I have two articles in Radical Commons! (or Radco! as it is known by the student body) this month. Radco! is a new left student zine started by students at the University of Michigan Law School which was formed to create a safe space for left students in what is recognised as a fairly conservative profession. It’s also the first and only such zine at their law school.

Radco! has a specific student community goal of allowing creativity, dissent and humour into its legal education and questioning their professors, which is healthy. They also embrace art from law students (so we’re soul mates really:).

Radco! has featured two artworks. One is my charcoal/pastel work on paper “A Kansas State of Mind” (2013), evoking the characters from the 1939 Hollywood film The Wizard of Oz as a metaphor to explore our relationship to law & the criminalisation of ideas during wartime.

The second is my painting “There is Nothing Like a Drone” (2012) featured at the University of Surrey’s 2012 workshop "Hitting the Target? How New Capabilities Shape International Intervention" at the Centre for International Intervention [cii], School of Politics at The University of Surrey in the UK; and as the cover for Dr Kyle Grayson’s 2016 book The Cultural Politics of Targeted Killing: On Drones, Counter-Insurgency, and Violence.

Movingly, they also published my 27th February blog post on the tragic death of US Airforce serviceman Aaron Bushnell, may he rest in peace. It’s hard to put into words how moved I am to be invited to add my voice to the student, activist and wider community shaken by his loss.

The loss of any individual of conviction and feeling for suffering people they don’t know, or indeed the loss of any human being, pulls people into activism. I hope we can can continue to reach out to each other to keep them, and ourselves, safe and strong enough for the hard work of making this world better than we found it.

I’m thrilled to be invited into the Radco! commons room and I hope the students and also staff at the Law School enjoys my art.

[Updated 9th March 2024]