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Recent episodes
Police the Beats: Lambros Fatsis w/ Adèle Oliver
May 13, 2026
Unknown duration
Superweak: Thinking in the 21st Century: Laurent de Sutter in conversation with Alfie Bown
Apr 29, 2026
Unknown duration
NO TO NUCLEAR! Linda Pentz Gunter in conversation with Jonathon Porritt
Apr 15, 2026
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Frontierlands by Hazel Sheffield w/ Nadia Idle
Apr 1, 2026
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May We Feed the King: Writing Radical Fiction Today w/ Rebecca Perry & Misha Honcharenko
Mar 18, 2026
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| Date | Episode | Description | Length | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5/13/26 | ![]() Police the Beats: Lambros Fatsis w/ Adèle Oliver | We are absolutely delighted to welcome Lambros Fatsis to Housmans to discuss the criminalizing of black culture, music and youth. We are thrilled also to welcome back the brilliant Adèle Oliver, author of ‘Deeping it: Colonialism, Culture and Criminalisation of UK Drill’, to interview Lambros about his work.Policing The Beats is a bold analysis that exposes the racist policing of Black music. The emergence of UK drill music made headline news, portraying it as a criminal enterprise instead of recognising it as an art form. This new rap subgenre, however, is neither the first nor the only Black music to be targeted this way.Policing the beats rewinds the tape to demonstrate how music has been used as an instrument for policing Black people, from the era of colonial slavery to the present day, revealing the racist legal processes that make crimes out of rhymes.This original and readable book offers the first in-depth account of the policing of Black music in Britain, highlighting the relationship between politics, culture and criminal (in)justice and inviting music lovers, scholars and activists to tune in. | — | ||||||
| 4/29/26 | ![]() Superweak: Thinking in the 21st Century: Laurent de Sutter in conversation with Alfie Bown | Using the stealth capacities of hermeneutic distrust as his weapon of choice, de Sutter’s writing breaks into unrecovered areas of subtle teachings, shedding light on philosophemes gleaned from Aristotle to punk-led attitude, biojewelry, and the historical buildup of authority billed to the triumph of reason in its many intrusive morphs.— Avital Ronell, New York UniversityWe welcome back the brilliant Alfie Bown to Housmans, this time in the company of Belgian philosopher Laurent de Sutter. The two will be focusing their conversation on the nature and necessity (or, rather, superfluity [as posited by Laurent]) of critique. As a jumping off point they will be using Laurent’s recent work of theory, Superweak: Thinking in the 21st Century. The book is described below:‘We have become superheroes. Nothing can resist us anymore: not persons, ideas, facts, realities, or beings. We owe our superhuman strength to a tool we have taken up that submits everything to the scrutiny of our judgment: critique. After its first formulation at the end of the sixteenth century, the project of critique spread from one sphere to another until it became almost universal: we have all of us been transformed by our equal capacity to judge, approve, and reject.If modernity is defined as the journey we have taken to move away from the myths and dogmas of the past, then critique, with its emphasis on reason and the autonomy of judgment, has been the lynchpin of modernity.Today, however, the critical project shows signs of exhaustion. We are beginning to realize that being right is useless, now that everyone can lay claim to the same power as we can. The democratization of reason, proceeding alongside the development of critique through modernity, has produced a stalemate: for every judgment that we pronounce, there is another opposing one – with grounds as solid as our own, and the same right to assert itself. Rather than elevating us above the world, critique has mired us in an impasse of claim and counter-claim. The age of critique is now over and in its place we need to develop a postcritical form of thinking, one he calls “superweak,” a form of thinking based not on establishing grounds, pronouncing judgment, and determining duty, but on welcoming possibility, exploring what the world has to offer, and cultivating a vertiginous appreciation for moving within a world less grounded and less bounded by the terms of critical reason.’Professor Laurent de Sutter is Professor of Legal Theory at Vrije Universiteit Brussels. He is the author of more than twenty books translated into a dozen languages. In English, he is the author of Narcocapitalism: Life in the Age of Anaesthesia (Polity, 2017) and After Law (Polity, 2020, French Voices Award, Leopold Rosy Prize of the Belgian Royal Academy). He is the editor of the Theory Redux series at Polity Press and of Perspectives Critiques at Presses Universitaires de France.Dr Alfie Bown is Lecturer in Digital Media Culture and Technology at Royal Holloway, University of London. His books include Dream Lovers (Pluto, 2022), an investigation into dating apps, sexbots and virtual relationships, Post-Comedy (Polity, 2024), Post-Memes (Punctum, 2019) and The Playstation Dreamworld (Polity, 2017), a psychoanalytic study of video games which is available in Spanish, Portuguese, Serbian, Slovak and many other languages. Currently, he is working on the relationship between psychoanalysis and cybernetics. He is also editor of Everyday Analysis, a pamphlet house and monthly talk series. | — | ||||||
