Global Dispatches

In the next essay in our Queen Mary Wasafiri Global Dispatches series, author Irenosen Okojie writes about the initiative that Africans are showing as they fight for community health and survival during the climate crisis. With activists of colour often overlooked in mainstream media, Okojie links her longing for home with an admiration and fierce pride at the innovation of African artists and entrepreneurs working for a better future. Read more Global Dispatches – including Swati Arora on protest, Robbie Arnott on climate, and Margarita García Robayo on Covid-19 and racism – here.

In the latest of Wasafiri's Global Dispatches series, Dr Swati Arora reflects on CA Davids's essay, answering with a piece that examines India's growing Hindu supremacy, the communal language of protest, and how the state's rhetoric around the Covid-19 pandemic can shore up systems of oppression. 

In the latest of Wasafiri’s Global Dispatches series, author and academic Barbara Taylor responds to Katherine Agyemaa Agard’s work ‘strangers, dreaming’.

In the latest instalment of the Queen Mary and Wasafiri essay series, Global Dispatches, novelist Katherine Agyemaa Agard writes on dreams, solitude, and touch – both physical and imagined. As lockdowns and safety protocols continue to change the fabric of how we interact with each other – perhaps forever – Katherine examines proximity and distance, and the ways in which the two blur and intersect. 

In the next essay in our Queen Mary Wasafiri Global Dispatches series, novelist CA Davids – writing from Cape Town – tracks the slow, surreal rhythm of days spent indoors watching the world outside unravel. As small violences play out in the news, ‘justice, and the application of justice, does not feel fixed, but shifting.’ A year on, as South Africa enters another fourteen-day lockdown and the same injustices repeat themselves on-screen, Davids brings the hazy patterns of pandemic time, and of injustice, into sharp focus.

Dr James Bradley – an Environmental Scientist at Queen Mary, University of London – reflects on the climate crisis and responds to Robbie Arnott's 'Warmer Waters', published as part of the Queen Mary Wasafiri Global Dispatches initiative, an essay series of exchanges and conversations between creative writers and academics.

In this piece for Global Dispatches, writer Robbie Arnott looks at the continued problem of emissions even during COVID-19 lockdowns.

Penny Green – Professor of Law and Globalisation, Head of the School of Law, Queen Mary, University of London – reflects on borders, racism and Myanmar's genocide and responds to Margarita García Robayo's 'From This Place on the Border', published as part of the Queen Mary Wasafiri Global Dispatches initiative, an essay series of exchanges and conversations between creative writers and academics. 

In this piece – translated by Carolina Orloff – Margarita García Robayo explores conversations around colourism within a family context. This piece is part of our Global Dispatches series.

Kiera Vaclavik – Professor of Children's Literature and Childhood Culture at Queen Mary, University of London – reflects on child-centred research during and post-pandemic and responds to Avni Doshi's 'Unfamiliar Creatures', published as part of the Queen Mary Wasafiri Global Dispatches initiative, an essay series of exchanges and conversations between creative writers and academics.

Read Avni Doshi's piece for Global Dispatches, on Covid-19 and childcare.

This year, we’ve joined hands with Queen Mary, University of London Arts & Culture to work together on the ‘Global Dispatches’ initiative: an essay series of exchanges and conversations between creative writers and academics.