The First Page: Creative Critical Interventions for Social Justice

THE FIRST PAGE

Creative Critical Interventions for Social Justice

edited by Natasha Tanna, Abeyamí Ortega Domínguez & Hakan Sandal-Wilson

16 March 2026

The First Page presents the first page of books that are launched as part of the IAS Book Launch Series. On 19 March 2026, the editors Natasha Tanna, Abeyamí Ortega Domínguez and Hakan Sandal-Wilson will present Creative Critical Interventions for Social Justice, an edited volume that is 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. Here, for a change, we publish the first page of the first chapter.

Paradoxically, writing ecopoetry:
a reflection on creative tools, knowledge and change
by Yairen Jerez Columbié

Introduction: outlining paradoxes

The walls of the city of Girona, close to the Iberian Peninsula’s northern Mediterranean coast, are covered in fossilised unicellular creatures that inhabited ancient tropical seas millions of years ago. Visible to the bare human eye and often the size of a coin, the remains of these big cells are a reminder of our common origin in the ocean. The pedra de Girona (Girona stone), abundant in the old part of the city and on its medieval walls, is a type of limestone formed mainly by nummulites, which take their name from the Latin word ‘nummulus’ (coin). They flourished in warm shallow tropical waters of the Tethys Sea, which ran from the centre of Europe to the Himalayas, more than 60 million years ago (see Fortey 2009). In summer 2014, I visited a private collection of fossils in my temporary neighbourhood in Girona. They were all beautiful and changed my relationship not only with the city but also with stones – now I am more inclined to notice ‘los círculos que prueban / que una piedra es la huella de algo más’ – the circles that prove / a stone is the footprint of something else (Jerez Columbié 2022, 16).¹ As a tropical creature myself, born, raised and educated in Havana, Cuba, I then found a more embodied connection with a foreign city that had once been part of an equatorial sea. Until then, Girona had appealed to me mainly, and perhaps solely, through its language and history. This encounter with…

Creative Critical Interventions for Social Justice was published by UCL Press in February 2026.

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The author is YAIREN JEREZ COLUMBIÉ who grew up in Havana. She works as Lecturer in Latin American and Caribbean Studies at University College Cork. Prior to this she was Assistant Professor in Latin American Studies and Intercultural Communication at Trinity College Dublin. She is the author of the monograph Essays on Transculturation and Catalan-Cuban Intellectual History (2021) and of the poetry collections Fósiles de lluvia (2022) and De corales (2024).

The volume editors are NATASHA TANNA, Senior Lecturer in World Literature at the University of York; ABEYAMÍ ORTEGA DOMÍNGUEZ, Honorary Research Associate in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester; and HAKAN SANDAL-WILSON, Assistant Professor of Gender, Peace and Security at The London School of Economics.

On 19 March 2026, Creative Critical Interventions will be launched at the Institute of Advanced Studies. More information.

Lead Image by Eric Han via Unsplash.