Take A Bow When You Fall: A Sensory Autoethnography of Aikido

This article is an autoethnography reflecting on my experience as a beginner practicing aikido. It centres around the embodied experience of this martial art: how practices feel to the inexperienced body and the emotional highs and lows accompanying both strength and vulnerability. Following a disjointed narrative that combines experiences over weeks of practice, this autoethnography considers the trust, hierarchy, and gendered expectations that arise and are consequently challenged during training. Violence and the considerations of physical limitations are also taken into account in order to provide a personal description of aikido practice as a woman

“Reformed Humanism: Essays on Christian Doctrine, Philosophy and Church” by David Fergusson

Review ofDavid Fergusson, Reformed Humanism: Essays on Christian Doctrine, Philosophy and Church (London: T&T Clark, 2024), pp. x + 291, hardback 978-0567712745 £85.00; paperback 978-0567712783 (Dec 2025) £28.99

Embodied Experience: A Walk Down Memory Lane

In this essay, the author explores the anthropological method of autoethnography during a walk along East Sands. Focusing on the sensorial experience, the article draws connections between the senses and memory. With these findings, the author analyzes the idea of the ‘field’ and how these interactions influenced their experience with the ‘field.

Interlocutorial Friendship

While kinship is a key and thoroughly analyzed tenet of anthropology, friendship has not been afforded the same status, as it is notoriously difficult to categorize. This paper seeks to contribute to the widening of this field through analyzing the experiences and definitions of friendship of four interlocutors, as well as the benefits and drawbacks of friendship between interlocutor and anthropologist in ethnographic fieldwork

Netflix as Global Thought: What can paying attention to the intentionally obscured shadow industry of television piracy reveal about Netflix and its delivery of global thought?

This essay challenges streaming services as providers of global content through the case study of Netflix. Through the lens of television piracy, it investigates the spatial and temporal challenges inherent in the streaming era. Ultimately this essay contends that streaming regresses as frequently as it promised progress, while piracy emerges as both a revealing and transformative force. By circumventing the limitations of streaming it is piracy that offers access to global thought in an increasingly fragmented digital landscape

Selfish Comparative Optimism: A Rejoinder to Nagasawa’s Problem of Evil for Atheists

Yujin Nagasawa’s problem of systemic evil (pose) argues that systemic evils like natural se lection pose a greater challenge to atheism/non-theism than to theism, as they conflict with “modest optimism”: the view that the world is fundamentally “not bad.” Nagasawa suggests theism resolves this by appealing to a heavenly bliss, offsetting natural evils, a strategy unavailable to atheists/non-theists. However, I argue that atheists/non-theists are better equipped to address pose because they are not constrained by the theistic commitment to a categorically good world. In Section 1, I critique two theistic approaches to pose. Extreme optimism defends the actual world as the best possible one, requiring problematic justifications such as free-will and “only way” theodicies to explain systemic evils as necessary. Neutral optimism, while allowing for multiple good worlds, still struggles to reconcile systemic evils with a benevolent God, merely shifting the problem to other possible worlds. In Section 2, I explore how atheists/non-theists can bypass pose. They can adopt personal, rather than cosmic, optimism, valuing their own existence without affirming the world’s overall goodness. Alternatively, they can embrace comparative optimism, viewing existence as better than non-existence without attributing intrinsic value to natural processes like evolution. These flexible approaches free non-theists from the philosophical burdens tied to systemic evils. In Section 3, I argue that even if pose persists, atheists/non-theists can “borrow” theists’ theodicies without committing to their metaphysical assumptions. By adopting naturalistic or subjective frameworks, non-theists can justify their modest optimism without the theological constraints imposed by theism. This demonstrates that pose ultimately challenges theistic frameworks more than atheistic ones

Global Thought and its Ghosts

An essay which utilises short fiction and music to reflect on the teleological determinism characteristic of historical Eurocentric theorising which aspired to a global universality. How can we think theory in the ruins of such meta-narratives? Does theory still retain an emancipatory function? Can global thought also mean an excavation of wreckages, or giving voice to revisiting spectres from the past? Can such ghosts meaningfully contest the “capitalist realism” which threatens the subsumption of futurity and utopian imagining today