When the submersible Titan imploded on its descent to the wreckage of the Titanic this past June, its five victims were widely eulogized as explorers. They were termed “true explorers” by OceanGate, the company that sponsored the voyage. OceanGate’s founder, Stockton Rush, who piloted the Titan that day, saw himself as an explorer and […]
Read MoreIf you have been following the news in the past months, you may have read that Democrats in the United States reported that the White House under Donald Trump failed to report gifts received by the former president from foreign nations. Moreover, other gifts went missing. Similar stories have also made the news in Brazil. […]
Read MoreIn March and April 2023, Al Jazeera’s investigative unit released a documentary series on gold smuggling, money laundering, corruption, and organised crime in Zimbabwe. The documentary implicated the Zimbabwean President, his family, the central bank, state diplomatic officials, customs officials and a ring of notorious smugglers and fraudsters in a multibillion-dollar transnational money laundering and […]
Read MoreThe office of the Union for Democratic Control, 1959. Photograph by Cyril M. Bernard. Courtesy of Miriam Bernard and Hull University Archives
Read More“Never Again,” the campaign to end extreme hunger emerged out of the 2011 famine in Somalia, yet today, in Somalia, seven and a half million people are facing food shortages while over 200,000 people are experiencing a level five famine with the numbers expected to rise dramatically in the next few months. The name – […]
Read MoreIn On the Frontiers of the Indian Ocean World: A History of Lake Tanganyika, c.1830-1890, I seek to challenge how East African history is conceived in space. I do so in two core ways. First, I take the region around Lake Tanganyika as a case study. This freshwater lake, the second-most voluminous in the world, […]
Read MoreImage reproduced with the kind permission of the National Library of Scotland and the Church of Scotland World Mission Board.
Read MoreWestern academic research about Africa has been likened to industrial mining: researchers arrive uninvited, extract knowledge from local communities using ‘foreign’ technologies, and disappear back to where they came from, leaving no meaningful benefit for those communities. While the intimate relationship between western knowledge production and (neo-)colonialism is well known, this may create a misleading […]
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