Love That Journey For Me dives deep into the cultural sensation of Canadian comedy-drama Schitt’s Creek. Considering the fusion of existing sitcom traditions, references and tropes, this Inkling analyses the nuance of the show and its surrounding cultural and societal impact as a queer revolution. By discussing how the show reshapes LGBTQ+ narratives from the crafting of the town itself, and celebratory influences including Cabaret, to how writer-creator Dan Levy utilised and subverted expectations throughout his work, Emily Garside will showcase how one TV show became a watershed moment in queer representation and gay relationships on screen. Part analysis of Schitt’s Creek’s importance, part homage to a cultural landmark, this is a show that – in the words of David Rose himself – needs to be celebrated. This book is that celebration. This book is unofficial, and unaffiliated with Schitt’s Creek and its brand.

On His Royal Badness explores how Prince’s distinctive style both on and beyond the screen disrupts hegemonic, heteronormative and Black masculinities to examine and celebrate the construction and impact of Prince upon contemporary fashion. As a lifelong fan and academic specialising in the field, Casci Ritchie looks to highlight the importance of Prince as a cultural icon, and dive into the depths of his own personal reverence for fashion and self-expression, and what can be learned through that. Taking core pieces from his wardrobe, she embarks on a wide-ranging exploration of how the simplest of pieces can tell the most incredible of stories. A must for fans of Prince, fashion, and discovering more about cultural icons and their lasting influence in unexpected ways. This book is unaffiliated with the Prince estate.

In 2019, Liam Konemann began collating what he called ‘The Appendix’, a simple record of ongoing transphobia in the UK that he came across in day-to-day life: from the flippant comments of peers to calculated articles and reviews in newspapers. When the list began to take its toll on his mental health, he changed tack by asking different questions: how is beauty in transmasculinity found? And how is it maintained in a transphobic world? The Appendix, in its new incarnation, begins at the end. Considering the final item on the list, we travel back in time through Liam’s life and his formative experiences on both sides of the globe, and examine the wider hostile climate that trans people face today. In response, focus shifts to celebrate trans joy, the complexities of finding it and, crucially, holding on to it.

What is a university for? They educate and set people up for their futures; they teach, research, employ – often irritate. We talk about developing the next generations and pushing the boundaries of knowledge, but in the midst of a pandemic, universities were put more firmly under the microscope than ever before. As we emerge into a new reality, James Coe considers the enormous challenge of reimagining an entire cornerstone of society as a more civic and personal institution. The New University posits a blueprint of action through universities intersecting with work, offering opportunity, and operating within the physical space they find themselves. Diving into the issues he aims to tackle in his own work as a senior policy advisor, Coe believes we can utilise universities for community betterment through realigning research to communal benefit, adopting outreach into the hardest to reach communities, using positional power to purchase better, and using culture to draw people together in a fractured society. The world has changed and universities must change too. The New University is the start.

Throughout history, apocalypse fiction has explored social injustice through fantasy, sci-fi and religious imagery, but what can we learn from it? Why do we escape very real disaster via dystopia? Why do we fantasise about the end of the world? The word “apocalypse” has roots in ancient Greek, with apo (“off”) and kalýptein (“cover”) combining to form apokálypsis, meaning to uncover or reveal. In considering apocalypse fiction across culture and its role in how we manage, manifest and imagine social, economic and political crises, Goh navigates what this genre reveals about our contemporary anxieties, and why we turn to disaster time and again. From blockbusters like War of the Worlds to The Handmaid’s Tale and far beyond, we venture through global pandemics to the climate crisis, seeking real answers in the midst of our fictional destruction. Let’s journey to the end.

Hip hop is an art form that originated in the margins, and can be simultaneously devastating and celebratory; an expression of pain, love and desire or an ode to the other, the underdog and the underground. For Arusa Qureshi, it became a safe haven, the genre she turned to in highs and lows. In particular, it was the women to whom she owes her thanks. Flip the Script explores many of the phenomenal women who have paved the way in UK hip hop both at the forefront and behind the scenes, through interviews, research and Qureshi's lifelong love of the form. From the influence of the genre's beginnings in the Bronx to formation of distinctive regional scenes across the country, the barriers women faced to the magazines and club nights that fostered thriving hip hop communities, readers get to know the women who led the charge in one of the country's most innovative and exciting music scenes, and those picking up the torch today. This is a love letter to UK hip hop, and to the women changing the game.

Two million people in the UK live with sight loss, and many more worldwide. Yet the general population knows very little about the day-to-day life of the blind, who must move through a world not designed with them in mind, from city planning and technology, to pop culture and education. What’s more, blind people often fall off the pages of our history books, despite being some of the most prolific figures in their fields. In Blind Spot, Maud Rowell challenges readers to think differently about what they may take for granted, carrying them on a whirlwind tour through time and space - from Japanese tube stations to the 18th century museum - to showcase what the world looks like for someone who does not see. She offers practical insights based on her own experiences, as well as spotlighting incredible blind pioneers - explorers, artists, scientists, and more - through history and the current day, unearthed through her own research and interviews. In educating us about the realities of sight loss, Maud shows us how to be aware of our own blind spots, offering the knowledge needed to become better, more tolerant members of diverse communities. Society needs to support everyone - it's time we caught up.

Many individuals – especially of non-white heritage – are suspended in an identity limbo. The need to divide and separate our lives, even ourselves, into neat boxes means that many British-born people with no ties to their parental culture are left adrift within our society. This is Anne East’s experience. Neither able to claim one culture as her own or be fully accepted by all groups within British society as the Brit she is, it’s a no man’s land of cultural loss. In No Man’s Land, Anne explores this chasm in more detail, how it is to feel one thing and yet be perceived as another, the emotions felt within this limbo, and why culture truly matters. More so, she considers how this has manifested through history, and the British Empire, with focus on the often unheard or ignored impacts on those of East and Southeast Asian heritage. Here, we enter the liminal space between two cultures; both home and not home at once.

