Recent publications

For a full list of publications by individuals associated with the Centre go to People and click on their names and go to the Publications tab on their profiles.

  • Lifestyle revolution: How taste changed class in late 20th-century Britain

    Highmore, Ben (2023) Lifestyle revolution: How taste changed class in late 20th-century Britain. Manchester: Manchester University Press (ISBN: 978-1-5261-0882-1).

    In postwar Britain, journalists and politicians predicted that the class system would not survive a consumer culture where everyone had TVs and washing machines, and where more and more people owned their own homes. They were to be proved hopelessly wrong. Lifestyle revolution charts how class culture, rather than being destroyed by mass consumption, was remade from flat-pack furniture, Mediterranean cuisine and lifestyle magazines. Novelists, cartoonists and playwrights satirised the tastes of the emerging middle classes, while sociologists claimed that an entire population was suffering from 'status anxiety', but underneath it all, a new order was being constructed out of duvets, quiches and mayonnaise, easy chairs from Habitat, white emulsion paint and ubiquitous pine kitchen tables. More than just a world of symbolic goods, this was an intimate environment alive with new feelings and attitudes.

    "Lifestyle revolution is a brilliant corrective to our lazy habit of condescending to the recent past by reducing it to the eccentric, the uncool and the kitsch. Through his richly evocative readings of chicken bricks, quiches, self-assembly furniture, duvets and dinghies, Ben Highmore tells the unwritten story of our collective life. Blending the personal and the political with great skill, this book is a joy to read." - Joe Moran, Professor of English and Cultural History, Liverpool John Moores University, UK

  • How 1950s bombsites in the UK were turned into adventure playgrounds

    Highmore, Ben (2023) 'How 1950s bombsites in the UK were turned into adventure playgrounds'. The Conversation.

    In 1946 the children’s rights campaigner and landscape architect Lady Allen of Hurtwood visited the Emdrup junk playground (Skrammellegepladsen Emdrup) in Denmark. Lady Allen returned to the UK and wrote an article for the magazine Picture Post, that featured photographs of the Danish junk playground under the headline, “Why Not Use Our Bombsites Like This?” The idea caught on. 

  • In defence of the 1970s, the ‘decade that taste forgot’

    Highmore, Ben (2022) 'In defence of the 1970s, the "decade that taste forgot"’. The Conversation.

    I once appeared in a television series about technology in the home during the last three decades of the 20th century. I wanted to suggest that the UK in the 1970s should be remembered as a decade of relative social equality and contentment. But I couldn’t make this argument because the production company had already bought the media rights for showing news footage from the so-called “winter of discontent” (1978-79). “Everyone knows that the 1970s was awful,” the producer seemed to be saying, “so that’s what we’re going to run with.”

  • Consumer Activism: Promotional Culture and Resistance

    Lekakis, Eleftheria J. (2022) Consumer Activism Promotional Culture and Resistance. London: SAGE Publications (ISBN: 9781529784909).

    Consumption and resistance are entwined. From buying fair-trade, to celebrity advocates for social causes, to subvertising and anti-consumerist grassroots movements, consumer activism is now a key part of our fight for social and environmental justice.

    This book is a comprehensive exploration of the complexities and dilemmas of using the marketplace as an arena for politics. It goes beyond simply buying or boycotting to critically explore how individuals, collectives, corporations and governments do politics with and through consumption.

    Impassioned and always accessible, Eleftheria Lekakis explores:

    • The media and economic logics which privilege elite activists.
    • The real opportunities to resist and redirect promotional culture.
    • Consumer activism as collective and community-building.
    • The politicisation of celebrity influencers.
    • The centrality of digital media technology.
    • A range of transnational case studies pushing the field beyond the Global North.

    Consumer Activism: Promotional Culture and Resistance covers the full breadth of theory and practice you need to know. It is an essential resource for understanding, researching and engaging with the global phenomenon of consumer activism.

    "A crucial intervention to both critical studies of consumption and research into activism. It authoritatively explores the complex and multiplying links between branding and neoliberal culture, consumer practices and social justice." Professor Mehita Iqani, Stellenbosch University

  • The Burden of Conviviality: British Bangladeshi Muslims Navigating Diversity in London, Luton and Birmingham

    Redclift, Victoria, Rajina, Fatima, & Rashid, Naaz (2022) 'The Burden of Conviviality: British Bangladeshi Muslims Navigating Diversity in London, Luton and Birmingham'. Sociology, 56(6), 1159–1175.

