Category Archives: Subcultures

DIT Born Digital – #DejaLockdown zine

Digital History, Subcultures, Teaching, , , , , , , , , , , ,

Get involved with our Born Digital DejaLockdown Zine.

Listen to our masterclasses, explore online archives and contribute to a zine built by us together.

Join in our collaboration between Post-Rave Britain, The Subcultures Network, and Intellectuals Unite Bookclub

The last official lockdown encouraged us to come together and find ways to build a sense of community, fill our time and make sense of the perpetually unprecedented. Whilst some of us have been shielding throughout for most of us returning to lockdown mark II is daunting, frustrating…. (fill in your own emotional responses here……)

It seems sensible to pick up some of the beautiful energy from #IOUBookclub, hosted on my personal instagram and inspired by Vivienne Westwood’s #IntellectualsUnite to try and help us help each other get through this next phase.

Last time we covered, Mill on the Floss, Northanger Abbey, Mme Bovary, Turn of the Screw, A Taste of Honey and Dr Zhivago

With contributions from Pam Thurschwell, Chris Warne, Charlotte Delaney, Jodie Prenger and Claire Langhamer.

We will have exciting announcements about the book club’s return soon but alongside that we wanted to get something new going too.

In the precedented world this would be the point in term when myself and Chris Warne would be gathering old magazines, ordering glue sticks and Tippex to run our (fan)zine making workshop with our third year Special Subject students on ‘Post-Rave Britain’.

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Drugged up methodologies

Subcultures, Teaching, The Eighties, , , , , , , , , , , ,

Last week I had the honour of acting as discussant at a panel on Modern Britain On Drugs at this year’s MBS conference at Birmingham University. (It was a really great conference, but more on that another time.)

Peder Clark, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine: ‘“Do You Love What You Feel?”: Ecstasy, Rave, and Ways of Knowing, 1988-1995’.

 Ben Mechen, Royal Holloway ‘Rubber Gloves and Liquid Gold: Poppers and the Policing of London’s Queer Nightlife’.

 Yewande Okuleye, University of Leicester ‘You Call It Marijuana and I Call It “The Herb”: Cannabis as a Boundary Object’.

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Referencing sisterhood.– ego, guilt and being kind

Media and Life, Subcultures, The Eighties, , , , ,

I want to think about the possibility of working, together, kindly with respect. When your own institution lists ‘kindness’ as one of its key strategies there are interesting possibilities in the feelings at work, at work.

Kindness

We will seek to be known as a ‘kind’ institution. We will care for each other and for the world around us, in responsible and sustainable ways. We will value collegiality and mutual support across all of our actions and activities. Sussex2020 Strategic Framework

So this blog is a way to explore how to protect the parts of ourselves that we give away when our personal is political. As Sara Ahmed says ‘to live a feminist life is to be a feminist at work’.  But that means my institution gets a whole load of stuff out of me that was never in my job description. It means that when I’m evaluated, fedback upon, quantified, its not just my outputs, but my whole personal and political self that’s being measured. Furthermore, feminism is a beautiful, stretchy, broad old chorus, and its never simple when ‘being a feminist at work’ is by necessity informed by your own personal as political.

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Jubilee and memories of punk

Media and Life, Subcultures, The Eighties, , , , , , , , ,

 

This blog post is based on a piece I was commissioned to write for the programme for a new theatrical production of Derek Jarman’s Jubilee adapted by Chris Goode. 

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Indie Rock-a-Nore

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CW: Suicide

This post was originally commissioned by the CIRCY blog. Many thanks to Janet Boddy for all her support. I’m working to develop this into a broader project so thought I’d revisit it for a bit.

The Indie Rock-a Nore Festival was held on 21st October 2017 at the Hastings and St Leonards Angling Association.  It was “[a] one-day indie-pop festival (midday to midnight), bringing together current indie bands and those of yesteryear. Raising money for Brighton based suicide prevention charity, GrassRoots, who provide support across East Sussex (Charity Number: 1149873)”. Alongside the bands there was a raffle, a pool tournament and a buffet.  CIRCY made a small contribution to hosting costs, ensuring that all money taken on the door could go straight to the charity. Over £2500 was raised on the day.

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Viv Albertine’s pioneering women (and what happens when we meet our idols)

Media and Life, Subcultures, , , , ,

*Guest post by Laura Cofield*

A moment of pure joy washed over me last Wednesday as I  watched my two favourite feminist icons sit on stage together and chat about pioneering women in music as part of The Odditorium series of events for Brighton Fringe Festival. Viv Albertine, writer, artist and guitarist of The Slits was invited to talk in conversation with Lucy about the women she had come to recognise as influential in her life. It was like ‘grasping at straws’ she described, born in the fifties and with so few women visible in the public eye, let alone pioneering in alternative and subculture.

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Your punk politics will be privileged, or it will be bullshit

Subcultures, Teaching, , , , , , , ,

An assault on an all female band by a member of security staff at this weekend’s Undercover punk festival in Brighton has brought the online mansplainers and slut shamers out of the woodwork.  It also raised some issues that need to be resolved, some feel new, some are as old as punk itself. Can women make a new space in a scene and politicize it from within ?  Is there ever a way to reconcile the punk politics of the past, and the intersectional politics of the present?   Can we actively build a politics where race, gender, age and subcultural identity intersect ?– the answer, it seems to me, to all of these questions is the same; not really, no. Continue reading Your punk politics will be privileged, or it will be bullshit →

KISMIF: Process not subject – it’s the way that we rhyme

Media and Life, Subcultures, The Eighties, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I’ve just got back from the most mind-blowing conference I’ve ever been to.  Keep It Simple, Make It Fast, is a conference/music and literary festival/art show organised around DIY cultures, Spaces, Places.  Events were held across various venues in Porto, bringing together academic presentations, some celebrity guests, live performances, exhibitions with daily book launches and a summer school. The event is convened by Paula Guerra and Andy Bennett with an incredible team of international volunteers. I went with my Subcultures Network army (Matt Worley, Petes Webb and Ward, David Wilkinson and stayed in a seminary with the Punk Scholars Network and Steve Ignorant from Crass).

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A week ago we stood together: is it fixed yet?

Media and Life, Subcultures, The Eighties, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

 

I’ve been out of the country for a week at a great workshop in Berlin “How to Write and Conceptualize the History of Youth Cultures” organised by Felix Fuhg, Doctoral Student, with the Centre for Metropolitan studies.  I was travelling with the histrrry girls and The Subcultures Network, so there were Harringtons. There are always Harringtons.  We spent one day working and talking in the Archiv der Jugendkulturen.   Its an incredible community archive and library that has brought together all the different traces of resistance in youth culture and subcultures.  From magazines made by school pupils to the Love Parades’ backdrops and giant cut outs of Nena – the transational and hyper local are boxed up together and are being carefully catalogued by local participant experts in each scene.

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DIT Dreamland

Digital History, Subcultures, Teaching, , , , , , ,

Today was finalist results day for the students on my Post-Punk Britain Module.  Together we’ve laughed, done cutting and pasting, swapped celebrity gossip, kicked over a few statues and analysed the history of subcultural theory and practice.  They have made me laugh and they have me think in new ways.

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