Critical Contemporary Culture (CCC) is a student-led online journal that believes in reflection and engaged cultural practice. CCC is a conversational space, a democratising porthole, attempting to work against the restrictions of the market towards innovation, creativity and intellectual freedom. CCC brings together work in the humanities, social sciences, arts and cultural practice. It works towards providing an autonomous space...

Artificial Grass and Schools: A Synthetic Novelty? Brief Summary This paper focuses on the larger transformation of green space, in particular the use of artificial grass in Birmingham’s inner-city primary schools. The paper uses a combination of observation and informal interviews to explore the artificial grasses’ impact along with its novelty value in a school setting. The article draws on...

Novelty and the politicization of the creative field: Creative labour and the ‘open work’   Panos Kompatsiaris, Ph.D. candidate in Visual Culture University of Edinburgh Abstract This article examines the ways that novelty can operate as an emancipatory thrust within the creative field today. ­­­­For this purpose, it first discusses how novelty is understood by creative economy rhetoric and demonstrates...

My Words “My Words” is a video engagement with mobility, metadata and identity. These are the recorded lists of people’s personal dictionaries on their mobile phones. In contrast to the manufacturer’s default dictionary, these words were saved into the phone when the individuals were texting. They were saved, often unconsciously, mid-process by the users because these were words not included...

SISTERS HOPE – Protected By The Fiction Between Art and Pedagogy   By Gry Worre Hallberg, MA in Theatre and Performance Studies, University of Copenhagen and co-founder of Fiction Pimps & Anna Lawaetz, PhD fellow, Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen     Abstract: In this article we will introduce the fictional and art-pedagogical universe of Sisters...

This is what radical democracy looks like! Reclaiming urban space in Vienna Introduction On the first of May 2009 more than 2000 people gathered together at the “Marcus Omofuma”-Memorial stone in the centre of Vienna for a protest march in memory of the Nigerian citizen Marcus Omofuma, who had suffocated during his deportation in May 1999 because the police tied...

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Ruth Sanz Sabido – De Montfort University, Leicester, UK Khan, A. (2010) The Long Struggle: The Muslim World’s Western Problem. Zero Books: Winchester. The Long Struggle aims to provide an account of some of the historical reasons that explain the tensions between the West and the Muslim world today, tracing the roots of the conflict by taking the reader back...

Basia Lewandowska-Cummings – Goldsmiths College, University of London RETROSPECTIVE FORWARD; Foreword to Guns for Banta at Gasworks Gallery, Feb-April 2011, Matthieu Kleyebe Abbonenc As a ‘retrospective foreword to an absent film’, Matthieu Kleyebe Abbonenc’s installation at Gasworks Gallery has a playful temporality, which tactically unravels the complex political constellations around Sarah Maldoror’s work, a militant filmmaker famous for Sambizanga (1972),...

Burcu Baykurt New York University The Meaning of David Cameron, by Richard Seymour (Zero Books, May 2010) In his recent book, Richard Seymour, an activist blogger who has been running Lenin’s Tomb since 2003, provides a short but well thought and compelling inquiry into the meaning of David Cameron. The title can immediately remind bookworms of Alain Badiou’s similar book,...

Shoshone Odess Johnson – Goldsmiths College, University of London Kode9 and The Spaceape- Black Sun (Hyperdub 2011) It takes a special kind of intellect in order to make white people dance. It’s never been an easy task. Kode9 is one of the especially rare breed of musicians who is a so-called white person and can still make white people dance....