Since its inception decades ago, the tabletop roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons has offered an escape from the real world, the chance to enter distant realms, walk in new shoes, and be part of immersive, imaginative tales as they unfold. More so, in Thom James Carter's opinion, it's a perfect vessel for queer exploration and joy. Journey on, adventurer, as Dungeon Master Thom invites readers into the game's exciting queer, utopian possibilities, traversing its history and contemporary evolution, the queer potential resting within gameplay, the homebrewers making it their own, stories from fellow players, and the power to explore and examine identity and how people want to lead their lives in real and imagined worlds alike. Grab a sword and get your dice at the ready, this queer adventure is about to begin.

For adoptees, the word ‘lucky’ gets thrown around a lot. They’re regularly told they’re lucky to not be in an orphanage, lucky to have been brought into a family, lucky to be adopted at all. Often they’re depicted in media as being broken, in need of saving and fixing. Then they’re expected to become the hero of their own journeys and overcome their origins. Whatever Next? considers how these traditional narratives surrounding adoption have both dominated and damaged adoptive communities for many years, and what we should do to avoid these pitfalls. Inspired by the conversations within their Whatever Next? community project, Jo, Addie and Hannah explore the key tropes that adoptees grapple with and how these conversations are evolving, with the goal of kickstarting new dialogues around the adoption experience more broadly, and showcase how beneficial shared discussion can be.

Men who experience sexual abuse are often dismissed, only brought up as the butt of a joke, an exception to the rule or, perhaps worst, to be used as a rhetorical tool against female victims. Sons and Others offers a new way of seeing these men in our lives, and asks how the violence they experience affects us all.

Risk is embedded in almost every corner of the popular culture we consume; its hidden exposure is a new version of disaster capitalism. No Dice explores the messy world of gambling, addiction and risk that we encounter daily, from childhood through adulthood, to ask - is it worth the risk? And more so, do we even know what risks we're taking?

Grief is all around us. At the heart of the brightly coloured, vividly characterised, joyful films of Studio Ghibli, they are wracked with loss – of innocence, of love, of the connection to our world and of that world itself. Now Go enters these emotional waters to interrogate not only how Studio Ghibli navigates grief so well, but how that informs our own understanding of grief’s manifold faces.

Hair is potent. It can be an emotional and intense matter across gender - it will grow in places you don't like, it may desert you - suddenly, or gradually. It is a symbol of gender, sexuality, status, and more. Part memoir, part investigation across history, politics, religion, and culture, Hair/Power explores the power, control and ultimate liberation that hair can provide.

BFFs examines female friendship as a site of radical intimacy, as told through the cultural touchstones around us. From Elena Ferrante to Booksmart, Little Women to Insecure, and beyond, the book considers how female friendships can offer a more expansive and emancipatory understanding of female intimacy.

It’s one of modern history’s most beloved sci-fi creations and while the Doctor is revered world-round, what about their companions, friends and acquaintances along the way? For all the time travel and extravagant alien worlds, Doctor Who is often at its best when it looks to you, the average viewer, and how the lives and values of us human beings are actually spectacular. The cup of tea or coffee we make in the morning, the relationships we carry and lose in life, the routines we love and hate, the vinegar-soaked chippies we have at night – they might look mundane against the spectacle of the Doctor but what if it’s us, the humans, who are the fantastical ones? In We’re Falling Through Space, J. David Reed investigates how Doctor Who uses its larger-than-life lens to consider how the mundane is a lot more special than we might realise. As one of the Doctors put it, ‘Do you know, in nine hundred years of time and space, I’ve never met anyone who wasn’t important before.’

Deeping It shines a critical light on UK drill and its fraught relationship with the British legal system. Intervening on current discourse steeped in anti-Blackness and moral panic, this Inkling ‘deeps’ how the criminalisation of UK drill cannot be disentangled from histories, technologies, and realities of colonialism, consumerism and more.

Identification technologies - passports, ID cards, ancestry reports - put us in boxes, determine where we can go and where we can’t, and change how we relate to those around us. From nationally-run systems, to social media platforms, DNA testing and counter-terrorism registers, we are all part of databases that seek to identify us, and impose a framework upon us for assessing others. Machine Readable Me is a tour of the many ways in which identification technologies are impacting our lives in ways we see and ways we don’t.

For a period in time that gave us Sappho, and the love affair of Achilles and Patroclus, the Ancient Greek relationship with queer folk is a lot more complicated than at first glance. Myths were altered and adapted throughout antiquity to reflect the values and issues of the day. All the Violet Tiaras navigates queer reimaginings, explorations of gender, and more.

Diving into the highly-charged (pun intended) topic of sex robots, Electric Dreams positions them not as a threat to human women and relationships but as the last impossible promise of a dying colonialist-capital narrative. Roboticists say they’re a distracting science fiction, yet endless books, films and articles are written on the subject. Campaigns are even mounted against them. So why are sex robots such a hot topic? Let's find out.

Naomi Westerman was an anthropologist studying death rituals in other cultures, then her entire family died. Death moved from being academic to deeply personal. Encouraging people to think and talk more openly, and break taboos, Happy Death Club explores how death is everywhere in our culture, but grief often isn't, whether it's writing horror movies for a living, true crime podcasts, working in the death industry, death peer support groups, and looking to death rituals in other countries.

What happens when aggressive, riotous punk music becomes the peacemaker? Chronicling a history of punks at war, Blitzkrieg Bops studies bands who have soundtracked a movement spanning decades and borders—creating music to overthrow corrupt governments, stomp out oppressive regimes, fight the establishment and, in turn, fight for their lives.