As journalists and academics, politicians and other commentators struggled to make sense of the social unrest across England, they reached for theoretical understandings of the crowd that have long since been discredited. The powerful imagery of the madding crowd has always been a popular trope...

The casual observer of the controversy over policing at April 2009\'s G20 summit in London might have been forgiven for imagining that Britain\'s media serves as a bulwark against the abuse of power, fearlessly illuminating and condemning injustice. The publication of video footage and...

This is a country where the poor fear tuberculosis, which kills 1,000 Indians a day, but people like me—middle-class people with access to health services that are probably better than England's—don't fear it at all. It's an unglamorous disease, like so much of the things that the...

Although Dalit orators and slogans threaten (or promise) to ‘turn Tamil Nadu on its head’, the 2006 state elections offer Dalit analysts pause for thought. In compromising its principles and allying with established parties, the Dalit Panther Iyyakkam (Movement), the largest Dalit...

July 2005 saw 225,000 people march through Edinburgh in the city's largest ever demonstration. Their cause was the idealistic injunction to \'Make Poverty History\' (MPH). This paper presents an analysis of the MPH march, focusing particularly on the interplay between protestors, the police and...