| 4/15/26 | ![]() NO TO NUCLEAR! Linda Pentz Gunter in conversation with Jonathon Porritt | ‘Linda Pentz Gunter has done a great service in highlighting the nuclear chain reaction and exposing the huge human and environmental costs. We need this book for our environment and a peaceful world’– Jeremy CorbynWe are delighted to welcome Linda Pentz Gunter to Housmans to discuss her new book No To Nuclear. Brilliantly written, clear, concise and exacting, this brilliant book shows us that there is no silver bullet for the climate crisis—but that hasn’t stopped people searching. Seizing its chance, the nuclear power industry wants us to believe that theirs is the only technical fix for our deliverance. The public, politicians and the media have been easily swayed.This should come as no surprise. After all, the pro-nuclear PR campaign is richly funded and has an army of lobbyists sowing myths while the industry reaps the rewards of taxpayer-funded subsidies.No To Nuclear calls the industry’s bluff. Blasting aside its claims to be safe and green, Linda Pentz Gunter makes the irresistible case that nuclear power is too slow, too expensive, too dangerous and too integrally connected to the nuclear weapons complex, to serve as a rational energy choice.The book also delves into the lives of Indigenous peoples and communities of colour, who have been harmed the most by the nuclear sector, and questions whether the way we devalue nature and the environment is costing us the chance of a genuinely just energy transition.Linda Pentz Gunter is the founder of the US-based non-profit Beyond Nuclear and serves as its international specialist. Previously, she was a journalist at USA Network, Reuters, and The Times. She launched, and writes for Beyond Nuclear’s online magazine, Beyond Nuclear International.Joining Linda in conversation we welcome the environmentalist and writer Johnathon Porritt. Jonathon is a great advocate for the Green Party and frequently contributes to magazines, newspapers and books, and appears on radio and television.‘Linda Pentz Gunter has the great skill that more writers should have: to take a crucial and complex issue and make it truly accessible. This rigorous and comprehensive work is a gift to everyone who wants to understand the nuclear power paradox’– Kate Hudson, previous General Secretary of Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament | — | ||||||
| 4/1/26 | ![]() Frontierlands by Hazel Sheffield w/ Nadia Idle | ‘Hazel Sheffield’s book is a warming remedy to the creeping nihilism many feel about the places where they live,’ Jen CallejaWe are delighted to welcome Hazel Sheffield to the shop to discuss her inspiring new book about Britain’s abandoned and neglected places and the opportunities they present for communities, and how they can help us face the challenges of climate change.‘Frontierlands’ are Britain’s forgotten places. Silt-filled harbours, overgrown forests, sunken railway tracks and empty buildings. All once economic engines, now abandoned by investors and the state.But they are home to local communities, and amongst them, some remarkable pioneers working together to repair, rebuild and prepare for the future.Hazel Sheffield takes her readers on a journey that begins at the coastline and travels inward via hoardings and railway arches, factories, streets and neighbourhoods to our homes. Moving from Watchet harbour in the South West to Gateshead in the North East, from Lancashire to London and the South East, she introduces us to the people who are acting to shape their own destinies – people with first-hand knowledge of the problems Britain faces and with clear ideas how to make things better.This is a book about regeneration, reclaiming power, and the hope that comes from community action. About people questioning how the world works and determined to do things differently in the face of economic upheaval and climate crisis. People learning to build a new world, challenging us all to think about how we should live in the face of certain change.Immersive and inspiring, Frontierlands challenges us to reconnect with and reclaim our environment, showing that it is possible to regenerate, reskill and create opportunities for industry, and to address the challenges of climate changeNadia Idle (Novara Media) will chair a discussion about the book for 45 minutes to an hour. The audience are invited to share their experiences. Hazel will be signing books after the event. | — | ||||||
| 3/18/26 | ![]() May We Feed the King: Writing Radical Fiction Today w/ Rebecca Perry & Misha Honcharenko | Perry combines effortless exactitude with canny ambiguity to create a novel that is always as stimulating as it is enchanting. ‘May We Feed the King’ is a rare achievement, I absolutely loved it.Claire-Louise BennettWe are delighted to welcome two of the most exciting writers working in Britain today, Rebecca Perry and Misha Honcharenko, to Housmans for our first creative writing event of the year. The talk will be focused on Rebecca’s new novel May We Feed The King (Granta), a ‘serial and dreamlike’ (Jessie Burton) work of avant-garde historical fiction that tells the story of ‘ a curator, who spends her time dressing the rooms of historic buildings to bring them to life. But in the lush private quarters of a medieval palace, she finds herself so transfixed by the reign of an almost-forgotten King that the edges of her life begin to blur.’ Interviewing Rebecca about the book we welcome back Misha Honcharenko, a queer Ukrainian artist and writer whose incredible debut novel Trap Unfolds Me Greedily (Sissy Anarchy) we launched at Housmans back in 2024. The are two writers whose work is in equal parts inventive and alert to the historical circumstances under which it is produced. As the current global order continues to dissolve before our eyes, we ask: what can, or should, ‘fiction’ be now? | — | ||||||
