Author: Janiene Farquharson
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On Identity-Coding in Children’s Animation
Featured Illustration: Drew Buchanan Coding, in television and film, is a technique that implies a fictional non-human character has a particularly human quality or identity. By paying attention to the ways in which animated characters are drawn, behave, and speak, one can make conclusions about the identities they would have…
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Let’s Talk About Intrusive Thoughts
Featured Illustration: Aasma Qureshi Trigger warning: discussion of intrusive thoughts . . . Sometimes my thoughts scare me. It’s not uncommon that I’ll be doing something mundane and a frightening thought suddenly appears in my mind. Quite often I ruminate on them and they get stuck on an uncontrollable loop…
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Arlo Parks: Voice of a Generation
Featured Image: Clash Magazine Arlo Parks has a notably gentle voice. In a striking way, it is pretty, soft, and rather captivating. With two EPs in her discography and several singles, the London-based singer has recently seen her popularity grow with some great musical achievements. In August, she performed her…
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The Radical Movement You’ve Never Heard Of
Featured Illustration: Julia Mauch Since 2012, we have seen the proliferation of the body positivity movement on social media channels such as Instagram, Tumblr, and Twitter. While we have all heard of the movement and its accompanying hashtag, and understand what it is meant to achieve, very little is known…
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The Terrifying Reality of Womanhood
Featured Illustration: Simply Sophie Designs Trigger warning: mentions of gendered violence, gun violence, transphobia, and sexual assault. A TikTok video of user @jatsiveh detailing the contents of her ‘If I Go Missing Folder’, recently went viral on Twitter, collecting over 2 million views and 200,000 likes and retweets. Her folder…
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The Emotional Trauma of Racism
Featured Artwork: Daylight Illustrations I cried when I heard the story of Althea Bernstein, an 18-year-old biracial woman whose face and neck were burned by white men wielding lighter fluid in Wisconsin, though she fortunately survived. It’s clear that this was a racist hate crime, given that her attackers called…
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What Mindful Therapy Taught Me
Featured Artwork: Sonaksha Trigger warning: very brief mentions of depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and suicidal ideation. . . . In January, I started a 9-week Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) group course. Following the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, I finished the course in my bedroom via Zoom. I’d spent…