Mia Jones

Like many of us, my first port of call when I think something has happened is social media. News spreads fast and wide on sites like X before the reporters at the BBC or the Standard have managed to get their ‘scoop’ out there. A witness will tweet a sentence, a friend of a friend will ask what’s going on, a passerby will share a photo of some paramedics, some blue tape, a tarp on the floor.

One second you’re learning about iambic pentameter with a boy in your class, the next he’s sharing podcast clips on his Instagram story of men talking about how women need to be controlled, Taming of the Shrew style. These ideals are horrifyingly archaic, and are often played with in Shakespeare’s work.

From the invention of the concept, the nature of the empire is to police. To police who ‘counts’ as a citizen, to police self expression, to control. Empire uses gender, ethnicity, socio-economic background, education, and almost every other tiny detail that makes up an identity to create hierarchy: in the wise words of Charli xcx, ‘you wanna know what I’ve got going on down there?’

Recently, I’ve found myself forgetting the walk from the library to campus, unable to recall the faces of those around me on the Northern line that morning. By putting on my noise-cancelling headphones, at just the right level to drown out the screeching between Camden Town and Euston, I could block myself away from the outside world. Muscle memory would guide me from A to B, until it got to a point where I hadn’t mustered a single independent thought in what felt like weeks.

(Audio description available) Tell me, O Muse, about a mother and a daughter, tell me about their journey into creation, and how they oversaw the city of Athens from their rooftop, and where they went when their duty of overlooking was taken away. Tell me about their Odyssey over the seas, and where they ended up. Tell me, O Muse, about their journey from the workshop, to the Parthenon, to the long, crowded hall. Find the beginning.

Ferdinand de Saussure brings forward the hypothesis that a word requires a signifier (a physical appearance, a word, image, or sound) and a signified (a concept) to create meaning. Therefore if the signifier and signified are codependent to create meaning, meaning cannot exist without one or the other. A question was brought up in a seminar I attended in my first year on Saussure and it has been on my mind since: if a language does not have a word for feelings such as love and friendship (that i...

Gender-queer bodies, while seeming like a hot topic among politicians in recent weeks, have never been a modern invention. Although the term itself originated in the 1990s, humans that fit under the wide gender-queer or transgender umbrella have existed for a millennia. A 5000-year-old biologically male skeleton found dressed in feminine clothing surrounded by traditionally feminine grave-goods in Prague, the 4000 year history of Eunuchs (sometimes referred to as a third gender according to Wang...