videos & podcasts

A selection of panel discussions, webinars, lectures, and interviews, mostly about policing and political philosophy

… interwoven with some more artsy content exploring these themes by other means.

edinburgh radical book fair

‘Abolition as Liberation. Panel discussion and public Q&A chaired by Leah Cowan, author of Border Nation. With Tanzil Chowdhury and members of Cradle Collective and Campaign Against Prison Expansion.

left book club webinar / launch

Celebrating the reprinting of Abolishing the Police (Dog Section Press, 2021) by Left Book Club.

With contributors Becka Hudson, Arianne Shahvisi, and Tanzil Chowdhury.

abolishing the police

It was a pleasure to discuss music, disability, and policing on Things Musicians Don’t Talk About, an award-winning classical music podcast that campaigns for awareness of mental illness and discrimination within the arts.

Full episode details here. Available on Spotify and other streaming services.

Things Musicians Don't Talk About podcast promo image for episode 63 with picture of Koshka.

intro to Emma Goldman lecture

‘The most dangerous woman in America’

Find recordings of my super-accessible guest lecture for Foundation Year students at UoN (with student contributions removed for privacy) here:

Part I: Why We Need Emma; What Anarchism Meant to Emma; Love vs. Marriage; Comradely Criticisms

Part 2: History Makes Emma; Emma Makes History; ACTIVITY: What Would Emma Goldman Do?

Old newspaper clipping, text reads: Emma is arrested. The High Priestess of Anarchy Taken into Custody in Chicago.

Stolen goods live

Such a dream to support living legends Petrol Girls. Turns out Abolishing the Police inspired the lyrics on their latest album!

decay

And here we are at the regular open mic night we ran for a couple of years at our local, the Robin Hood. Lyrics to this song are published in Kruk Book - see CREATIVE PROJECTs.

Excess force - goldsmiths cCA

A conversation about the use of ‘excess force’ by private security, police, and others, chaired by sociologist JENNIFER FLEETWOOD. Thanks to our wonderful audience for sharing your experiences and ideas!

Event related to artist PIVI TAKALA’s exhibition, On Discomfort, at Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art. Find out more about the event here.

what is policing?

I’m interviewed by Mark Jago - a fellow philosopher at the University of Nottingham - for his Attic Philosophy channel.

Do police keep us safe?

Part 2 of 3. Check out the full mini-series and more from Attic Philosophy here.

join the party

The microbes go mad now, supposing they’re free / stumbling backwards, the cool and the sweet.

The I and the We, the You and the They / the work and the profit at the end of the day.

We won’t be long

Pack chaos in my suitcase, I turn to the wind

ticking off the big three

Performed at Sophie Carapetian’s Refuse to Collaborate exhibition launch at the Stadtgalerie, Bern.

we’ll raise the dead

THEY ARE a defunct assembly of ghouls, our superiors, cream-sucking fools / their cluelessness systems of staples, potatoes, detectives and diagrams / they think the dead should just be more polite.

drunken boat

The first song we ever wrote, an abolitionist anthem of sorts, based on a poem by Arthur Rimbaud, queer ASBO kid of the Paris Commune.

Find it on Spotify, Bandcamp, etc by following the links in CREATIVE PROJECTS.

Promo image for Webinar with pictures of Koshka, Nicole D Porter (Director of Advocacy & sentencing project), and Ife Thompson (host).

black learning achievement mental health (Blam UK) webinar

29 September 2020. It was an honour to be part of this conversation on the history of Black uprisings in the US and UK with Ife Thompson and Nicole D. Porter. Watch the full webinar on YouTube.

Still from Webinar
Slide showing picture and contrasting quotes about the politics of 'crime' from Juliet Hooker, Professor of Political Science at Brown University, and David Cameron, Former British Prime Minister.

novara podcast: policing by consent?

Novara Media, 30 November 2018. I’m interviewed by Oonagh Ryder and Sam Swann about policing, accountability, and carceral feminism. This was several years before I won an apology and compensation from the Met, when their internal investigations had just (surprise, surprise) cleared their officers of any wrongdoing.

‘promised land’

utopia, propaganda, collective joy

E1 of //++pOLITICAL nOISE++// - a lockdown project with the brilliant Dr Hannah Robbins, Associate Professor in Popular Music at the University of Nottingham.

Concept: we pick tracks on a theme and talk about what they mean.

‘bitch better have my money’

power, gender, capitalism

In E2 of //++pOLITICAL nOISE++// we take on Megan Thee Stallion, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and more.

free speech, radical perspectives

Back in 2016 I took part in this panel discussion on ‘Radical Perspectives on Free Speech’ at the University of Essex with Lorna Finlayson, Wail Qasim, and Rosie Worsdale.

bit of brahms

Now for something quite different, here’s a recording from a Lieder (art-song) recital I gave at the Royal College of Music with the wonderful mezzo-soprano Melisandre Froidure-Lavoine.

at midnight

This song is about being awake, angsty, and terribly alone in the middle of the night, overwhelmed by the pain and struggle of how messed up the world is - then the release of surrendering to a higher power.

Solo piano - Rautavaara study

I really enjoyed playing this study (etude) by the Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara. It’s called ‘Terssit’, meaning ‘Thirds’, and comes from a set where each study is based on a different interval.

bit more brahms

This Capriccio (Italian for lively!) was also one of my favourite pieces, and is included on my 2015 Album Death and the People. To me, it sounds like a popular uprising with a climactic but ambiguous ending.

For more, check out CREATIVE PROJECTS.