Read about us on It's nice that

Drawing on the understanding that “Pluralism is the view that there is no one correct logic, or alternatively, that there is more than one correct logic”, The Pluralist is a student-run newspaper following in the vein of acts of self-publishing at the Royal College of Art. The Pluralist hopes to act as a platform for experimental practices and works in progress, offering a different context to make all students' voices heard across the college and beyond.

The Pluralist is the new iteration of the Royal College of Art’s Students’ Union-run Newsheet newsletter. Re-launched in 2017 The Pluralist began under the editorial lead of Rachel Yalisove, Anna Schlimm, and Niyoshi Shah. The newspaper has since been continued by Aleks Stanek and designed by Eilis Searson. Since 2019, Lucy Holt and Harriet Welch have co-edited the publication with contributors varying with each edition. In this current form, issues have addressed the dual thematics of ‘self & other’, ‘openings & closings’, and ‘real & fake’, exploring paired concepts which have some tension within them.

Due to the current global situation, ‘real & fake’, released in July, and all forthcoming issues will be available online. We hope to return to print in the near future. If you have a pitch, submission, or simply have questions, get in touch with us at info@thepluralist.com.

Every year we release a couple of Pluralists per school term, kindly supported by the RCA Student’s Union. We print 300 copies (100 per campus) with a budget of 300 quid each time. If you’ve ever tried to print a book that you’ve had to pay for yourself, you’ll know that spending £1 per book is quite a feat. Books are expensive. The hours I have spent folding paper, whilst begging Ian Gabb (the letterpress monster) to towel my brow, all in order to save a few quid on getting the newspapers machine folded, I do not care to put into writing. It’s all worth it when I:

(a) Drop a gigantic pile of the newspapers into the SU’s RCAfé.
(b) Look at my triceps.
(c) Return the next day for a coffee to find that all of them are gone.

Option (c) is particularly nice, because it means I never have to think about that issue of The Pluralist again. It also means people like them.

We made this website wearing an equally tight belt, in the midst of COVID-19, as an online platform and archive for our work. Personally speaking, having this archive feels slightly disconcerting. I’ve always taken comfort in the ephemeral nature of the newspaper, and the fact that all the mistakes I make will only be used as somebody’s note paper in a seminar the next day, anyway. (Do MA students eat fish and chips?) Call it authentic, last minute, independant publishing, and forgive me. The actual content is always outstanding.

The design is as utilitarian as the budget. We use Univers (Roman), Times New Roman (Condensed) and an open source gothic typeface called Old London from DaFont (lol). In print we mainly use The Royal Duplication Centre (for their Risograph machine), the free photocopiers, and the incomparable services of the Letterpress department (Ian Gabb).

Massive thanks to Iain Worgan and Niall Lewis for coding this website for us. And apologies (again) for the pathetic design, boys.