Category Archives: Media and Life

We better sort out our solidarity pt1

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Earlier this month I attended two conferences in a week. Not great planning on my part but it was really interesting to move across geographical locations and organisational structures to ask in essence very similar questions but with very different answers.  The first symposium I attended as a discussant was Rethinking Contemporary British Political History at Queen Mary’s Mile End campus organised by Dr Helen McCarthy. (The second was the Workshop on Voluntary Action and Philanthropy at Frankfurt University which I will write about later)

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Things are messy: Be Careful What You Wish For

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I was going to write a blog about Twitter, and voice and collectively generated knowledge, but this came out instead.  It is a starting point, for thinking through #beforethedrugsrunout

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We’re Old and We are F**king Angry: Haunted by Post Post-Punk

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interrologoBonW

It probably says more about my life than theirs, but I seem to be haunted by old punks propping up the bar telling me stories about the Clash, or showing off their badge collection on ebay.  There’s certainly a lot of punk ghosts around – icons– Sid, Nancy, Rotten before he became farmer Lydon , and reunion bands are everywhere. But what are the ghosts for? And why are they following me round all the time?

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Press Release: An Anthem for the People’s Republic of Brighton and Hove

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Contemporary historian Lucy Robinson has spent the last five year’s listening to, writing about and thinking about charity singles.  From Oxfam’s association with the Beatles in the 60s, to ‘Do they Know its Christmas?’ in all of its various incarnations, the charity single has turned fans into communities, and allowed over indulgent celebrities to show their caring side.  Now finally her work has come to life in a brand new charity single.  She has been volunteering her expertise as Minister for Nagging in the newly launched People’s Republic of Brighton and Hove.

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How many historians does it take to start a cover band?

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When we began the Brighton hub of Wellcome’s sexology and Song-writing project we imagined that the young women involved would undertake some sort of original research and then write songs about it. It quickly became clear that the young women participants and the youth work and music practitioners had some different priorities.  The practitioners wanted to concentrate on building a secure and supportive environment in which to build a collective group identity, and the young women wanted to sing songs that they already knew and liked.  The young sexology song-writers didn’t want to write songs.  They wanted to cover and recover them.  Once we recognised that the priorities of the practitioners and of the young women needed to be our priorities too, we moved towards their goals.  We weren’t training them to be researchers.  They were training us in their modes of re-enactment: an active and creative intervention in a cultural circuit that brought together the legitimacy of publicly celebrated singer-songwriters, with their own experiences and voices.

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#RIPZayn2K15 Thoughts on being The Hot One

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I’ve spent a lot of the last five years living with One Direction. For a while, most conversations with my daughter involved The Boys in some way and a life size Harry Styles greets you from the front window of my house.

The Boys have even joined us on a picket line. They opened up the chance for me to work academically with one of my favourite people in the world, documentary maker Daisy Asquith who made the Channel 4 documentary Crazy About One Direction. Between the two of them my daughter and Daisy have helped me connect my feminism with my love of fandoms.

I have a lot to thank The Boys for.

https://vimeo.com/daisyasquith/crazyaboutonedirection

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Archive Grrrls: Scoping the Fales Library, NY

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Doctoral researcher Laura Cofield and I have just returned from a research trip to New York in order to scope the Riot Grrrl Archive in the Fales Library.  There are hundreds of different zines in the archive across 18 individual collections that cover the years 1974-2003.  The trip was funded by the Santander Mobility Fund and set up by Simone Robinson, Tracey Wallace and Paul Roberts from the Doctoral School at Sussex.

Laura’s in the first year of her doctoral research looking at the c20th and c21st history of pubic hair removal as a way into women’s experience of their bodies and the relationship between pornography and feminism. Laura and I were totally inspired by our visit. Everyone was incredibly helpful, going out of their way to help us, from Anthony on the desk at Gem hotel Soho who filled us in on a quick history of the queer politics of Wonder Woman, to Campbell the security guard at Fales who not only recommended where we should get lunch, he rang ahead and made sure we would get in, to Marvin Taylor the Fales Archivist who shared his prize acquisition of a set of homoerotic photographs from 1905 with us.  But to top it all off Steve Haugh was our Angel of New York and toured us round Manhattan in his beautiful Jag.

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Fan-Tastic at Sheffield Documentary Festival

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I was part of a panel discussion on fans and music documentary at this year’s Sheffield Documentary Festival.  The panel was organised by Emily Renshawe-Smith.  We discussed work by Daisy Asquith (Crazy About One Direction), and Nick Abrahams (The Posters Came from the Walls) and Jeanie Finlay Orion: The Man Who Would be King.  If you stick with it, you can hear me have a bit of a debate with the one and only Peter York.

FOOTLOOSE AND THE POLITICS OF PLEASURE

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This post is based on a speech that I gave as part of UCU industrial action I had proposed that Union members and students shared our two hour strike on 28th January 2014 by watching the 1984 film Footloose. I’m not sure how I got away with it, but I did. Here is how I explained why to those who came to watch the film.

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