ISSUE 4: STRUGGLE
We have chosen the theme of “Struggle” for this issue, fit for Winter and the hard times that people go through during this season. Struggle is a prominent historical theme, one that has a broad application and definition. It can include resistance, striving to achieve a goal through difficult circumstances or even the attempt to handle a situation that causes distress. Read this issue and explore themes such as identity, health and even witchcraft!
We hope you enjoy.
Learn more about the zine here
OUR Voices
Struggle comes easy to those who have everything to fight for.
By Natália Pačesová
When you are born in a country like Slovakia, from the moment you become conscious, everything around you is telling you to leave. To stay is a personal flaw, a failure of one´s potential. In a sense, you get trained to become an immigrant. When Western people talk about learning different languages at school, at worst a nuisance, at best a hobby, you cannot believe that to them, that is all it is.
UCL: disruptive thinking since 1826. ‘Disruptive’ to whom?
By Naseerah Patel
‘UCL: disruptive thinking since 1826’ is no doubt a bold statement. It is the picture-perfect university experience for me; where challenging the status quo in academia is encouraged, and intellectuals who are not traditionally represented in their discipline can thrive. For myself, UCL embodied a university that was exceptional from other spaces in academia, where no matter where you are from or who you are, you would succeed just like your peers.
Fireside Chats: Discussions with UCL Academics
An opportunity to get to know more about your lecturers’ work and how it relates to the concept of ‘Struggle’.
Fireside Chat with Dr Jack Saunders
What does ‘Struggle’ mean to you?
Personally, it is an interesting question. I have been a member of a trade union my whole life, since I started work, and I’ve always been very aware of the asymmetries of power that exist in society. I’ve been quite politically active most of my adult life, so, I was involved in anti-war protests at the beginning of the 2000’s.
Fireside Chat with Dr Jagjeet Lally
What does ‘Struggle’ mean to you?
It’s funny you should ask me that, because right now I’m struggling just to move around after being knocked off my bike at the weekend. (Poor me! Poor me!)
I’m also struggling to get my unanswered emails back down to a manageable number. And I’m struggling with writer’s block in the midst of a book that I’m really excited to be writing – perhaps a little too excited, and maybe that’s creating a fear of disappointing my own expectations that’s fuelling the fire of my writer’s block.
Fireside Chat with Dr Mitchell Robertson
What does ‘Struggle’ mean to you?
What I would like to reinforce for my students and my own sense is the idea of history being about people, about people doing things at particular times and at particular places. And so much of that is indeed about the topic of struggle, about overcoming global injustices and inequalities, about having a dream that we can have a different and a better world.
Fireside Chat with Dr Patrick Lantschner
‘What does ‘Struggle’ mean to you?’
I did my PhD on political conflict in medieval cities and that is why I am interested in the subject of struggle. In Western Eurasia, the Middle Ages see the greatest push of urbanisation between antiquity and industrialisation in the modern world. Cities doubled, trebled or sometimes quadrupled in size and this often led to a lot of social and political conflict.
Fireside Chat with Dr Lily Chang
‘What does ‘Struggle’ mean to you?’
I think struggle is about context. It’s about time and place. Struggle is individualised, different and unique to each person, but can also occur at a much broader level — there can also be shared and collective struggles. I suppose my understanding of struggle is that there is no struggle that is too vague or too small, nor is there a struggle that is any less or more important. Struggles are a way to grow as much as ways of being introspective with oneself.
Fireside Chat with Dr Anna Maguire
‘What does ‘Struggle’ mean to you?’
That’s a really interesting question, and I guess there’s a couple of ways of answering it. There’s struggle through my historical research work and then struggle for me personally. I’m really interested in the choice of the word ‘struggle’, it’s not something that I necessarily employ in my own work, although I do work a lot on the histories of struggles. I tend to use terms more like ‘solidarities’ and ‘resistances’ than struggle. I guess for me struggle is the work and behaviour and thinking of the historical actors whose lives I research.
