A long time ago I looked at Lesbian and Gays Support the Miners for my Phd. Although I included LGSM in my book Gay Men and the Left I had always felt that it was an important story of the relationship between the politics of sexuality and the history of the Miners’ strike that needed … Read more
There seems to be a lot of anarcho-punk knocking around historians. There have been a number of academic conferences and events around the politics and aesthetics of anarcho-punk, increasing numbers of academic publications, online resources, documentaries, homages, and the … Read more
The most exciting thing about moving into the second year of the Observing the 80s project is seeing how people are using the resources.
Project hero Prof Stephen Brooke has been inviting his students at York University, Toronto, to engage with the resources as part of their coursework for History 3490: 20th Century Britain in … Read more
At the end of April I’m going to be presenting at the History After Hobsbawm Conference as part of a panel on Marxist and post-Marxist social history. Fittingly, I will be presenting a collaborative collective project on protest Political Protest and the Police: Young People in Brighton that I produced with Read more
One of the most exciting things about the Observing the 80s project is never quite knowing how and why it will be used. As a team we always felt that it was important that the raw data should be an open as possible in more ways than one. Not only is everything available under a … Read more
Mass Observation has taken our work in many directions but in May last year we found ourselves entering a Prison…
( Image, Inside Lewes Prison – The Argus)
We had the idea of working with prisoners at Lewes, because back in 2011 we had put out a call to Prison Librarians nationally to encourage … Read more
Image courtesy of UCU Sussex, Lewis Nielson one of the students currently facing disciplinary action at Sussex.
Youtube film courtesy of verymovingpictures
This post is a little bit different from usual Observing the Eighties posts, although it is certainly informed by the diversity and possibilities of our project.
I don’t usually engage with the autobiographical in … Read more
Here is a recording of last Summer’s debate on Counterculture at the ICA which I shoehorned the 1980s into.
About a year ago I posted the Observing the Eighties first Christmas message. We were still in the snagging stage then. A year later the project is up, running and being used in ways we hadn’t even imagined. It seems appropriate to hand this year’s Christmas Message over to someone who has something new to … Read more
On Friday 8th November 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 … Read more
