Tag Archives: Observing the 80s

Referencing sisterhood.– ego, guilt and being kind

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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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.

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

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

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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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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Cringe, in more ways than one, (but don’t tell my Mum)

 

On 19th November I stood in the Latest Music Bar Brighton and read out bits of my teenage diary from the year 1984-1985.   The event, ‘Cringe at Mass Observation‘ was jointly organised by Cringe and Mass Observation as part of ‘Being Human: The Festival of Humanities’.  London Cringe organise events where “Funny ‘grown-ups’ read aloud from their teenage diaries”.  It’s a model that was picked up from New York and spread from there.  Fiona Courage and Jessica Scantlebury from Mass Observation had been to one of the events and had immediately recognised Cringe’s resonance with Mass Observation writers who also share their private experiences and analysis for public consumption.

You can hear a bit more about Cringe, where it came from and the Brighton event on a podcast of an interview myself and Cringe organiser Ana McGloughlin did for Radio Reverb with Melita Dennett. (at about 22 minutes in)

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Part 1: Remote Control  Supervision – The hybrid puppet master supervisor

I love a training session.  I’m always signing up for new workshops.  I know there is often a load of nonsense from academics who somehow think that they are instinctively good teachers and don’t need to engage in professional development, that isn’t explicitly developing their reputation as an international scholar.  In fact I’ve heard early career and established academics say some pretty shoddy things about pedagogical training.  Shoddy things that they wouldn’t accept being said about their own work, their own research or indeed their own teaching.  Why wouldn’t we want to benefit from the high quality pedagogical research and training experience of experts? We certainly expect people to take our own research and experience seriously.  In fact I have noted a direct correlation between historians who dismiss pedagogical training whilst simultaneously separating themselves from public history, heritage, amateur archivists, genealogists or school and FE based history curriculum as not being ‘real history’.  So it is alright for historians to blag it as teachers but not for teachers to blag it as historians?

Continue reading Part 1: Remote Control  Supervision – The hybrid puppet master supervisor

‘IT DID GET TIRING TO WELCOME EVERYONE TO THE FIRE’ – POLITICS AND SPIRITUALITY AT GREENHAM COMMON PEACE CAMP

Here is a written up version of my 2013 talk at The Rest is Noise Festival on politics and spirituality in the late 20thcentury.  I’ve added a couple of thoughts as I went along based on contributions from the audience.  One thing that really struck me throughout the other discussions during the day was the importance of the individual or ‘the self’, in both political and religious engagement through the period.  The creative tension for me, was the ways in which Thatcherite individual resilience (Tebbit ‘getting on his bike’) and post-punk ‘any one can do it’ seemed to weave together.

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REASONS TO CHEERFUL: ESRC FESTIVAL OF SOCIAL SCIENCE

On Friday 8th November 2013 I introduced and chaired the ESRC Festival of Social Science sponsored event ‘What is Happiness?’ organised by Mass Observation at the Quadrant Pub, Brighton. On a rainy, dark, Friday evening four different academics sat in the pub to talk about how their work illuminated the idea of Happiness.  The project’s resident blogger has responded to the overall session, and the discussion, but I thought I’d share part of the introductory talk I gave.  After introducing the Observing the 80s project generally I talked about what I might have gathered about happiness from Observing the 80s, and why it has made me so happy to be involved.

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Introducing my blog

So what is this blog for?

All sorts of things,

Showing off, Letting Go, Getting Writing, Stopping Writing, Recycling, Pissing on Lampposts, Sending Thank you Notes, Experimenting, Collaborating, Taking Teaching Seriously, Not Taking Everything Seriously, Temperature Testing, Getting Myself in Trouble,

now thats what i call history logo

obviously all opinions are my own,

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4597-7339