| 2/18/26 | ![]() 'The Log Books: Voices of Queer Britain and the Helpline That Listened' with Tash Walker &Adam Zmith | An intimate history of LGBTQ+ life over four decades, discovered in a stash of forgotten, handwritten notes.Switchboard was founded at Housmans, and operated out of our premises for many years. So we are honored to start LGBT+ History Month by launching a book that covers an intimate part of Switchboard’s proud history and we look forward to welcoming its authors Tash Walker and Adam Zmith to the shop for an evening of discussion and celebration.In a crawlspace at the offices of Switchboard, a queer helpline in operation since 1974, lies dozens of log books kept by volunteers describing the phone calls they had taken: a teenager whose parents had kicked them out of their home for dressing as the wrong gender; a lesbian terrified of having her baby taken away from her; a man arrested for chatting up another man in a public toilet; a young person wanting to know how to come out. These logs were traces of tens of thousands of queer lives, a bridge to a past hidden from people like Tash Walker and Adam Zmith in their youth, captured by people who lent an ear to those in need. Walker and Zmith came of age in the time of Section 28, a law which banned councils and schools ‘promoting the teaching of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship’. In recovering these logs, they encountered people grappling with feelings, questions and problems both familiar and different. They set out to learn from – and sometimes speak to – people on both sides of the calls. Charged with joy, gossip, sensuality, heartbreak and sometimes fear, and with a potent relevancy to the world today, Walker and Zmith have collected these stories in The Log Books. They capture queer lives in stunning detail, embarking on a journey of both collective history and self -discovery, propelling it into the foreground of our national history.OUR SPEAKERS:Tash Walker is a writer, podcast producer and community organiser who has worked with institutions such as the Barbican, BBC, and Queer Britain; they were a member of Switchboard’s board for eight years.Adam Zmith is a writer and multi-format producer; his book Deep Sniff: A History of Poppers and Queer Futures won the Polari First Book Prize. He writes theatre shows, talks and podcasts, including Press Play Turn On which won Podcast of the Year at the British Podcast Awards 2024. | — | ||||||
| 2/4/26 | ![]() 'Contested Commons': A History of Protest and Public Space in England | For our first event of the year we welcome Proffessor Katrina Navickas to the shop to discuss what is an increasingly urgent political issue in our current cultural climate. Her recent book, Contested Commons is a radical history of the increasing restrictions against protest in England’s public spaces. The work is a gripping overview of increasingly restrictive policing and legislation against protest in public spaces. It tells the long history of contests over Trafalgar Square, Hyde Park, Cable Street and Kinder Scout, as well as sites in towns and rural areas across the country. Navickas reveals how protesters claimed these spaces as their own commons, resisting their continuing enclosure and exclusion by social and political elites. She investigates famous and less well-known demonstrations and protest marches, from early democracy, trade union movements and the Suffragettes to anti-fascist, Black rights and environmental campaigners in more recent times. Contested Commons offers positive as well as troubling lessons on how we protect the right to protest.Katrina Navickas is Professor of History at the University of Hertfordshire. She is the author of Protest and the Politics of Space and Place, 1789–1848 (2016) and Loyalism and Radicalism in Lancashire, 1798–1815 (2009). She will be joined in conversation with Daniel Frost. They will discuss the book and its themes for around 45 minutes, followed by a open discussion with the audience. | — | ||||||
| 1/21/26 | ![]() 'Jaw Filler': Maz Murray & Charlie Markbreiter in conversation with So Mayer | Experimental trans neonoir fiction.‘Jaw Filler instantly joins the canon of outlier literature: jaw-dropper, more like.’– Isabel Waidner, author of Sterling Karat GoldHousmans and Montez Press invites you to a conversation around the new neonoir novel Jaw Filler by Maz Murray & Charlie Markbreiter, hosted by writer So Mayer. Tickets are free but booking is essential.‘You don’t need dysphoria to be trans. You don’t need a body at all.’When Detective Sean Hastings is asked to investigate the disappearance of Character, he enters the First Trans Commune in Sim World, a virtual reality cult community imagineered by transfluencer Kevin, and bankrolled by a mysterious tech company, VSI.Haunted by the death of his cis gayguy college bestie and their shared diasporic dilemmas, Taylor, VSI’s token QTPOC face, sees potential in Kevin’s ability to Release trauma into the virtual world. Meanwhile, Casey, Sean’s ex, hopes Releasing will cure their Long Plague. Then femme fatale Mitchelle reappears. And the plot twists.A pulpy neo-noir romp through the anxiously assimilated transmasculine id, Jaw Filler asks: who is VSI, and what do they really want? Can you be your own dad? And if Character’s mind is trapped in Sim World, then where is his body?PRAISE FOR JAW FILLER‘It’s like The Sluts meets Double Indemnity but everyone is trans. I had an absolute blast.’– Macy Rodman‘With Jaw Filler, Charlie Markbreiter and Maz Murray offer a searing, noir-flavored lens into the world of terminally online guys and our insecurities, fantasies, and wild imaginations of ourselves and each other. I will be discussing this in therapy and billing Charlie and Maz for the expense.’– James Tom‘There’s something faintly Brazil about Jaw Filler: wilful and breakneck, self-aware yet never cynical, paranoiac but always coyly – unarguably – plausible. Calling it a pastiche would be stupid. To do so would overlook not only the ravenous delight Jaw Filler takes in the melange of its genre conventions, but also, more importantly, its surgical commitment to grounding a narrative in what I can only succinctly describe as genocide-reality. Murray & Markbreiter have achieved the extremely contemporary and impossible to falsify: true camp darkness.’