Arcadia England

Though orientation is not yet over, many of you have settled in to your programmes – with us at Arcadia, in London, or further afield – having absorbed the newness of your surroundings, and the deluge of information that we have shared.

Now that you are falling into the routines and practices of the coming semester, we feel this is the best time for us to address our Life of the Mind theme: Protest.

The Life of the Mind series is an overarching prompt for engagement and reflection, a theme to connect all of our programs around the world. Protest is a theme that is always relevant, and always prevalent, but perhaps more so in recent years – particularly as part of students consciousness.

When the theme was first announced, the below was the world’s contemporary experience of protest:

With the Arab Spring, England Riots, Occupy Movement, Greek Debt Crisis, Ferguson Riots, and Baltimore Uprising (to name a select few) all within our students' high school and college years, ongoing power struggles have the potential to shape students' political consciousness. What frame can each local context provide? What part do students' local choices play on a global scale. How do people around the world contest power and authority in local, regional, and global contexts?

Since then, sadly, there have been many more causes to protest – but it is heartwarming, in its own way, that people are ready and willing to speak out against inequality and austerity.

So how have we, in the London Centre, embraced this topic?

The Protest Board

If you are a regular in our centre, then you cannot miss our protest board – but even those of you that have stopped by for one or two days likely caught sight of it.

The space was created as an outlet for students, meant to inspire thoughtful questioning of the things that bring us together in protest. When students witness protest, or get involved in protest themselves, they bring along new additions for the board. A quick glance is enough to get a sense of the various issues in Britain that seem to inspire the most protest. Often, this prompts great discussions as to the different issues that are deemed most important in the UK and the US.

Events

Hopefully you enjoyed Billy Elliot, the Musical (or are going to enjoy it, if you are yet to arrive), and you might also have noticed that it is part of the Life of the Mind theme. We do our best to incorporate our events programme into the theme, and Billy Elliot is the perfect example. The UK has a rich history of protest, and the Miner’s Strike of 1984 was a particularly bitter dispute that can still inspire high emotions today.

Last semester, we also enjoyed a Talk of the Town event that dug into the idea of Street Art as Protest. This event was so successful that the artist, Nathan Bowen, has tagged one of our walls at the London Centre. Have you popped outside to see it yet? Whether or not you have, a few words to help understand the piece:

Nathan Bowen is London’s most recognisable and perhaps most prolific street artist of the last few years. His demon soldiers and builders can be found around the East End of London and, more recently, in the city centre. Nathan recently painted a whole mural of figures on Tottenham Court Road brandishing the French flag: it is a memorial to the people who died in Paris on 13th November. Each street artist has their own style whether it is the plastic mushrooms of Christiaan Nagel up on the rooftops of Shoreditch or Stik’s lonely figures which haunt the East End and the Southbank, and Nathan’s style is just as distinctive, eccentric even. His demons and soldiers are his tropes, his signature; he sees them as engaged in the act of re-invention. Referring to his work as ‘After Lives’ his demons refashion derelict buildings and construction sites to make a public gallery of the streets. While art galleries may suggest bourgeois audiences, the space of the streets is democratic, where every passerby can become a spectator or even an art critic. His soldiers take art to the people.

Here, in the London Centre, we are constantly on the lookout for new ways to incorporate Protest into our events and programming. Perhaps there are new ways that you can think of? Perhaps Protest is the theme for your CLC? Perhaps you would like to write something for this very blog, examining your own experience of Protest?

Protest inspires fresh opinions and freedom of thought, something which we encourage in all of you. So if you have anything to share, we would love to hear about it.