In this column Ana Deumert looks at the meaning and practice of shutdown. Originally used in the context of capitalist expansion and workforce disciplining, it has been adopted as a grassroots tool of rebellion against the status quo.
On 30 August 2017 the Dutch VSB Fund announced to stop financing the VSB Poetry Prize after this year’s (the 24th) edition. Poetry or ‘the volume of an individual’ is considered to not fit into the new policy. Odile Heynders does not agree.
Kevin Doyle sees a vast consolidation and compression of human experience into more and more narrow and predictable terms. The unique language and vocabulary that innovative forms of the arts provide us can be an antidote, according to him.
Nobel laureate and dissident writer Liu Xiaobo is released from prison. Xiaobo dedicated the Nobel prize to ‘the martyrs of Tiananmen square’. His poetry expresses his courage and conviction. says Odile Heynders
A social movement in Brazil accuses teachers of public institutions of imposing their political beliefs on students, and defends that schools should be ideologically neutral environments. However, is neutrality in education possible?
Historical facts described by a literary author, and then presented in a television programme in which documentary material and the performance of an actor are intertwined: this is how history and WWII is kept alive, Odile Heynders argues.