– Hesse K., author of Disquiet DriveOUR SPEAKERSMaz Murray is an artist who makes films, writing, performances and things. They had their first institutional solo show at Focal Point Gallery in 2024. He’s currently working on a collaborative performance, PLOT HOLE, developed while an awardee at Studio Voltaire.Charlie Markbreiter is the author of Rapid Onset: Anti-Trans Culture and U.S. Imperial Decline (Bloomsbury, 2027) and Gossip Girl Fanfic Novella (2022). He is a PhD candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center. So Mayer is a writer, editor, bookseller, organiser and film curator. Their most recent book is Bad Language (Peninsula Press, 2025), a memoir and manifesto on language and power. | — | ||||||
| 1/7/26 | ![]() 'Sea Now': Eva Meijer in conversation with Lucy Mercer | ‘Sea Now joins Meijer’s rich oeuvre of novels and philosophical meditations on multispecies coexistence. One could read this novel as the story of two characters—the Netherlands and the sea—posing a question of each other: What am I? What and who is “the Netherlands”? What and who is “the sea”? The first question implicates uncomfortable stories of value: Who determines the status quo that decides who or what (a foreigner?, a painting?) deserves to be saved, who or what (a US-trained scientist?, the Dutch language?) would count as a loss?’Mandy-Suzanne Wong, Asymptote‘One of the unanticipated highlights of my reading year…a fabulist disaster novel, doubling as identity-of-the-nation commentary…playful, with a dry sly omniscient voice…a little bit as though Stephen Baxter’s Flood (2008) (or Japan Sinks) had been rewritten by Italo Calvino….the cumulative effect of this wide-ranging, generous narrative attention is a constant sense of motion, and a lightness of touch that allows Meijer to move smoothly from, say, haunting elegy to academic satire to a more serious intellectual point… Simply as a page-to-page reading experience, Sea Now is consistently fresh and interesting: You never quite know where its eye will fall next.’Niall Harrison, LocusHousmans are very excited to welcome the celebrated writer, philosopher, and visual artist, Eva Meijer to the shop to launch her novel Sea Now, newly translated into English by Anne Thompson Melo. This work is a profound meditation on the relationship between the human and non-human and a biting satire of governmental ineptitude in the face of climate change. As the sea swallows a nation, the prime minister holds a daily press conference and scientists try to find an explanation, without success. A climate activist, a young poet, and an oceanographer journey across the new sea and return to confront all that has been lost, as a coming-of-age adventure story is braided with a clarion call to wake up to the defining challenge of our age. Eva will be joined in conversation by the poet and academic Lucy Mercer, author of Emblem (Prototype, 2022) and Afterlife (forthcoming from Fitzcarraldo Editions.) The two will talk for around 45 minutes to 1 hour followed by an open discussion. | — | ||||||
| 12/24/25 | ![]() The First Jasmines by Saima Begum | Housmans and Hajar Press are delighted to celebrate the launch of this important, magnificent novel. Saima Begum’s The First Jasmines follows two sisters, Lucky and Jamila, after they are captured by the military while on the way to visit their mother in what was then called East Pakistan, in 1971.Locked in a room in an unknown village-turned-camp by the river, the women look through a lone barred window onto white jasmines blooming day and night. Meanwhile, around the camp, deadly guerrilla fighters from the Bengali Mukti Bahini gather to take back territory from the Pakistan Army.As Bangladesh crowns painfully into the world, Lucky and Jamila must choose between heartbreak and secrecy to return from an unspoken violence.We are extremely lucky to have Saima Begum with us on the night, joined in conversation by Shahnaz Ahsan. We anticipate this will be a popular event so please book ahead to avoid dissapointment.OUR SPEAKERS:Saima Begum is a British-Bangladeshi writer based in North London. She won the MFest Short Story Competition in 2021. The First Jasmines is her first novel.Shahnaz Ahsan is an author, columnist and award-winning food writer. Her latest book is The Jackfruit Chronicles: Memories and Recipes from a British-Bangladeshi Kitchen, published by HarperNorth. Her debut novel Hashim & Family was an Observer Best Book of 2020 and was shortlisted for the Guardian Not the Booker Prize. | — | ||||||
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| 11/26/25 | ![]() ‘Mutant Ecologies: how capitalism is reconfiguring the very texture of life’ with Erica Borg and Amedeo Policante | Mutant Ecologies: Manufacturing Life in the Age of Genomic Capital Ecologies (Pluto Press) traces the spinning of new synthetic threads into the web of life. It is a critical cartography of the shifting landscapes of capital accumulation conjured by recent developments in genomic science, genome editing and the biotech industry.CRISPR crops, fast-growing salmons, heat-resistant Slick™ cows, Friendly™ Mosquitoes, humanised mice, pigs growing human organs – these are but a few of the dazzling new life-forms that have recently emerged from corporate and university laboratories around the world, all promising to lubricate the circuits of capital accumulation in distinct ways. The deliberate induction of genetic mutations is increasingly central to business operations in a number of sectors, from agriculture to pharmaceuticals.While the Nobel Committee recently proclaimed the life sciences