UK Scheming

February 11th, 2006

My “associate fellowship scheme” at the University of Kent’s Centre for Law, Gender, and Sexuality is over, and I’m heading back to the States. It did feel like a scheme, as if I was impersonating someone who knew what they were talking about.

My favorite part of the experience was getting my own office for a week. I never get to go to an office, or have colleagues. It was a novel sensation. Academics would drop by and ask if they could take me for a cup of tea. (I think I may have tea-poisoning.) They would want to discuss things like the auto-immunity of democracy, or the sociology of risk, or discrimination within the queer anti-discrimination movement, or whether constitutionality is law or politics. I sipped my tea.

Here I am teaching a cartooning workshop to some legal scholars. That’s Emily Grabham on the right, who made the whole Scheme happen.

And in London last week, I took part in a roundtable discussion with UK cartoonists Kate Evans, Kate Charlesworth, and Suzy Varty, moderated by Carol Bennett, who has run the comics distributor Knockabout for over 20 years. This was jointly presented by the Kent Centre and the Cartoon Museum Trust.

I got a tour of the Cartoon Museum, which is frantically under construction and set to open later this month in a great space near the British Museum. Along with their permanent collection, which includes comic art from Hogarth and Cruikshank to superhero stuff, they’ll have a shop and gallery and classes. Amid the chaos of workers putting up sheetrock and wiring, cartoonists were working on a mural.
Here’s Martin Rowson recreating a famous old British cartoon by James Gillray about William Pitt and Napoleon carving up the world like a plum pudding. Above this is a cartoon of Bush as Adam, with Tony Blair as his figleaf.