want to raise some consciousness together?
I enjoy facilitating workshops and discussion events with groups beyond the university, including sixth-form college and school groups as well as self-organised political education and community projects.
Please feel free to get in touch if your group might be interested in hosting a workshop or collaborating on an event. You can also make use of the resources below to create your own sessions.
They are designed for a variety of audiences, from Foundation Year and first year uni students to postgraduate researchers and the general public - so I hope there’s something for everyone!
FREE TEACHING RESOURCES
You are welcome to use these materials / adapt them to your own context. They include syllabuses, slides, workshop activities, and more. Click on titles to access. Please credit where appropriate.
Module
Gender, Justice & Society (Year 1 of Philosophy BA, University of Nottingham)
Year
2023-4
Focus Texts
MICHEL FOUCAULT, 'Panopticism' in Discipline and Punish: The Birth Of The Prison (1975).
JOHN LOCKE, Chapters 1-5 of Second Treatise Of Government (c. 1680-82) & 'Essay on the Poor Law' (1697).
EMMA GOLDMAN, 'Patriotism: A Menace to Liberty' (1917) & What I Believe' (1908).
ANGELA DAVIS, 'Political Prisoners, Prisons, and Black Liberation' (1971)’.
Topics
What is political philosophy?
Power
Liberty and/or Property
What is the state?
‘This is what democracy looks like!’.
Real Politics Workshops
Students in the streets since 1968
Resisting compulsory hetero-monogamy
Placards, pamphlets, poems, philosophy essays: the politics of style
DIY counter-surveillance
And more
With exciting guest speakers including…
Leanne Yau (@polyphiliablog), Hope Chilokoa-Mullen (Lewisham Refugees and Migrants Network), Chris Rossdale (Campaign Against Arms Trade), Connor Woodman (Free West Papua Campaign)
GJS Playlist: a selection of gender, justice & society themed bangers to get you in the mood for thinking about political philosophy
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GJS Playlist: a selection of gender, justice & society themed bangers to get you in the mood for thinking about political philosophy 〰️
Sample essay Qs and tips on essay writing
‘Kill the cop in your head.’ What does this slogan mean? Should we follow its advice?
Explain the concept of patriarchal ideology, drawing on at least one example from a Movie Mondays film. How helpful is this concept for understanding gender oppression?
What is a ‘disciplinary society’, according to Foucault? Do we live in a disciplinary society?
Explain one form of injustice this module has made you (more) aware of. What, if anything, will you do to resist this form of injustice? Try to persuade your reader to support your chosen course of action.
Short series of Essay Writing Advices Vids available on YouTube.
Abolishing the police
These FREE resources accompany my edited collection Abolishing the Police (Dog Section Press, 2021).
They are all available via Abolitionist Futures.
Glossary
Straightforward explanations of all potentially unfamiliar terms contained in Abolishing the Police, from ableism to white supremacy, via precarity, neo-liberalism, structural violence and more.
A useful resource for all political education projects.
Audio versions of the text
Listen to all the book’s chapters read out by contributors.
Study guide
Questions designed to kick off discussions about the book and its themes, pitched at a variety of levels so you can pick and choose whichever ones work for your context.
Includes general Qs and more in-depth Qs on each chapter.
A useful resource for anyone who wants to chat about the book with friends, organise a reading group, or use the book as a teaching resource. Qs can also work as prompts for reflection / note taking if you are reading alone.
Bibliography with links to free versions of texts
Find further reading on the book’s themes by browsing this list of sources. Links are included whenever a text or resource is freely available online.
masters level course
You are welcome to use these materials / adapt them to your own context. Please credit where appropriate.
Module
Social & Political Philosophy (MA, University of Nottingham)
Year
2023-4
Focus Texts
Lorna Finlayson, The Political Is Political: Conformity and the Illusion of Dissent in Contemporary Political Philosophy (2015)
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961)
Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2021)
Walter Benjamin, 'Critique of Violence' (1921).
Helpful docs
How to formulate a research question in philosophy
ACTIVITY: Research question speed dating
Writing an abstract
Presentation tips
EXPLAINER: Responsive reading list
Film Club recommends
Sound of Metal (2020)
Concerning Violence: Nine Scenes from the Anti-Imperialistic Self-Defense (2014)
Shortbus (2006)
Accidental Death of an Anarchist (1983)
The Act of Killing (2012)
And more…
guest lectures
You are welcome to use these materials / adapt them to your own context. Please credit where appropriate.
Guest lecture topic
Emma Goldman: ‘The most dangerous woman in America’
Module
Important Thinkers Through History (Foundation Year Liberal Arts, University of Nottingham)
Year
2022-23
Top recommended readings
Emma Goldman, 1910. ‘Marriage and Love’ & ‘Patriotism: A Menace to Liberty’ in Anarchism and Other Essays.
Chris Rossdale, 2014. 'Dancing Ourselves to Death: The Subject of Emma Goldman's Nietzschean Anarchism'. Globalizations, 12:1, 116-133.
Guest lecture topic
Module
Philosophy and the Contemporary World (1st Year Philosophy BA, University of Nottingham)
Year
2023-24
Top recommended readings
Nadine El-Enany, 2014. "Innocence charged with guilt": The Criminalisation of Protest from Peterloo to Millbank. In D Pritchard and F Pakes (eds.), Riot, Unrest and Protest on the Global Stage. London: Palgrave.
Connor Woodman, 2018. Spycops in Context: Counter-subversion, deep dissent and the logic of political policing.
phd researcher training
You are welcome to use these materials / adapt them to your own context. Click on workshop title to access. Please credit where appropriate.
About the session
Half-day research skills training session for postgraduate researchers from the Ukraine Catholic University, Lviv, and the University of Nottingham.
Topics & key questions
What is war?
When does organised political violence become visible as war?
How do concepts like ‘militarism’ and ‘violence work’ help us understand (and intervene in) war and war-like phenomena?
Ideological justifications for war
How are discourses legitimising war-like violence gendered and racialised?
How can the concept of ‘analytical atomism’ help us criticise justifications of war and torture?
More topics & key questions
Causes and consequences of war
In what ways does war depend on, and contribute to, the dehumanising of those affected (as targets of, or participants in, violence)?
How are war and militarism implicated in broader patterns of social harm, such as gendered and sexual violence, economic inequalities, and repression of LGBTQIA+ communities?
Resistance and/or resilience
Is there a tension between the value of resilience and more transformative visions of social justice?
What does resistance to war and racial militarism look like?
Suggested pre-reads
Chris Rossdale & Nivi Manchanda. 2021. ‘Resisting Racial Militarism: War, Policing and the Black Panther Party’. Security Dialogue 52 (6): 473–92. 1910.
Alison Howell. 2018. ‘Forget “Militarization”: Race, Disability and the “Martial Politics” of the Police and of the University’. International Feminist Journal of Politics, April, 1–20.
