Category Archives: Teaching

‘Political protest and the police: young people in Brighton’ by Tom Akehurst, Louise Purbrick and Lucy Robinson (2011)

Subcultures, Teaching, The Eighties

It feels like a long time ago since three UCU members witnessed the treatment of young people on a demonstration for the right to access education. We wrote a report on what we had seen, collectively and with urgency. It has definitely informed a lot of my work and thinking since. In particular it inspired my involvement with the Subcultures Network which aimed to uphold some of the agency afforded to young people in the earlier models of subcultural resistance, but with a more nuanced twist. The experience of witnessing the protest and writing the report also greatly informed my thinking about publics and the crowd that went into my 80s book, most notably work by John Drury.

When it was published the police were very disappointed in us –

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A Blue Plaque for Smiley Culture

Media and Life, Teaching, The Eighties, , , , , , , ,

I want to reflect on the recent unveiling of a Blue Plaque in honour of the British rapper, Smiley Culture. The event was jointly supported by The Nubian Jak Community Trust, Sony Music UK, and the Emmanuel family.  The “event mark[ed] an incredible milestone in recognising Smiley Culture’s impact as a cultural bridge, musical trailblazer, and voice of the people [and] … celebrate[ed] his enduring legacy and contributions to Black British heritage. We were joined by JP Ennis, the Mayor of Lambeth, Charlotte Edgeworth from the Sony Music Justice Fund, musical collaborators Asher Senator and John Dub Vendor, as well as Smiley Cultures family. It was an honour to meet Smiley Culture’s family who had been generous enough to invite me to participate alongside his grandson Zaire’s incredibly moving and impressive performance of Smiley Culture’s single Cockney Translation

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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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Claire, Hester, this one’s for you….

Media and Life, Teaching, , , , , , , , , ,

I just gave an inaugeral. The most terrifying and life affirming thing I’ve ever done at work. It was a room full of amazing people – I was blessed to have four generations of my family there and loved the opportunity to make my 89 year old mum and my 7 year old grandson all swear in unison.

 

There’s a recording coming at some point, but there are some things that I really want to share, in a written form, for those who might not be interested in the main body of the talk itself, but might be facing similar questions in their negotiation with the academic structures around us.

Capture

How the fuck are we going to get through this shitstorm, intact, together, and without throwing each other under the bus? Who has got our back? and what can we learn from those who have negotiated the faultlines of the shitstorm before us?

Continue reading Claire, Hester, this one’s for you…. →

My Strike Scrapbook by Lucy Robinson aged 48 1/3 yrs

Media and Life, Teaching, , , , , , , , , ,

The UCU strike for USS has been a roller coaster and I don’t really know what it means yet, being a historian and all. But the  strike over pensions and the marketization of universities has changed how I understand  our structures and possibilities and how I feel about work, and how I feel about feeling things about work. (But I will leave the truly brilliant Claire Langhamer to take that one on) Its also changed the way academics in different institutions relate to each other, and filled our lives with Twitter.

I’ve never had an overly easy relationship with Universities, or really with education, but over the last few weeks I’ve never felt so completely at home in academia, or wanted to leave academia so much.

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Why consumer rights don’t feel like solidarity

Media and Life, Teaching, , , , , , , ,

Yesterday we finished the first day of a 14 day action, a financial sacrifice that will be compounded by a 20% pay cut for action short of a strike.  This kept me up at night.

I’ve said it before, and I’m sure I’ll say it again – “Other people’s tactics are not the problem’. So why then was it the support for the strike, rather than any opposition that kept me up at night?

A number of petitions to University management have been circulated by students seeking financial compensation for contact hours lost due to the strike.

I really don’t want to sound ungrateful, and I do not take student support for strike action for granted. So why do I find it so uncomfortable when students demonstrate their support for me through their individual consumer rights? Why doesn’t their consumer pressure for compensation for hours lost in the current strike in defence of our pensions make me feel defended?

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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 →

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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Plicker the Punk Rock Clicker : Quant into Qualt won’t go?

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

Yesterday was the last seminar of this year’s Post-Punk Britain course that I teach with Chris Warne in the third year of our History degree. It is a funny sort of course; it is not really about Punk, and quite a lot of people might think it is not really about History either.  It is about what we can do with punk.  We do some history of subcultures stuff, but really it is about thinking of punk as a methodology, as an ethos and as a form of dissidence or resistance.  In practice that means it’s an ongoing pedagogical experiment. Each of the three years we’ve run the course has been totally different. This is partly because the students collaboratively set the agenda and choose what directions they want to go. It is partly because we’ve been funded through Technology Enhanced Learning and Excellence in Teaching to run a set of student led projects;  DIY Digital and DIT Digital.  These projects are scavenger history.  Students create open access educational resources inspired by the course using apps, social networks, and websites that were often designed with other purposes in mind.  Like a DIY zine, it is a way of taking what we can find and making it our own.

When I attended Sussex’s Annual and Teaching conference I was introduced to the idea of using Plickers (paper clickers) in teaching I knew this was something we could play with.

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