ISIS’s genocidal attack on the Yezidi population in northern Iraq in 2014 brought the world’s attention to the small faith that numbers less than one million worldwide. That summer ISIS massacred Yezidi men and enslaved women and children. More than one hundred thousand Yezidis were besieged on Sinjar Mountain. The US began airstrikes to roll back ISIS, citing a duty to save the Yezidis, but the genocide is still ongoing. The headlines have moved on but thousands of Yezidi women and children remain in captivity, and many more are still displaced. Sinjar is now free from ISIS but the Yezidi homeland is at the centre of growing tensions amongst the city’s liberators, making returning home for the Yezidis almost impossible. The mass abduction of Yezidi women and children is here conveyed with extraordinary intensity in the first-hand reporting of a young journalist who has been based in Iraqi Kurdistan for the past four years, covering the war with ISIS and its impact on the people of the country. Otten tells the story of the ISIS attacks, the mass enslavements of Yezidi women and the fallout from the disaster. She challenges common perceptions of Yezidi female victimhood by focusing on stories of resistance passed down by generations. Yezidi women describe how, in the recent conflict, they followed the tradition of their ancestors who, a century ago during persecutions at the fall of the Ottoman empire, put ash on their faces to make themselves unattractive and try to avoid being raped. Today, over 3,000 Yezidi women and girls remain in the Caliphate where they are bought and sold, and passed between fighters as chattel. But many other have escaped or been released. Otten bases her book on interviews with these survivors, as well as those who smuggled them to safety, painstakingly piecing together their accounts of enslavement. Their deeply moving personal narratives bring alive a human tragedy.
This work is about women's education; it is not about education for women. "Women's education" is education which is possessed or owned by women, is provided by women for women, is designed for and about women, and focuses on the needs of women.
In the history of western art, decorative and applied arts – including textiles and ceramics – have been separated from the ‘high arts’ of painting and sculpture and deemed to be more suitable for women. Artists began to reclaim and redefine these materials and methods, energizing them with expressions of identity and imagination. Women’s Work tells the story of this radical change, highlighting some of the modern and contemporary artists who dared to defy this hierarchy and who, through, experimentation and invention, transformed their medium. The work of these women has helped underscore the ongoing value of these art forms within the history of art, championing ‘women’s work’ as powerful mediums worthy of celebration. With biographical entries on each artist featured, as well as beautiful images of their artworks, Women's Work raises up the work of these visionary and groundbreaking artists, telling their stories and examining their artistic legacies.
The Covid, climate and cost of living crises all hang heavy in the air. It's more obvious than ever that we need radical social and political change. But in the vacuum left by defeated labour movements, where should we begin? For longtime workplace activist Ian Allinson, the answer is clear: organising at work is essential to rebuild working-class power. The premise is simple: organising builds confidence, capacity and collective power - and with power we can win change. Workers Can Win is an essential, practical guide for rank-and-file workers and union activists. Drawing on more than 20 years of organising experience, Allinson combines practical techniques with an analysis of the theory and politics of organising and unions. The book offers insight into tried and tested methods for effective organising. It deals with tactics and strategies, and addresses some of the roots of conflict, common problems with unions and the resistance of management to worker organising. As a 101 guide to workplace organising with politically radical horizons, Workers Can Win is destined to become an essential tool for workplace struggles in the years to come.
In Alice Walker’s second story collection, women stand their ground in the midst of crisis
This collection builds on Alice Walker’s earlier work, the much-praised In Love & Trouble. But unlike her first collection of stories, the women in these tenderly wrought tales face their problems head on, proving powerful and self-possessed even when degraded by others—sometimes by those closest to them. But even as the female protagonists face exploitation, social asymmetries, and casual cruelties, Walker leavens her stories with ample wit and, as always, an eye for the redemptive power of love.
A collection that reveals a master of fiction approaching the fullness of her talent, these are the stories Walker produced while penning The Color Purple.
This ebook features an illustrated biography of Alice Walker including rare photos from the author’s personal collection.
Alaa Abd el-Fattah is arguably the most high-profile political prisoner in Egypt, if not the Arab world, rising to international prominence during the revolution of 2011. A fiercely independent thinker who fuses politics and technology in powerful prose, an activist whose ideas represent a global generation which has only known struggle against a failing system, a public intellectual with the rare courage to offer personal, painful honesty, Alaa’s written voice came to symbolize much of what was fresh, inspiring and revolutionary about the uprisings that have defined the last decade. Collected here for the first time in English are a selection of his essays, social media posts and interviews from 2011 until the present. He has spent the majority of those years in prison, where many of these pieces were written. Together, they present not only a unique account from the frontline of a decade of global upheaval, but a catalogue of ideas about other futures those upheavals could yet reveal. From theories on technology and history to profound reflections on the meaning of prison, You Have Not Yet Been Defeated is a book about the importance of ideas, whatever their cost.
English teachers are currently concerned by the question of less traditional reading materials. This book deals with the culture of young people, and how that culture determines their reading of popular literature, and of popular video, as well as approved texts.
Your Party sees leading figures make the case for Britain’s major new political project, laying out the challenges ahead and how to surmount them. Oliver Eagleton interviews Zarah Sultana MP; Leanne Mohamad, who came within 500 votes of unseating Labour’s Wes Streeting at the last general election; Stop the War co-founder Andrew Murray; Our Bloc author James Schneider; Andrew Feinstein, who took on Keir Starmer in Holborn and St Pancras in 2024; and former Corbyn speechwriter Alex Nunns.
Delineated in these pages is a left-wing programme opposed to austerity, inequality and war, an agenda fit to oppose both authoritarian centrists and the hard right. The discussion addresses the need to balance parliamentary politics with social movements, short-term aims with long-term ambitions, and centralised structures with grassroots participation.
In his introduction, Eagleton lays bare the abject failure of Starmer’s Labour government, explaining why a new socialist party is not only possible but urgently needed. Over 750,000 people have registered to support Your Party. This book is essential reading on the new insurgent force at Westminster and beyond.
Audre Lorde (1934-92) described herself as 'Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet'. Her extraordinary belief in the power of language of speaking to articulate selfhood, confront injustice and bring about change in the world remains as transformative today as it was then, and no less urgent. Your Silence Will Not Protect You brings Lorde's poetry and prose together for the first time.