For students coming back (or for the first time) to university, time seems to wrap itself around a couple of key dates out of sync with our usual calendar. A new academic year, where life seems to “start up again”, brings with it change. A change of homes, studying, friends and routines all at once can sometimes make life before appear to stand still. Summer can fade into our memory just as quickly as it came and went. Only on reflection can the mark between new and last makes visible what has changed since the last time we were all in Edinburgh. A new government, a new democratic presidential candidate, and a new assassination conspiracy to obsess over. Never have news cycles worked so fast, or to put it another way, never has our memory been so short.
Change, then, can also work to mask what hasn’t. The ongoing genocide in Gaza, austerity (no matter the colour of government flag), the cost-of-living crisis and of course the ongoing ecological destruction of our world. We are surrounded by the appearance of change that never seems to change. New movements, new fads, new truths are constantly presented to us by an ever-increasing number of sources. News media, social media, the government - nevertheless all in some way woven by and founded on the same patterns, cycles and structures. The paradox of our society: So much seems to change, and yet, simultaneously, so much doesn’t. Change is always undercut by stasis – those foundational structures that shape structures: capital, patriarchy, racism, euro-centrism and colonialism.
For no-one is this stasis clearer than for those whose voices are silenced by these structures. It is only for them that time seems to truly stand still, those who suffer from these systems of power: The worker still struggling to pay their bills, the trans teenager still living in fear, the Palestinian still under apartheid. It is only their voices, then, that offer the true ability to recognise change beyond that which the status quo affords them. More than anyone, it is these voices that can see what has changed, as well as tell us what hasn’t.
This, then, is the challenge of radical journalism: To write about change from the shadow of stasis. A stasis that is itself masked by the appearance of change. For us, news can never be new so long as it depends on the silence of those who can imagine real change.
Above all therefore, The Rattlecap strives be the space for those people. We aim to give a platform to those systematically ignored by those foundational structures that shape stasis, where our community can write about itself - instead of being written for. Radical journalism is a challenge, but we more than believe that the Rattlecap is the space for that challenge. If you believe we can be too, then we encourage you to join us.
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