Hello and welcome back to The Rattlecap! We have returned from our years abroad, the paper has returned from its long and lonely quarantine, and we are so ready for another year of radical publishing!
For our Summer School edition, we wanted to showcase the side projects that everyone has been taking on this spring and summer at home, be it through reading groups, volunteering, or just far too much time on Twitter. We have an amazing selection of commentary (our biggest issue ever!) - from personal reflections on quarantine, to commentary on anarchist occupations; from interviews with great activist orgs Living Rent and Radical Independence Edinburgh, to child marriage, and the connection between global poverty and neoliberalism.
We are especially pleased to have teamed up with the 93% Club Edinburgh to publish a really important resource for incoming students, which compiles the grants, bursaries, and scholarships available for low income students or students from difficult home backgrounds. It is vital that this information is made more widely available, and so we ask if you are in the mood to share an article, that this is the one!
This year, more than ever, radical thought has gone mainstream, spurred on by the explosion of BLM protests and the social impacts of COVID-19; we both have spent a lot of time examining ourselves and the paper, and we are more convinced than ever of the importance of making radical thought engaging and accessible. We hope to move forward as a fully democratic paper, and we take our commitments to be inclusive, anticapitalist, and antiracist seriously. Whilst as editors we guide the paper at times, we run as a collaboration, not a hierarchy, and we encourage readers, writers, editors and illustrators alike to engage with this community; to challenge us and guide us too. Our ears and emails are always open.
Looking forward to an exciting year of student-run, left-wing journalism!
Love and solidarity,
Phoebe and Iz