Tag Archives: protest

THE review, Chris Coates, Communes Britannica

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communes_britannica_chris_coateI review for the UK’s university weekly, Times Higher Education, short reviews which I enjoy writing and don’t take much time, of new books that catch my eye, or old ones that have stayed with me for years.  Recently these have included Franz Kershchenbauer et al‘s Eurojazzland, Noel Kingsbury’s Hybrid, Leah Lievrouw’s Activist and Alternative New Media, Christopher Small’s classic Musicking. This week it’s Chris Coates’s new book, published by the collective co-housing press Diggers and Dreamers, Communes Britannica.

An entertaining, informative directory of social experiments in alternative living. Packed with images and anecdotes, it captures the excitement of the cranks, religious visionaries, dropouts and utopian pragmatists up to and beyond the 1960s and 1970s. I even found out there was a pacifist commune on my street in 1940: Utopia isn’t nowhere, it’s down the road.

Crass and anarcho-punk symposium, June 28 2013

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No Sir, I Won’t: Reconsidering the Legacy of Crass and Anarcho-punk

Friday 28 June 2013

Organised by Oxford Brookes’ Popular Music Research Unit (PMRU)

in association with the Network of Punk Scholars (NPS)

Stations of the Crass, patch30 years since legendary anarcho-punk group Crass released their highly challenging LP Yes Sir, I Will, this symposium will explore the impact and long-lasting legacy of Crass and anarcho-punk. Crass are widely perceived as ‘reluctant leaders’ of the anarcho-punk scene; an ironic title for self-proclaimed anarchists, of course. The central question, for this study day, is: were Crass and anarcho-punk scene significantly effective politically or, alternatively, was the anarcho-punk scene surreptitiously more about clothes, music, image and ‘symbolic rebellion’ (to use Adorno’s term)?

Newspaper articles, journalist/fan publications and a growing body of scholarly work on Crass and the anarcho-punk music scene has been keen to celebrate the fact that such groups sold many thousands of records (more than a million in total in Crass’s case, reportedly), contributed substantially to the rise of anarchistic strategies on the Left and the revitalization of CND in the UK, drew the attention of the UK establishment including the House of Commons and were eventually prosecuted under the Obscene Publications [A]ct.

Recent scholarly work on punk has challenged classic academic accounts of punk such as Dick Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style. Querying the legitimacy of such accounts has been a specific intention of the nascent Network of Punk Scholars, for example. This symposium, however, would offer a counter-challenge to post-Hebdigean scholars: what is the meaning and politics of punk? What have bands such as Crass done, beyond the ‘bricolage’ which Hebdige describes? What are (were) the limits to their efficacy as agitators? Was/is anarcho-punk really about more than music? If so, was music the best possible vehicle for the forms of agitation which Crass undertook?

Within the study day, in addition to presentations from members of the Punk Network of Scholars and any other interested parties, an afternoon panel combines the views of Penny Rimbaud (the vociferous drummer of Crass), Sarah MacHenry (Crass fan, 1in12 member and ex-Witchknot/Curse of Eve drummer) and George McKay (author of Senseless Acts of Beauty, discussing examples of correspondences he had with Crass in the early 1980s).

Themes for papers might include (but are not limited to):

  • Penny Rimbaud and George McKay in conference discussion, Salford 2008

    Penny Rimbaud and George McKay in conference discussion, Salford 2008

    Specific discussions of Crass

  • Discussions of other bands from the anarcho-punk milieu
  • Comparisons between anarcho-punk and other punk sub-genres
  • Anarcho-punk as a subculture
  • Anarcho-punk as a political ‘culture of resistance’
  • Continuities between hippies, punks, ‘eco-warriors’, ravers and so on
  • Music versus Politics
  • Anarchism versus Marxism
  • Underground versus Mainstream
  • Pacifism versus Violence.

The deadline for proposals for papers is Monday 15 April.

The symposium will be free of charge and will run all day. A free lunch will be provided. However, spaces are limited and interest is expected to be high so it is recommended that you book a place early to avoid disappointment. Those interested in giving a paper or wanting to book a place should contact Dr. Pete Dale at Oxford Brookes  University, pdale@brookes.ac.uk c/o School of Arts, Richard Hamilton Building, Headington Hill, OX3 0BP. Please do not hesitate to contact Pete if you are at all interested in this symposium event.

16th Culture and Power conference, IBACS/University of Murcia, October 2013, call for papers

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The 16th International Culture and Power Conference ‘Spaces’ will be held on October 2, 3, and 4, 2013, and hosted by IBACS (the Iberian Association for Cultural Studies) and the English Department at the University of Murcia, Spain.

The Conference’s special topic will be SPACE.

