I am a member of the Editorial Board for the scholarly journal DIY, Alternative Cultures & Society. A week or so back was the annual meeting of the journal which includes a report from the publisher, SAGE. The board met in Porto, during the excellent biennial KISMIF conference, but alas I was online, from home in Norwich. It was a good report, and the journal is going from strength to strength under its editors, Profs Andy Bennett and Paula Guerra.
But, since this website ands blogpost are, y’know, All About Me, these are the two slides from the publisher’s presentation that jumped out of my screen.
I am ofc pleased about this. What is that article about? Here’s the abstract.
This article offers a reconceptualisation of the DIY/punk nexus, both to challenge the standard critical narrative of punk as originary DIY culture and to liberate the broader practice of DIY from the limits of punk. It critically traces the development of the discourse of DIY both in early British punk and in what has become punk studies. This includes identifying competing terms to DIY used in the early scene. In its challenge to the scholarly orthodoxy, the central section interrogates aspects of punk that are regularly and repeatedly presented as evidence of its DIY-ness: punk mediation, instrumentation, and participation. These three then constitute a context for a more detailed critical interrogation of arguably the most widely accepted DIY/punk practice, the independent or self-produced record, which is also here read as non-DIY. The article concludes by widening the critical gaze via a call for DIY to undergo a process of depunking.
Since it is open access, you can read the entire article here for free.
TLDR? Everyone says punk was the high point of DIY culture; no it wasn’t.