Category Archives: The Eighties

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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Europe not Europe

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I remember being canvased for the 1989 European election.  I was a nineteen year old mother of a two year old, living in a shared house. It was the first election I’d been old enough to vote.  It was also the first time I’d seen the Green Party as an electoral force. Something interesting was going on.  I can’t say that Europe itself really mattered to me very much, but it opened up ways to think things through, that we couldn’t really find space for elsewhere.

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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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