The 16th Culture and Power conference seeks to respond to the growing importance of space, spatial analysis, and localization in cultural studies. While locating cultural practice in concrete geographical and social coordinates has been a constant in the field, the last two decades have witnessed an extraordinary expansion in the ways space has been explored and made to signify in relation to such different social categories as: gender and sexuality; race and ethnicity; region, nation, and globalisation; the real and the virtual. Likewise, location and ground have become central to such temporal categories as public and private memory; history; deep and slow time; cultural and media archaeologies; storytelling.

IBACS spaces fotoWe are currently inviting 20-minute papers that will deal with the theory and representation of space in any of its manifestations, or that, in the process of studying particular texts or media, will take into account space in a significant manner. We are especially interested in proposals addressing—but not limited to—any of the following themes:

  • (Post)modern configurations of space
  • Urban and post-urban spatialities
  • Spaces of control, discipline and surveillance
  • Spaces of dissidence and transgression
  • Border spaces
  • Transnational spaces
  • Locations of intimacy
  • Sexuality and space
  • Queering space
  • Rethinking the rural
  • Spaces of (de)(neo)colonialization and Empire
  • Grounding memory and history
  • Spaces of fiction and fictional space
  • Media(ted) spaces: the specific spatialities of cinema, video, radio, television
  • Outer and Inner space
  • Acoustic space
  • Interactive space
  • Gaming, virtual locations, and the making and unmaking of identity
  • (De)territorialization
  • Spatial materialisms

The following keynote speakers have confirmed their participation:

  • Professor George McKay, Director, Communication, Cultural & Media Studies (CCM) Research Centre at the University of Salford
  • Professor John Storey, Director of the Centre for Research in Media and Cultural Studies, University of Sunderland
  • Professor Jane Rendell, Vice Dean of Research for the Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment, The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL
  • Professor Chris Weedon, Chair of the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory, Director of Postgraduate Studies and Head of the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory, Cardiff University.

Papers should be presented in English. A selection of conference papers will be considered for publication after the conference.

IBACS_logoProposals of 400 words should be submitted by 8th of April, 2013 and should be submitted electronically through the IBACS conference website. Notification of acceptance will be by the 8th of May.

Conference Convenors:

  • David Walton (President of IBACS) dwalton@um.es
  • Juan Antonio Suárez jsuarez@um.es

Why Occupy matters: a Social Movement Studies special issue

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Just published is an outstanding special issue of Social Movement Studies: Journal of Social, Cultural & Political Protest, on the Occupy movement (vol. 11, nos. 3-4: August-November 2012). This is a journal I co-founded a decade ago, though I stepped down from being an editor three or four years back, making way for new ideas and energy.

The special issue is edited by Jenny Pickerill and John Krinsky, and contains 22 short articles from academics, activists, critics—precisely the kind of activist/academic intervention we envisaged when we set the journal up, though I’m pretty sure we didn’t manage it with quite this degree of success. From the editors’ introduction to the special issue, EIGHT reasons why Occupy matters to scholars, since ‘Occupy has enthused and mobilised activists in new ways and has articulated that inequality is something we all can, and should, seek to remedy’:

  1. the core claim to space that Occupy asserts
  2. the power of the language of occupation
  3. the need to pay more attention to the importance of crafting and repeating slogans
  4. the politics of prefiguring a new society (and its contradictions)
  5. the implications of not making demands on the state
  6. the importance of ritualising and institutionalising protest
  7. the messy diffusion and mediation of a potentially global movement and finally
  8. why confrontation with the police is understood as important as a movement tactic.

Pickerill and Krinsky go on to argue:

As Occupy activists are once more arrested trying to start another camp outside the London Stock Exchange and others concede to eviction notices (May 2012), it is timely to reflect on why the actions of Occupy activists across the world matter. This is especially so, given their comparatively short existence (since September 2011). There are obvious precursors and parallels to the Occupy movement (if it can even be conceived as such a connected entity), but it is not a clear progression from the anti-capitalist actions of the 1990s nor necessarily the spirit of the Arab Spring spreading west. There are disjunctures and fissures between these other movements and moments and the ways in which Occupy was conceived and practised.
     To many it was the moment when resistance to the inequalities of capitalism finally emerged: a tipping point in which the unfairness of bank bailouts juxtaposed against rising personal poverty triggered a moment of clarity of the absurdity of the current economic and political system. Yet we have had these moments of clarity before. Indeed, there are those who claim Occupy to be a manifestation of a particular ideology (and therefore its historical tenet) and there is evidence of certain tints of socialism, Marxism and anarchism at different Occupy protests (Graeber) and indeed similarity with the 17th century Diggers (Lewycka). Others rightly have despaired at the ignorance of lessons already learnt about the tyranny of structurelessness or the exclusionary potential of consensus decision-making practices (such as hand gestures).