In recent times, much has been written about consumers' co-responsibility for addressing environmental problems, with consumers expected to steer or regulate their consumption in an instrumental wa...

Green Consumption Life-politics, risk and contradictions

This paper’s focus is what we call ‘autonomous geographies’ -spaces where there is a desire to constitute non-capitalist, collective forms of politics, identity and citizenship. These are created t...

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Notes towards autonomous geographies: creation, resistance and self-management as survival tactics:

Most conceptions of public and private life within political and social theory do not adequately consider the networks or fluidities involved in contemporary social relations. The distinction of public and private is often conceived of as statically `regional' in character. This article, following an extensive analysis of the multiple meanings of the `public' and `private', criticizes such a static conception and maintains that massive changes are occurring in the nature of both public and private life and especially of the relations between them. We consider flows and networks that enable mobility between and across apparent publics and privates. These mobilities are both physical (in the form of mobile people, objects and hybrids of humans-in-machines) and informational (in the form of electronic communication via data, visual images and texts). We consider the transformations of public and private life that have arisen from `complex' configurations of place and space: the dominant system of car-centred automobility whose spatial fluidities are simultaneously private and public; and various globalizations through the exposure of `private' lives on public screens and the public screening of mediatized events. These mobile, machinic examples demonstrate the limitations of the static, regional conceptualizations of public and private life developed within much social and political theory, and suggest that this divide may need relegation to the dustbin of history.

Mobile Transformations of 'Public' and 'Private' Life.

Trial by space for a ‘radical rural’: Introducing alternative localities, representations and lives

This article is concerned with the complex relations between institutional politics and aesthetics in oppositional forms of popular culture. Indie is a contemporary genre which has its roots in punk's institutional and aesthetic challenge to the popular music industry but which, in the 1990s, has become part of the ‘mainstream’ of British pop. Case studies of two important ‘independents’, Creation and One Little Indian, are presented, and the aesthetic and institutional politics of these record companies are analysed in order to explore two related questions. First, what forces lead ‘alternative’ independent record companies towards practices of professionalization and of partnership/collaboration with major corporations? Second, what are the institutional and political-aesthetic consequences of such professionalization and partnership? In response to the first question, the article argues that pressures towards professionalization and partnership should be understood not only as an abandonment of previou...

Indie: The institutional politics and aesthetics of a popular music genre

McKay takes us on a vivid journey through the endlessly creative counterworld of punks, ravers, travellers, tribes, squatters and direct-action protesters of every kind.
"The secret history of the last two decades.' Jon Savage

Senseless acts of beauty: cultures of resistance since the sixties

Gathered here together for the first time is a collection of 12 in-depth and reflective pieces by activists and other key figures in [Britain's] DiY culture, telling their own stories and histories. From the environmentalist to the video activist, the raver to tthe road protestor, the neo-pagan to the anarcho-capitalist, the authors demonstrate how the counterculture of the 1990s offers a vibrant, provocative and positive alternative to institutionalized unemployment and the restricted freedoms and legislated pleasures of UK plc.

Diy culture: party & protest in nineties Britain

'War is the natural occupation of man … war-and gardening.'
Winston Churchill to Siegfried Sassoon, 1918

In the common public perception, contemporary gardening is understood as suburban, as leisure activity, as television makeover opportunity. Its origins are seen as religious or spiritual (Garden of Eden), military (the clipped lawn, the ha-ha and defensive ditches), aristocratic or monarchical (the stately home, the Royal Horticultural Society). Radical Gardening travels an alternative route, through history and across landscape, linking propagation with propaganda. For everyday garden life is not only patio, barbecue, white picket fence, topiary, herbaceous border.… From window box to veggie box, from political plot to flower power, this book uncovers and celebrates moments, movements, gestures, of a people's approach to gardens and gardening. It weaves together garden history with the counterculture, stories of individual plants with discussion of government policy, the social history of campaign groups with the pleasure and dirt of hands in the earth, as well as media, pop and art references, to offer an informing and inspiring new take on an old subject.

Radical Gardening: Politics, Idealism and Rebellion in the Garden

In Circular Breathing, George McKay, a leading chronicler of British countercultures, uncovers the often surprising ways that jazz has accompanied social change during a period of rapid transformation in Great Britain. Examining jazz from the founding of George Webb’s Dixielanders in 1943 through the burgeoning British bebop scene of the early 1950s, the Beaulieu Jazz Festivals of 1956–61, and the improvisational music making of the 1960s and 1970s, McKay reveals the connections of the music, its players, and its subcultures to black and antiracist activism, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, feminism, and the New Left. In the process, he provides the first detailed cultural history of jazz in Britain.

McKay explores the music in relation to issues of whiteness, blackness, and masculinity—all against a backdrop of shifting imperial identities, postcolonialism, and the Cold War. He considers objections to the music’s spread by the “anti-jazzers” alongside the ambivalence felt by many leftist musicians about playing an “all-American” musical form. At the same time, McKay highlights the extraordinary cultural mixing that has defined British jazz since the 1950s, as musicians from Britain’s former colonies—particularly from the Caribbean and South Africa—have transformed the genre. Circular Breathing is enriched by McKay’s original interviews with activists, musicians, and fans and by fascinating images, including works by the renowned English jazz photographer Val Wilmer. It is an invaluable look at not only the history of jazz but also the Left and race relations in Great Britain.

George McKay

Papers

Senseless acts of beauty: cultures of resistance since the sixties

Diy culture: party & protest in nineties Britain

Radical Gardening: Politics, Idealism and Rebellion in the Garden

Circular Breathing: The Cultural Politics of Jazz in Britain

The Pop Festival