Book cover for Creative Critical Interventions for Social Justice

Publication date: 1 February 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781806550067

Number of illustrations: 5

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

Creative Critical Interventions for Social Justice

Natasha Tanna (Editor), Abeyamí Ortega Domínguez (Editor), Hakan Sandal-Wilson (Editor)

Series: Comparative Literature and Culture

Creative Critical Interventions for Social Justice is an edited volume grounded in a commitment to politically engaged research that moves beyond traditional scholarly forms. It examines knowledge that is often excluded from conventional academic production and explores the potential for creative critical writing and cultural production to advance social justice-focused research and practice. The book addresses hierarchies of knowledge creation and knowledge creators, bringing together artists, educators, community organisers, activists, researchers and writers working from decolonial, antiracist, queer and transfeminist perspectives.

The volume considers the role of storytelling and experimental, creative and often collaborative interventions across, between and beyond disciplines. Contributions include reflections on the uses of poetry in youth and climate justice work, conversational life stories as a research method in sociological studies of kinship formation, analysis of the potentials and pitfalls of centring researcher positionality and lived experience as a basis for scholarly analysis, relationality and the ethics of ethnographic work with radical political movements, speculative imaginings of the future of political organising and notions of rigour and care for the living and the dead in racialised archives.

List of figures
List of contributors
Acknowledgements

Introduction
Natasha Tanna, Abeyamí Ortega Domínguez and Hakan Sandal-Wilson

Part I: Poetic possibilities for youth and climate justice

1 Paradoxically, writing eco-poetry: a reflection on creative tools, knowledge and change
Yairen Jerez Columbié

2 ‘Britishness is not whiteness’: youth poets ‘bite back’ at the education survival complex through killjoy call-and-response towards creative abolition
Dita N. Love, Debbie Yeboah, Dami Folayan, Shirley May and Princess Arinola Adegbite

Part II: Conversations for change: life stories of Black, queer, and trans kinship and parenthood

3 Heather and Maggie
Haydn Kirnon

4 ‘If you’re gay, you’re lucky to be a parent’: current issues for queer and trans families in the UK
Marcin Smietana

Part III: Paradox and parody: the politics of positionality and relationality

5 Notes on lying
Mathelinda Nabugodi

6 Queer Mediterranean futures: an {uneventful} performative text
Anna T.

7 The interview: scholarship, sincerity, suspicion
Dilar Dirik

Part IV: Reparative rigour: caring for the archives of the living and the dead

8 Writing at the limits of reason
MJ Hunter Brueggemann, Bea Wohl and Koundinya Dhulipalla

9 the smell of rain on hot concrete
Kerry McInerney

Index

DOI: 10.14324/111.9781806550067

Number of illustrations: 5

Publication date: 01 February 2026

PDF ISBN: 9781806550067

EPUB ISBN: 9781806550074

Hardback ISBN: 9781806550043

Paperback ISBN: 9781806550050

Natasha Tanna (Editor)

Natasha Tanna (she/they) is Senior Lecturer in World Literature in the Department of English and Related Literature, University of York. She specialises in contemporary literary engagements with queer theory, decolonial theory and critical race theory. Previously, she was a Leverhulme Fellow in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, UCL and Lecturer in Spanish at Cambridge.

Abeyamí Ortega Domínguez (Editor)

Abeyamí Ortega Domínguez (she/they) is an Honorary Research Associate in Social Anthropology, University of Manchester. Her research explores how creative practices relate to the production and countering of social inequalities, from intersectional perspectives and antiracist frameworks. She has taught at the University of Cambridge, at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and the National School of Anthropology of Mexico.

Hakan Sandal-Wilson (Editor)

Hakan Sandal-Wilson (he/him) is Assistant Professor of Gender, Peace and Security at the Department of Gender Studies at the LSE. His research explores democracy, social movements, and the intersections of ethnic, religious, gender and sexual identities in conflict-affected states and societies in the Middle East. Previously, he was a Teaching Associate in Sociology at Downing College, University of Cambridge and an Affiliated Lecturer at Cambridge’s Centre for Gender Studies.

Creative Critical Interventions for Social Justice

Natasha Tanna (Editor)

Abeyamí Ortega Domínguez (Editor)

Hakan Sandal-Wilson (Editor)

Creative Critical Interventions for Social Justice

Sahidic Coptic

Translation Studies before ‘Translation Studies’

Walter Benjamin’s Ark

Space, Affect, Memory

Heterosexual Masculinities and the Self-Reflexive Novel

A Grammar of Khowar

Reading Robert Walser

Classics and Race

Baghdadi Judeo-Arabic

A Grammar of Elfdalian

Contemporary Afro-Brazilian Short Fiction

From Shakespeare to Autofiction

Selected Essays and Dialogues by Gianni Celati

Gabriel Harvey and the History of Reading

Elements, Government, and Licensing

The Bankruptcy

Drama, Poetry and Music in Late-Renaissance Italy

Poetic Writing and the Vietnam War in West Germany

In the Face of Adversity

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Creative Critical Interventions for Social Justice

Natasha Tanna (Editor)

Abeyamí Ortega Domínguez (Editor)

Hakan Sandal-Wilson (Editor)

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UCL Press

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