to have entered ‘a new epoch’, the authors show how these technological innovations continue to operate within a socio-historical context defined by the iron rules of capitalist competition and exploitation. Capital no longer contents itself with simply appropriating the living bodies of plants and animals. It purposefully designs their internal metabolism, and in that way it redesigns the countless living vectors that constitute the global biosphere. It is driving a biological revolution, which will ripple through the everyday lives of people everywhere.Erica Borg is a geographer and political ecologist based at King’s College, London. Their research focuses on the relations between capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy and ecological crisis.Amedeo Policante is a Researcher at the Nova University of Lisbon. His writings interrogate the nexus of extraction, exploitation and expropriation that fuels the contemporary world market. He is the author of two books: The Pirate Myth and The New Mercenaries. | — | ||||||
| 11/12/25 | ![]() Double Launch: Danny Hayward and Matthew Goulish | ABOUT THE BOOKS:Danny Hayward‘s Training Exercises:‘Organized violence committed on ordinary speech’ is therapy for those who don’t believe in literature as value. Training Exercises is an unpacking of that dictum: seven short essays, letters, reports and anti-biographies written to overcome the feeling of resistance to the defacement of what strikes us as true. An anti-purge written out by lipstick or hammer, scrawled over the top of itself and run through a translation program that turns everything upside inside down, its pieces include: a polemic against catharsis; a letter to the poet Dom Hale on his book Seizures; and a series of on-the-spot reports on the UK Illegal Migration Bill, East London poetry readings, the politics of the war in Ukraine, and a conversation about the meaning of damage in contemporary literature.‘First you learn to write down your ideas, then you learn again how to write all of your lurid political and intellectual and intimate disappointments and all of your childhood hopes over the top of them’. Jack Spicer scrawled the name of his book in pink lipstick on the cover of the academic journal he had published in: Training Exercises scrawls itself on top of that.Danny Hayward‘s most recent poetry collection is Loading Terminal (87 Press, 2022). More recent work, along with an earlier collection of critical essays, can be accessed at Free Trials Matthew Goulish’s Kingfisher:The dramaturg, writer, and teacher Matthew Goulish reflects on the practice of reading poetry, of reading just one poem: ‘Kingfisher’ by Ed Roberson. How to attend, to follow the course of poem as a waterway, to recognise in its surface tension impending drops, hidden obstacles, and disguised turns? How also and at the same time to attend to an interruption – an accidental sighting – with equal curiosity? Sincerity follows the lines of the poem inside and outside, inward and outward, drawing in a series of correspondences and correspondents, roots and sources, until reading becomes a collective endeavor; the words of Ed Roberson, Michelle Sherburne, Renee Gladman, and Lyn Hejinian are also here. As the subject of this particular poem surfaces, to catch a glimpse is not so obviously a gift: the practice of catching sight might also be injurious to another’s freedom. And so we follow the trail of the poem through Smuggler’s Notch.About the author: Matthew Goulish co-founded Every house has a door in 2008 with Lin Hixson. He is dramaturg, writer, and sometimes performer with the company. He was a founding member of Goat Island, the Chicago-based performance group that existed from 1987 to 2009. His books include 39 microlectures – in proximity of performance (Routledge, 2001), The Brightest Thing in the World – 3 Lectures from the Institute of Failure (Green Lantern Press, 2012), Work from Memory: In Response to In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust, co-authored with Dan Beachy-Quick (Ahsahta Press, 2012) and Pitch and Revelation—Reconfigurations of Reading, Poetry, and Philosophy through the Work of Jay Wright, co-authored with Will Daddario (Punctum Books, 2022). His essays have appeared in Richard Rezac Address (University of Chicago Press, 2018), Propositions in the Making – Experiments in a Whiteheadian Laboratory (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020), and many other journals and anthologies. He teaches in the Writing Program of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. | — | ||||||
| 8/27/25 | ![]() A Social History of Analytic Philosophy with Christoph Schuringa | ‘Christoph Schuringa’s A Social History of Analytic Philosophy achieves the impossible: while it follows a clear line of interpretation – analytic philosophy is not politically neutral, it is deeply rooted in capitalist liberalism and its struggle against Leftist engagement -, it develops this line in a vast and complex narrative full of fascinating historical and personal details, from the Cambridge beginnings of analytic thought (Russell, Moore) through the key role of analytic philosophy in McCarthy purges up to how analytic approach was crucial in including anti-colonial and feminist orientations into the liberal frame (Appiah). Schuringa’s book is unputdownable – applied to it, this term is not a cliché but a simple description of its effect on a reader.‘– Slavoj ŽižekIn the English speaking world, self-described ‘analytic philosophy’ has become the predominant method of philosophical inquiry, at least within the majority of university philosophy departments. By some, it is celebrated for it’s exhalting of rigorousness and pursuit ‘the empirical.’ Others find these theoretical claims to be dubious and naieve. Christoph Schuringa, in its brilliantly argued book, A Social History of Analytic Philosophy, argues that the enduring power of analytic philosophy can only be understood by examining its social history. The mode tends to think of itself as concerned with eternal questions, transcending the changing scenes of history. It thinks of itself as apolitical. Schuringa, however, convincingly shows that the opposite is true.The origins of analytic philosophy are in a set of distinct movements, shaped by highly specific sets of political and social forces. Only after the Second World War were these disparate, often dynamic movements joined together to make ‘analytic philosophy’ as we know it. In the climate of McCarthyism, analytic philosophy was robbed of political force.To this day, analytic philosophy is the ideology of the status quo. It may seem arcane and largely removed from the real world, but it is a crucial component in upholding liberalism, through its central role in elite educational institutions. As Schuringa concludes, the apparently increasing friendliness of analytic philosophers to rival approaches in philosophy should be understood as a form of colonization; thanks to its hegemonic status, it reformats all it touches in service of its own imperatives, going so far as to colonize decolonial efforts in the discipline.Christoph Schuringa studied philosophy at King’s College, Cambridge and Birkbeck College, University of London. He has published widely on the history of philosophy and on Marx and Marxism, and is associate professor of philosophy at Northeastern University, London. He is Editor of the Hegel Bulletin, and his writing has appeared in Jacobin, New Left Review, European Journal of Philosophy and elsewhere.He will be joined in conversation with Jonathan Egid, lecturer in Philosophy at SOAS. Jonathan recently completed my PhD at King’s College London on the Ḥatäta Zär’a Ya‛ǝqob and the controversy over its authorship. Beyond the aim of clarifying this intractable debate, and bringing neglected works to a wider audience, Jonathan is interested in thinking about different ways of writing the history of philosophy, in particular what a truly global history of philosophy would look like. | — | ||||||
| 8/13/25 | ![]() Three Revolutions: Simon Hall in conversation with Owen Hatherley | Simon Hall and Owen Hatherley will be joining us to discuss Simon’s fascinating new book, THREE REVOLUTIONS: Russia, China, Cuba and the Epic Journeys That Changed The World.From the streets of Petrograd during the heady autumn of 1917, to Mao’s stunning victory in October 1949, and Fidel’s triumphant arrival in Havana, in January 1959, the history of the twentieth century was transformed in dramatic and profound ways by the Russian, Chinese, and Cuban revolutions.In Three Revolutions, the stories of these epoch-defining events are told together for the first time. At the heart of each revolution was an epic journey: Lenin’s 1917 return to Russia from exile in Switzerland; Mao’s ‘Long March’ of 1934–35, covering some 6,000 miles across China; and Fidel Castro’s return to Cuba in 1956 following his exile in Mexico. Told in tandem with these are the corresponding journeys of three extraordinary journalists – John Reed, Edgar Snow and Herbert L. Matthews – whose electric testimony from the frontlines of each revolution would make a decisive contribution to how these revolutions were understood in the wider world.Here, in Simon Hall’s masterful retelling, these six remarkable journeys are brought vividly to life. Featuring a stellar cast, extraordinary drama and an epic sweep, Three Revolutions raises fundamental questions about the nature of political power, the limits of idealism and the role of the journalist – questions that remain of utmost urgency today.Our Speakers:Simon Hall is the Professor of Modern History at the University of Leeds. He previously studied at Sheffield and Cambridge, and held a Fox International Fellowship at Yale. His previous books include 1956: The World in Revolt and Ten Days in Harlem: Fidel Castro and the Making of the 1960s.Owen Hatherley is the author of many books on aesthetics and politics, including Landscapes of Communism, Trans-Europe Express and Modern Buildings in Britain. His latest book, The Alienation Effect explores how Central European Émigrés transformed Britain in the 20th century. He is a commissioning editor at Jacobin. | — | ||||||
| 7/29/25 | ![]() FASCIST YOGA with STEWART HOME | We are very, very, very exited to be welcoming the dazzling provocateur, artist and all-round London legend STEWART HOME back to Housmans to talk about his latest book, Fascist Yoga: Grifters, Occultists, White Supremacists, and the New Order In Wellness, a dazzling exposé on the violent politics and occultic fascism that underpins much of the history of contemporary yoga. As ever, Stewart Home shows that nothing is sacred.The practice of yoga promises peace, self-realisation and release, thanks to the power of its ‘mystic’ Indian origins. But what if this is just hype? In Fascist Yoga, Stewart Home sweeps away the half-truths to tell a new origin story of the world’s first modern yogi – a Californian escapologist who added some Hindu fairy dust to gym and circus exercises.Ever since, the world of yoga has been full of grifters, occultists and white supremacists, all out to exploit and recruit via the medium of exercise. From cult leaders to brainwashed followers, TV celebrities and fake gurus, the story of yoga has involved some of the strangest currents of humanity.Today, the COVID pandemic has activated elements within the modern yoga movement to espouse far-right conspiracies, and QAnon’s fascist political programmes mirror some of yoga’s key early proponents.Interviewing Stewart about the book we have the legendary poet Sascha Aurora Akhtar! Sascha was born in Pakistan. Since that was obviously a mistake, she fled as soon as