    This article, which has been nominated for the SAGE prize for Innovation and Excellence, considers the convivial turn in migration and diversity studies, and some of its silences. Conviviality has been conceptualised by some as the ability to be at ease in the presence of diversity. However, insufficient attention has been paid to considering who is affectively at ease with whose differences or, more particularly, what the work of conviviality requires of those marked as other vis-a-vis European white normativity. Drawing on in-depth qualitative interviews with British Bangladeshi Muslims in London, Luton and Birmingham, we argue that a focus on ‘ease in the presence of diversity’ obscures the ‘burden of conviviality’ carried by some, but not others. We discuss three key types of burden that emerged from our data: the work of education and explanation, the work of understanding racism, and quite simply the work of ‘appearing unremarkable’.

  • Young Blood, Old Soul

    James, Malcolm (2022) 'Young Blood, Old Soul'. Tribune

    Little Simz is a traveller, and a sonic one. The sample, ‘you can’t see us, but you can hear us’, ends her third album Grey Area — a reference to the pirate radio shout outs and call ins, and so too to the sonic modality of her work. While many of her contemporaries are led by the visual, her music resonates with the past and vibrates with politics. Little Simz's introverted, thoughtful music brings together the sounds of London's recent past and propels it into the future.

  • COVID Publics and Black Lives Matter: Posts, placards and posters

    Ruiz, Pollyanna (2022)COVID Publics and Black Lives Matter: Posts, placards and posters’. Javnost – The Public, Journal of the European Institute for Communication and Culture. Special Issue,1-15.

    This article examines the ways in which COVID has reconfigured the boundaries between online and offline, as well as public and private spaces. The threat posed by the global pandemic meant that public spaces quickly emptied, work zoomed into the home, and windows became notice boards filled with moraleboosting messages. Every Thursday, UK doorsteps became the space in which private individuals emerged from their own homes to express their gratitude to key workers in general and the NHS in particular. Whilst posters calling for better provision of PPE occasionally appeared in people’s windows, online talk about Booing for Boris never fully materialised into offline action, and the doorstep continued to function as the threshold between public and private space. However, the killing of George Floyd radically disrupted these threshold spaces. Information about Black Lives Matter demonstrations leapt from activists’ digital networks into the hyper-local and granular chains of communication established by COVID mutual aid groups, grassroots communities of care and small clusters of neighbours. Similarly, the slogans which had been circulating within activist networks for years quickly appeared on the placards of protesters as they moved through city spaces, before finally settling in people’s windows alongside rainbow posters urging neighbours to “stay safe.” When—on the first Thursday after the final NHS clap—many individuals chose to relinquish the comforting anonymity afforded by mass demonstrations and take the knee on their doorstep, they called their neighbours, as well as their government, into a dialogue about race. In this way, the windowpane and the doorstep finally became a dynamic space which both separated and connected online and offline as well as public and private spaces.

  • Mutualism, massive and the city to come: jungle pirate radio in 1990s London

    Cordell, Tom and James, Malcolm (2021) 'Mutualism, massive and the city to come: jungle pirate radio in 1990s London'. Soundings, 77. pp. 109-120. ISSN 0038-1861

    One icy Friday in December 1991 Londoners woke up to find themselves breathing in a throwback from the city’s past. Overnight, a thick toxic smog had wrapped itself around the city, covering the streets and reaching out into the countryside, where it was held in by the chalk hills that edge the capital’s sprawl.

    But that weekend, creeping through the empty spaces of London and the surrounding countryside, were radio waves carrying fragments of the future. Anyone flicking across their FM dial could hear it in the gaps between the BBC and commercial stations - the Friday-to-Sunday broadcasts of a new kind of music, illegally beamed across the city from improvised studios in empty flats, via aerials on tower block rooftops. A unique sound - breakbeats, live spoken vocals, and bass lines. Jungle!

  • Sonic Intimacy: Reggae sound systems, jungle pirate radio and grime YouTube music videos

    James, Malcolm (2020) Sonic Intimacy: reggae sound systems, jungle pirate radio and grime YouTube music videos. London: Bloomsbury (ISBN: 978-1501320712 hbk; 978-1501320729 pbk).

    'Sonic intimacy' is a key concept through which sound, human and technological relations can be assessed in relation to racial capitalism. What is sonic intimacy, how is it changing and what is at stake in its transformation, are questions that should concern us all. Through an analysis of alternative music cultures of the Black Atlantic (reggae sound systems, jungle pirate radio and grime YouTube music videos), Malcolm James critically shows how sonic intimacy pertains to modernity's social, psychic, spatial and temporal movements. This book explores what is urgently at stake in the development of sonic intimacy for human relations and alternative black and anti-capitalist public politics.

