Tag Archives: Race

Drugged up methodologies

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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‘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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