possible to an environment where women could be wacky. What was born was a hydra. Each head a different medium, via which to transmit her wyrd and whimsical witchery. She graduated from Bennington College in 1999. She has written all too many poems, out of which some have managed to become titled collections. Her films include Ana-el-Haqq (2002) and The Sea and Medusa (2006). In 2003 she received a fellowship from the Creative Writing department at UMASS Amherst where she worked with James Tate, Sabina Murray and Peter Gizzi. In 2005 and 2006, she performed in Butoh-based dance pieces at Chisenhale Dance Space in London. She recently was part of a year-long initiative by the International Museum of Women in San Francisco, exhibiting work by women artists from around the globe. Her photographic work was on display at Gallery 27 on Cork Street in September 2007 and an exhibition of her works is upcoming in Spring 2008 at The Commune in Karachi, Pakistan. She spends her time in London and Pakistan and is the co-producer of the successful La Langoustine Est Morte reading series. | — | ||||||
| 7/9/25 | ![]() Friends in Common by Laura C. Forster and Joel White | Housmans are delighted to be welcoming Laura C. Forster and Joel White to the shop for a dicussion of their wonderful, exhilarting book on the radical potential of friendship!Friendship is full of revolutionary potential in the face of a profoundly anti-social capitalist system. Friends in Common explores friendship as a radical practice, capable of upending hierarchies and producing social change.Friendship can transcend social boundaries and political borders. It is vital in building communities and underpinning solidarity. But its transformative potency ensures that it is heavily policed and restrained by the state. Understanding the radical possibilities of friendship can help us rethink our approach to family, work and politics, and show us new routes to resistance and ways to open up spaces of solidarity and escape. The dissonance created by comparing societal expectations around friendship and a lonely reality, especially in the wake of an isolating global pandemic, is deeply alienating. Friends in Common shows that friendship as a political practice is foundational to strengthening revolutionary ideas and projects, and is the antidote to capitalist despair. | — | ||||||
| 6/18/25 | ![]() Every Monument Will Fall: Dan Hicks in conversation with Dr Mai Musié & Onyekachi Wambu | The culture war is over. If you want it to be. It wasn’t even a culture war; it was a war on culture. A sustained attack, Dan Hicks argues, in the form of the weaponisation of civic museums, public art, and even universities – and one that has a deeper history than you might think.We are delighted to welcome Professor Dan Hicks back to Housmans to discuss his incredible new book Every Monument Will Fall: A Story Of Remembering And Forgetting, a beautifully written, polemical but generous work. Tracing the origins of contemporary conflicts over art, heritage, memory, and colonialism, Every Monument Will Fall joins the dots between the building of statues, the founding of academic disciplines like archaeology and anthropology, and the warehousing of stolen art and human skulls in museums – including the Pitt Rivers Museum, where he is a curator.Part history, part biography, part excavation, the story runs from the Yorkshire wolds to the Crimean War, from southern Ireland to the frontline of the American Civil War, from the City of London to the University of Oxford – revealing enduring legacies of militarism, slavery, racism and white supremacy hardwired into the heart of our cultural institutions.Every Monument Will Fall offers an urgent reappraisal of how we think about culture, and how to find hope, remembrance and reconciliation in the fragments of an unfinished violent past. Refusing to choose between pulling down every statue, or living in a past that we can never change, the book makes the case for allowing monuments to fall once in a while, even those that are hard to see as monuments, rebuilding a memory culture that is in step with our times. | — | ||||||
| 6/4/25 | ![]() Book Launch: Disclosure: Unravelling the Spycops Files by Kate Wilson | ‘It was exciting when it started, then comfortable and domestic, and over time we grew apart. If it had been real, our relationship wouldn’t have made a chapter in a memoir. But Mark was a fictional character, contrived by the British state to violate me and undermine the values I held dearest. And the entire time, EN31 was sitting around the corner, writing it all down, watching our lives unfold.’In 2003, British police infiltrated a group of young activists, forming sexual relationships and spying without warrant on hundreds of innocent civilians. Kate Wilson fought back. She took the Met to court, at times battling alone without funding or legal representation, enduring bullying, psychological intrusion and further state surveillance. It took her nearly twenty years to uncover the eerie truth about Britain’ s secret political police.Kate will be joining us at Housmans to tell her story. This is an extremely important event us as Housmans itself has been home to many groups infiltrated and spied on by undercover police officers. | — | ||||||
