tensions between race, class and nation in a context of increasing immigration and numerous global crises. In response to all of this, Novara Media, Verso and Compass will be co-hosting a panel that focuses on living in London and some of the intersecting oppressions that increasingly define it. Novara Media's Aaron Bastani chairs the panel and is joined by Jumanah Younis of Sisters Uncut, Ash Sarkar, also from Novara Media, Liz Fekete, Director of the Institute of Race Relations and author of the forthcoming Fault Lines (Verso, 2017)and activist and academic Adam Elliott-Cooper. We remember those who died in police custody and ask: What does it mean to call London a multicultural – or even a post-racial – city in the context of neoliberalism? What is the relationship between race and class in the city in 2016 and how should mayoral candidates be responding to these issues?

Kate Evans joins writer and editor Sophie Mayer to examine the radical origins of International Women's Day, Rosa Luxemburg's revolutionary life and work in the international socialist movement, and her enduring legacy. This March, the London Review Bookshop is celebrating women graphic novelists in honour of Women's History Month. As part of their spotlight on Kate Evans, the creator of the cult hit Red Rosa: A Graphic Biography of Rosa Luxemburg, we present the inaugural Verso podcast in collaboration with the London Review Bookshop and a giveaway competition where you can win a limited edition Rosa Luxemburg tote bags containing a copy of Red Rosa, The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg and The Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg. To win a goody bag, you must listen to the podcast to answer the questions here: http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2534-the-verso-podcast-red-rosa-in-collaboration-with-the-london-review-bookshop

What happened to the future? Owen Hatherley and Douglas Murphy explode the distortions of history that obscure our present and future in their new respective books The Ministry of Nostalgia and Last Futures. Excavating the lost archeology of the present day, Douglas Murphy’s Last Futures is a fascinating, mind-bending cultural history of the last avant-garde. Through a cast of architects, dreamers, thinkers, hippies and designers, Murphy diagnoses the source of our current situation and steers us towards powerful alternative futures. In a sharp, witty polemic, Owen Hatherley skewers the contemporary nostalgia for a utopian past that never existed. Why, in an age of austerity, have we adopted the gospel of luxurious poverty, from ubiquitous 'Keep Calm and Carry On' posters to the ‘artisinal’? The Ministry of Nostalgia reaches across a depleted cultural landscape to demand more for our society—after all, Hatherley argues, why should we have to 'Keep Calm and Carry On'? Chaired by Shumi Bose, architectural writer, historian, editor and teacher at Central St Martins responsible for coordinating Contextual Studies for BA Architecture: Spaces and Objects, covering architectural history, theory and broader cultural issues.