    "Sonic Intimacy is an extraordinary exploration of the intricate relationships between sound, space and sociality. It charts a crucial but wholly under-explored slice of our recent cultural history with theoretical acuity and political sensitivity; making a significant contribution to the study of music culture in general, to contemporary cultural studies and to the genealogy of the sound system assemblage in particular." - Jeremy Gilbert, Professor of Cultural and Political Theory, University of East London, UK

  • “Look at What We Made”: Communicating Subcultural Value on London’s Southbank

    Ruiz, Pollyanna, Snelson, Tim, Madgin, Rebecca & Webb, David (2020)“Look at What We Made”: Communicating Subcultural Value on London’s Southbank’. Cultural Studies, 392-417. 

    This article sets out key findings of an interdisciplinary Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded project that uses Long Live Southbank’s (LLSB) successful campaign to retain London’s Southbank Undercroft for subcultural use – skateboarding, BMXing, graffiti art, etc. – as a case study to generate discussions about young people’s experiences and engagements with (sub)cultural heritage and political activism. At the heart of this inquiry is the perceived contradiction between the communicative practices of subcultures and social protest movements: the former typically understood to be internally oriented and marked by strong boundary maintenance, and the latter, to be successful, to be externally oriented to a diverse range of publics. In explaining the skaters/campaigner’s negotiation of this contradiction, we look to inclusive and everyday concepts. In eschewing the exclusionary and contestatory language of (post)subcultural and spatial theories, this article proposes new frameworks for thinking about the political nature of young people’s bodily knowledge and experiences, and the implications of this for the communication of (sub)cultural value.

  • Power revealed: Masked police officers in the public sphere

    Ruiz, Pollyanna (2017) ‘Power revealed: Masked police officers in the public sphere'. Visual Communication. Sage. pp. 299-314 

    Demonstrations which spill over into conflict have always required the police to distinguish between members of the public exercising their right to protest and members of the public engaging in criminal activity, i.e. between ‘good protesters’ and ‘bad protesters’. Journalists who depended heavily upon official sources when constructing news narratives have historically reproduced these distinctions and, as a result, images of violent protesters have frequently been used to delegitimize their claims. However a number of high profile investigations into the policing of protest in the UK mean that police officers are also being subjected to distinctions made by inquiry panels between ‘good police officers’ and ‘bad police officers’. Thus a new trope is emerging in popular print and online news narratives in which the actions of the police rather than protesters are becoming the object of the public’s attention.

    These dynamics are explored with reference to the ways in which confrontations between protesters and police were pictured in the aftermath of Ian Tomlinson’s death. The article focuses in particular on the way in which images highlighting acts of concealment became a significant strand in online and offline news narrative as they developed in the years between Tomlinson’s death in 2009 and the civil suit brought against PC Harwood in 2012. The author argues that images of police officers in militarized helmets and without identity tags become synonymous with the opacity that initially characterized the police force’s response to the death of Tomlinson. She concludes by suggesting that this lack of transparency contrasted with the extended visibility offered by mobile phone footage of the demonstration and contributed to the police’s inability to frame G20 protesters as violent agitators.

  • Just a girl: thinking intersectionally about ‘the Muslim girl’ and writing against culture

    Rashid, Naaz (2016) 'Just a girl: thinking intersectionally about ‘the Muslim girl’ and writing against culture'. Young, 24 (3). pp. 255-269. ISSN 1103-3088

    This article is based on empirical work which examined the inclusion of women and girls in the UK’s Preventing Violent Extremism (PVE) agenda. It focuses specifically on a road show designed to raise the academic aspirations of Muslim girls in order to improve Muslim women’s performance in the labour market. It begins by illustrating how global development discourses of girls’ empowerment (the ‘Girl Effect’) permeate the rationale for the road shows. The article interrogates these overarching narratives through analysis of interview material and participant observation. First, it highlights the diversity amongst Muslim girls in terms of region, social class and ethnicity. Second, it interrogates the rationale for the project, addressing other factors such as discrimination which also affect Muslim women’s position in the labour market. It concludes by stressing the importance of ‘writing against culture’ and thinking intersectionality about ‘Muslim girls’, not only as Muslims but as ‘girls who are Muslim’.

  • Veiled threats: representing the Muslim woman in public policy discourses

    Rashid, Naaz (2016) Veiled threats: representing the Muslim woman in public policy discourses. Policy Press, Bristol (ISBN: 978-1447325178).

    As Muslim women continue to be a focus of media-led debate, Naaz Rashid uses original scholarship and empirical research to examine how Muslim women are represented in policy discourse and how the trope of the Muslim woman is situated within national debates about Britishness, the death of multiculturalism and global concerns over international terrorism.

    Analysing the relevance of class, citizenship status, and regional differences, Veiled threats is a valuable addition to the burgeoning literature on Muslims in the UK post 9/11. It will be of interest to academics and students in public and social policy, race equality, gender, and faith-based policy.