| 5/27/25 | ![]() The Politics of Motherhood: Alex Bollen & Helen Charman in conversation | Alex Bollen is a Postnatal Practitioner with the National Childbirth Trust and researcher with over 20 years of experiance, in Motherdom: Breaking Free from Bad Science and Good Mother Myths she picks apart the pernicious histories of what she refers to as ‘Good Mother Myths.’ These myths are deployed to censure mothers and blame them for society’s problems. Incensed by the way bad science is used to shame mothers, she decided to set the record straight. With meticulous research and keen insight, Motherdom exposes both the shaky science and unjustified prescriptions about how mothers should ‘naturally’ behave. Competing visions of birth – ‘natural’ versus ‘medical’ – mean women can be criticised whatever happens, raising the odds that birth will be a damaging, even deadly, experience. Mothers are judged and belittled whether they breast- or bottle-feed their babies. Bogus claims about brain development and dodgy attachment theories mean that whatever mothers do, it is never enough. This must stop, she says. We must replace Good Mother myths with a realistic approach to parenting. Alex Bollen proposes ‘motherdom’, a more expansive conception of motherhood, which values and respects the different ways people raise their children. Instead of finding fault with mothers, Motherdom shifts our focus to the relationships and resources children need to flourish.Alex will be in conversation with Helen Charman whose book Mother State, not even out in paperback yet, already has a well deserved reputation as one of the major works of Marxist-Feminist thinking produced this decade. In it, Helen argues that motherhood must be conceived within poltical terms and that we must take a wider historically cohesive view of the figure of the mother, who is both monstered, and legislated againist, by the state, whilst also being held up as sort of ideal of reactionary political femininity. From the blurb: “In Mother State, Helen Charman writes a new history of Britain and Northern Ireland. Beginning with Women’s Liberation and ending with austerity, the book follows mothers’ fights for an alternative future. Alongside the mother figures that loom large in British culture, from Margaret Thatcher to Kat Slater, we meet communities of lesbian squatters, anti-nuclear campaigners, the wives of striking miners and teenage mothers protesting housing cuts: groups who believed that if you want to nourish your children, you have to nourish the world around them too. Here we see a world where motherhood is not a restrictive identity but a state of possibility. ‘Mother’ ceases to be an individual responsibility, and becomes an expansive collective term to organize under, for people of any gender, with or without children of their own. It begins with an understanding: that to mother is a political act.” | — | ||||||
| 5/7/25 | ![]() Squatting London with Samuel Bergum | Squatting in London has a rich and diverse history. Today, squatters live a marginalised, stigmatised and criminalised existence, yet they persist. Behind the glittering façade of shiny new buildings, London is a network of vacant offices, boarded-up shops and dilapidated pubs that host some of the city’s poorest and most determined citizens, exiled and increasingly pushed to the margins.We are very excited to welcome Samuel Burgum to Housmans to talk about his vital new book about a facinating, and much neglected, part of our urban history. Squatting London: The Politics of Property is an account of the real lives of the city’s squatters: their ambitions and struggles. Squatting is a challenge to the logic of property which underpins the city. By finding refuge, staying put, creating spaces and participating in counter-cultures, squats are political acts. They sit in direct opposition to the speculation, gentrification and regeneration that controls London today.From wasted office blocks transformed into a life-saving homeless shelter, to temporary art exhibitions and raves; from an empty doctor’s surgery, to a library closed by cuts; from mutual aid networks set up during the pandemic, to restaurants, shops, offices and pubs – Squatting London is an alternative, underground and rebellious ethnographic account of a city you thought you already knew.Samuel Burgum is an urban sociologist, currently conducting a Leverhulme-sponsored ethnographic project on squatting in the context of the UK’s housing crisis. He is the author of Occupying London: Post-Crash Resistance and the Limits of Possibility. He has written for various journals, including Antipode, The Sociological Review and Journal for Cultural Research. | — | ||||||
| 4/2/25 | ![]() The Psychic Lives of Statues with Rahul Rao | From Cape Town to Bristol and Richmond, statues have become sites of resistance and contestation of our imperial past and postcolonial present.We are very excited to be launching The Psychic Lives of Statues by Rahul Rao which offers an insightful exploration of these global controversies, demonstrating that beneath their surface lie deeper struggles over race, caste, and the politics of decolonisation.Rao takes readers on a journey through South Africa, England, the US, Ghana, India, Australia, and Scotland, revealing how statue controversies have dramatically rearranged the canon of anticolonial political thought. By examining these debates through a personal and literary lens, Rao addresses the multifaceted issues of justice, cultural memory, and belonging. The Psychic Lives of Statues examines both the toppling of colonial statues and the raising of postcolonial ones, demonstrating that the statue form as a medium of representation and a bid for immortality is by no means obsolete. Engaging with artists, scholars, and activists, Rao provides fresh perspectives on how societies grapple with and reinterpret the past and present through iconography.Rahul Rao is a Reader in International Political Thought in the School of International Relations at the University of St Andrews, and Professorial Research Associate at SOAS University of London. He is the author of two books – Third World Protest: Between Home and the World (2010) and Out of Time: The Queer Politics of Postcoloniality (2020), both published by Oxford University Press. He is a member of the Radical Philosophy editorial collective. | — | ||||||
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