Debbie Foster

Resistance is always a way of talking about agency and language and invention; it is a way of trying to sort out our determinisms from our freedoms, of determining where what we call our control begins and ends.

ordinary everyday behaviour may be an unconscious probe to find out what the other person will do with what I do or don’t do, with what I say or don’t say; and whether they can imagine and articulate the need in it, whether they can see something in it that I can’t. It is as though ordinary life is a performance art in front of, initially, one’s pa

resistance reveals preference and affinity, and fear and suspicion, political sympathy and personal antipathy, and the way these might come or go together. This is resistance as conflicted engagement

Steadfastness, intensity, subtlety, adventurousness, intellectual curiosity, gracefulness, personal integrity, spontaneity, artistic or aesthetic creativity: all of these are themes that can characterize lives, expressions of the different yet meaningful ways that people can live. We might also include spirituality on this list.

I wish I could track it down because no single object played a greater part in determining my future life than that album. It undoubtedly helped me get a grade 1 at O-level … but it was also like a sample from an ocean of language and literature stored and waiting for me in the paddling pool of my stereo. School work began to change from something

Uprooted from the place and life he knew he made an accommodation with his new circumstances by simultaneously finding fault with them and retrospectively upgrading the quality of life he'd left behind.

How low her expectations of herself, her sense of self-worth, must have been not even to have attempted this. Her sense of life was that everything universally granted to everyone else was beyond her.

The record player was, by definition, the thing on which records were played but it was also an insidious portal to a world of unrestrained expense. Long before the term 'mission creep' entered military parlance my dad had an unerring eye for what might be called purchase creep.

I would argue that the doodle is to modernism something like what the beautiful once was to the Renaissance: an aesthetic form that indicates a wider system of value intrinsic to a period of history. The beautiful embodies Renaissance ideals of harmony, rationality and humanism, just as the doodle alerts us to modernism’s fascination with differenc