InTuition

Daniel Priestley- Writer and Content Creator Watch this creative discussion on 'Youtube, Monopolies & The Rule of Law' by Daniel Priestley. 

Carys Furnell- Guest Writer The outbreak of COVID-19 has governed every-day life since its media-debut in December 2019, and declaration as a pandemic by the World Health Organisation on the 11th March 2020.  As a ‘zoonotic’ disease, the coronavirus strain was able to pass from a vertebrate animal to humans. It still remains unconfirmed just how the virus successfully made the jump, but fingers are being pointed at the humble pangolin.  Currently, the scientific community speculate that although the virus originated in horseshoe bats, it was only able to infect human populations using the pangolin as an intermediate host – commonly found in the wet markets of Wuhan, China, where the outbreak originated. These wet markets uphold regional Asian culture and lifestyles, being akin to a Westerner popping to their local farm-shop. However, global attention has shifted towards them, with a light shining on wet markets as a monster emerging from the shadows of global conservation and ...

Kayle Becker- Guest Writer If you have been paying any attention to news headlines recently, then you must be aware of how many governments all over the world are reacting, in economic and financial terms, to the devastating coronavirus pandemic. One must not look far to encounter articles titled, “Coronavirus: Bank pumps ￡100bn into UK economy to aid recovery”, “Central Banks Pump More Cash Into Economy to Fight Recession”, or “With $2.3 Trillion Injection, Fed’s Plan Far Exceeds Its 2008 Rescue” along with a slew of many similar headings. Reading headlines like this might be confusing; you must wonder ‘how is the government able to just print money?’ or ‘what are the implications of printing mass amounts of money?’. It may help to understand how the monetary system has changed over the last 100 years in order to grasp how governments are able to print money and how citizens are impacted.   The Gold Standard The Gold Standard is a monetary system which is used to protect the worth...

Niamh Brook - Writer and Content Creator Watch our BA Film and Television student Niamh Brook discuss the works of director Ava DuVernay against the background of the Black Lives Matter movement and how film can be an important tool to broaden perspectives.

Niamh Dann- Guest Writer Watching the popular television series RuPaul’s Drag Race, one cannot help but find themselves within an increasingly accepting society of queer culture and theatrical queer performance. To anyone who finds themselves outside of the queer community and its customs, RuPaul’s Drag Race might seem bizarre and very American. However, drag has been a big part of mainstream culture for a long time and isn’t merely queer. Before recently, drag has commonly been comedic. With the British pantomime dame, movies such as Some Like it Hot (1959), Mrs Doubtfire (1993) and The Birdcage (1996), drag has been mainstream for a long time. Its professional identity, however, is relatively new. With the current popularism of RuPaul’s drag race, Instagram and YouTube drag queens and TV shows such as Pose (2018), the community of drag has become a fundamental aspect of popular culture. To a modern audience, drag is a celebration of queerness, but it is also a theatrical protest agai...

Jonathon Griffiths- Guest Writer Scientific language is the poor misunderstood soul listening to pop punk in its room and writing in a diary all the while mummy Scientific Method argues with dad Mathematics downstairs. That was an odd way of saying scientific language is often misused in everyday life and within the media, not always intentionally and not always to detrimental effect. I thought it’d be fun for us to point and laugh at a couple of examples of the misuse of scientific language and learn the valuable lesson of asking ‘does this person have any idea what they are on about?’ Dan Aykroyd (one of the ghostbuster blokes) has a product called Crystal Skull Vodka which has already been criticised by YouTube personality “JonTron”, while many criticisms are brought up I wanted to focus specifically on Dan and his use of scientific language. I like to call this use of it ‘spooky chemistry’: the purposeful use of chemical names and their applications to be scary. I’ll be talking abo...

Lani Bond- Writer  Empathising with others has been strongly linked to prosocial attitudes and increasing understanding between diverse groups. The most recent successful continuation of the Black Lives Matter movement, sparking from the viral news of American policemen’s brutal murder of George Floyd, has revealed divided discourse and mixed reactions across the world. This discussion is interested in addressing the psychology of empathy in understanding racial biases – whether you’ve been burying your head in the sand, consistently sharing resources or actively developing yourself as an anti-racist, the ‘Empathy Gap’ suggests we can all do better to acknowledge our biases.  “I understand that I will never understand. However, I stand.” This quote has been re-posted around social media, showing solidarity and acknowledgement by white people and other POC of the complexity of black peoples’ experiences. Displaying solidarity with the message is possibly only the first step in ...

KF- Writer & Editor  Back in February, in a move that went astonishingly unnoticed by the international community, the South African government proposed an amendment to the Meat Safety Act which would see the current list of 35 species of domestic and wild species acceptable for commercial slaughter expand to include over 90 species. These would cover some critically endangered species such “rhinos, hippos, giraffes and elephants” and also (the puzzlingly vague statement) “all other species of animals not mentioned above, including birds, fish and reptiles that may be slaughtered as food for human and animal consumption”. This would allow those critically endangered species to be slaughtered and sold for commercial consumption in the same way that cattle can be raised for food.   Putting critically endangered species on the menu is at first glance indefensible from all angles. We don’t eat elephants. There is however one small argument for the new regulation which the...