Interventions

Welcome to Interventions, an experimental space where authors rehearse new ideas, reframe questions, or play unbridled within Arcade’s field of the humanities in the world. These short posts embrace the incomplete, the imperfect, and the indeterminate, but they may become much more: for example, the record of a thinker’s turn toward a new paradigm or the rough draft of a chapter in a new book. Rapid publication and immediate responses permit Interventions to foster conversation. The tone of the posts may range from personal to political, while maintaining a critical edge. 

Published regularly, Interventions are often freestanding contributions to Arcade, but some may join our feature called Colloquies. Inquiries and submissions are received by the editor of Interventions.


 

Dark and mysterious etching featuring four human figures with bat-like flying apparatuses.
By
Richard Read
We all know we can move between ages: the bank manager and the brain surgeon screaming in the members' stand at the football club, the sombre academic taking to ecstatic dance at the post-conference night club, the OAP who falls in love, the police people hiding tats beneath their uniforms. Does this pin-ball capacity to flick between several different ages we carry ready and waiting their turn within ourselves serve any evolutionary purpose?
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The Fourth and Fifth Waves
Is today's "fourth wave" feminist movement really a "fifth wave"? We can't understand the inclusiveness, confidence, and playful spirit of today's protest movement without appreciating the wave of community-building that took place in girls' internet fan culture starting around 2000. 
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Is Arab Middle Class Literature under Siege?
Can literature widden the scope of our understanding of the nations of the Middle East away from Orientalism and ISIS to include the struggle of a middle class that continues to fight for reform in the region?   
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The Shape of Law
To address neoliberalism’s globalized crises, we must abandon the exculpatory logics of modern sovereignty and avow the universal dependence articulated in Thomas Aquinas’s conception of ‘natural law’. 
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Unsentimental Vistas
In the endless debate between the old and the new, does sentimentality get in the way? How do we reconcile the desire to preserve the urban landscapes of the past with the need to meet the living needs of the present?