Academic History
Sewing Solidarity: Arpilleras and the Politicization of their Makers in Pinochet’s Chile
By Lucie Dumont
The 1973 coup in Chile is typically seen as a watershed moment in human rights activism. The coup saw the overthrow of President Salvador Allende’s democratically elected left-wing administration. Spearheaded by military officer Augusto Pinochet, the regime that ensued was conservative and violent, with mainly male leftists of any association being targeted and the lower classes being adversely impacted by staunch free market policies.
The impact of Western and Oriental concepts public health on the Yemenite Affair and the struggle for justice
By Lola Davies
The establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 was an event punctuated not only by Jewish ecstasy and pride, but also by turmoil and transnational conflict. The narrative that surrounds its establishment is often confined to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, with little room left for others who suffered from the chaos and struggle that ensued.
The Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) and the resulting struggle of Chinese domestic society
By Fynn Haagen
The Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) affected Chinese society in unprecedented ways as its brutality transformed up to 95 million people, from varying regional and social backgrounds, into refugees. By focusing on the war’s impact on society through Chongqing’s refugee population, I will demonstrate that in the context of institutional instability and rising economic hardship, the Nationalist Government, themselves refugees, sought to legitimise their continued authority by portraying refugeehood as introducing the Xiajiang (east-coast’s) “modernity” to a “primitive” rural Chongqing.
Diverging Viewpoints: Essence Magazine and the female African-American dispute on abortion and contraception in the 1970s
By Ava Tehrani
Essence magazine provides a lens for the socio-political concerns of African-American women,
especially during its initial publishing in the seventies. The specific concerns of abortion and
contraception can encapsulate concerns including African-American masculinity and Black
genocide, as well as the integration of Black individuals into wide-scale public institutions.
“Western perceptions of the Middle East have been shaped by a genuine desire to understand Middle Eastern societies”
By Natália Pačesová
Edward Said´s Orientalism has denounced the Western attempts to get closer to the Middle
East as ranging from thinly-veiled antagonism to downright inappropriate exoticization. But
have there been instances where the West had a genuine desire to understand the societies of
the Middle East? Focusing on the history of Egypt, principally Napoleon´s invasion of Egypt
in 1798 and its later consequences, arguably however genuine the Westerners´ intentions may have seemed, in reality, this only served one purpose – getting to know these societies in order to better exploit them.
Bare Necessities: Rudyard Kipling and his anti-Indian propaganda
By Mishall Bhathena
In 1907, Rudyard Kipling was awarded the Noble Prize for his “power of observation, originality of imagination, virility of ideas, and remarkable talent for narration.” His work, ‘The Eyes of Asia’, which was published over a decade later, is a testament to this statement. But it wasn’t meant to be ‘imaginative’.
Public History
Game of Crones: an interactive exploration of gender and region in the Witchcraft trials
By Karina Nanchahal
The Game of Crones is an interactive online game, structured as a witchcraft trial, which mirrors the historical proceedings of fifteenth century western European witchcraft trials.
The game is set in a court room, where you will be acting as a lawyer – answering questions to either prosecute or defend the accused witch. You must prosecute or defend the witch depending on the character you choose.
Struggling for Words at Kew Palace: Shifting interpretations and Public Perceptions of George III’s Mental Health
By Edie Bing
I spent a lot of 2023 thinking and talking about George III and his time at Kew Palace. No, this wasn’t due to an obsession with the young, shirtless, George that Netflix introduced everyone to last summer, but because of the great deal of time I spent with him while working at Kew Palace. This was one of his many homes, and the site of his confinement during illness later in life – I became very used to hearing about and discussing his ‘madness’ in my interactions with the public. Were George alive today, he would probably be diagnosed with a form of mental illness.
About 35 miles behind you’: how class and casualties were linked in the First World War, but not in the way we expect
By Anastasia Robin
It has been over 30 years since the TV series Blackadder Goes Forth brought ‘Chateau Generals’ to the small screen. ‘If you should falter, remember Captain Darling and I are behind you,’ Stephen Fry as the incompetent and aristocratic General Melchett would say, for Rowan Atkinson’s Captain Blackadder to clarify, ‘about 35 miles behind you.’
We hope you enjoyed our second Winter Issue: Struggle. See below for some of our older editions!
The Lapis 