Category Archives: Teaching

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’.

Continue reading DIT Born Digital – #DejaLockdown zine →

Drugged up methodologies

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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….

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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

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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.

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

Why consumer rights don’t feel like solidarity

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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

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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

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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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The awkward pleasure of Doing it Together

Digital History, Subcultures, Teaching, The Eighties, , , , , , , , , , ,

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 Have you ever been on holiday with your students? Its got a lot of awkward potential.

 

This year Chris Warne and I were awarded an Innovation in Teaching Award to take a group of students to Margate and set up a digital pedagogy experiment. DIT Digital: Doing Subcultures Online involved tours and workshops with two of Margate’s significant heritage sites; The Turner Contemporary and Dreamland. Our Twitter hashtag is #DITDreamland

Last year we had run a less ambitious project DIY Digital: Doing Punk Online with students on our Post-Punk Britain module.  Students had created open access educational resources around topics from the module.  One of the key lessons from the project last year had been the importance of ‘being in the room’ to facilitate virtual interaction so a field trip offered a way of sharing a physical space together whilst doing digital work.  Furthermore last year’s MA mentors had been absolutely central to the success of the project and we now had a group of masters students who had been part of the original project as undergraduates who could act as mentors.

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Persons Unknown

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Over the past few weeks Class War and LSE’s Lisa Mckenzie in particular have been taking a lot of stick for their choice of target and tactics.  For months Class War and the Women’s Death Brigade have been standing up against the relocation of young teenage mothers by supporting E15 Mums’ campaign, opposing Poor Doors, challenging Gay Pride’s for profit associations with big business and international banking,  and exposing the dodgy deals and marketing of working class women’s bodies for profit at the Jack the Ripper Museum in Cable St.  All pretty straight forward.  Not everyone likes the shouty, irreverent style of the brigade, but its pretty hard to defend kicking out teenage mums, humiliating social housing tenants, censoring gay activists in the name of Pride, or possible shonky negotiations for planning permission.  But then Class War went too far.  They went for the hipster – and the infamous Cereal Killer Café.  Jokes were made on Radio 4 quizzes. Newspapers dug around in activist’s private lives and recreational choices for a few exposes.  Friends of mine argued that these were the wrong targets and the wrong tactics.  I’m not going to get into analysis of cultural capital and bearded entitlement (but honestly doesn’t your face take up enough space already?). But I found it difficult to see the cereal café as the biggest victim in the struggle around austerity.

Fair enough, the other side of that coin is that the bearded cereal sellers might not be your biggest problem either.  In fact you might not have heard about all the grassroots activism that Class War and the Fuck Parade had been doing if they hadn’t annoyed Shoreditch. [disclaimer – I am gluten and lactose free so cereal prices are never going to be my biggest issue]  But the issue of personal taste, and personal tactics really isn’t the problem anymore.  The truth is, it doesn’t matter what your personal political style is.  It doesn’t matter how your particular political form and content sit together.  Because whether you like it or not, whether we like each other’s style or not, we really are all in it together. If we didn’t know that already, the CPS have just made it very clear.

Continue reading Persons Unknown →