Category Archives: The Eighties

‘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

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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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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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Referencing sisterhood.– ego, guilt and being kind

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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

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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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Yeah, I don’t know where to begin so I’ll start by saying I refuse to forget you

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The single is dead, so why is the charity single still going? There are so many other ways of soliciting donations to charity; by text, by paypal, by cash point.  It seems anachronistic to return to the charity single model, where musicians donate their labour in exchange for a financial donation from consumers . Yet time and again it is the default response that marks the significance of an event.

Each time a new charity single comes out it makes me think about what is at stake  – what problems are being responded to? what solutions are being offered? Who is helping whom and why?

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Queerama – Docfest 2017

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Thoughts on Queerama as Queer History.

The history of queer representation in film is sometimes the history of not being easily seen. It can be the history of having to work really hard to find yourself represented. It can be the history of having to work really hard with what you are given, when you are represented as the freak, the pervert, the duplicitous spy, the blackmailer.

Queerama for me, was the story of how people have negotiated the identities that have been imposed on them.  As a history Queerama shows us a series of outside definitions of queer identities that have had to be negotiated;  homosexuality, for example, has been seen as a sin,  an illness, to an act of dissidence.  Sexualities and their identities have been legislated and defined from above, diagnosed by sexologists,  feared for contagion, dissected like a guinea pig,  but they have also been squeezed through the cracks.

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Do I know anyone who has worked on Jersey in the 80s?….. well funnily enough…

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(Thanks to Claire Langhamer who excelled herself as travel companion/carer)

I’ve just got back from the launch of Jersey Heritage’s new exhibition ‘Bergerac’s Island: Jersey in the 1980s’.  I’ve been working with the team throughout the project’s development and can honestly say the whole experience has been brilliant. This exhibition is clever stuff. It speaks across generation, to the local and the global. But it is also touching, funny and engaging – that’s pretty much what I want history to be.

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

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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?

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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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