Tony D. Sampson is Reader in Digital Culture and Communications at the University of East London. He has a PhD in social-cultural-digital contagion theory from the Sociology Department at the University of Essex. He is a former art student who re-entered higher education in the UK as a mature student in the mid-1990s after a long stint as a gigging musician. His career in education has moved through various disciplines and departments, including a maths and computing faculty, sociology department and school of digital media and design His publications include The Spam Book, coedited with Jussi Parikka (Hampton Press, 2009), Virality: Contagion Theory in the Age of Networks (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), The Assemblage Brain: Sense Making in Neuroculture (University of Minnesota Press, 2016), Affect and Social Media (Rowman and Littlefield, July 2018) and The Sleepwalker's Guide to Social Media (2020 with Polity Press).
Tony is the organizer and host of the Affect and Social Media conferences in the UK (see archive on this blog).
As a co-founder and co-director of the public engagement initiatives, Club Critical Theory (CCT) and the Cultural Engine Research Group (CERG), Tony has been project lead on a number of funded projects that bring impactful critical theories into the community and local political sphere to approach. These activities have included large conferences, symposia and informal lectures/workshops in pubs and community centres, co-organized with community groups and local authorities.
Tony occasionally blogs at: https://viralcontagion.wordpress.com/
Full academic profile: https://www.uel.ac.uk/Staff/s/tony-sampson
On March 24th we are supporting The Cultural Engine’s
Cherry Orchard Country Park – Future Events
Friday 24th March 2023, 7pm at the WI Hall Rochford (West Street)
An open session to discuss how future Events and Cultural programming at Cherry Orchard Country Park could support broad engagement with Culture and Heritage. With free food and drinks!
The Cultural Engine are holding an event to discuss the potential for an events programme at Cherry Orchard Country Park, and how this can play a key role in developing the heritage and cultural profile of the Rochford District.
We will have a number of speakers that will focus on the opportunities and share knowledge about Cherry Orchard Country Park. This will be followed by opportunities for anyone attending to share their thoughts, insights, ideas and concerns.
We are keen for anyone that has an interest in the Park to attend and get involved – wherever you live. Please get in contact for more information or if you would like to talk to us beforehand. Please also share with anyone else you think might be interested in attending.
‘GONNA BREAK OUT OF THIS CITY’ A SOUTHEND ON ZINE EXHIBITION EVENT IN COLLABORATION WITH CLUB CRITICAL THEORY AT THE IRONWORKS
Following on from Club Critical Theory’s (CCT) launch event for Graham’s Burnett’s Southend-on-Zine archive book at 21 in Oct 2022 , we will be at Southend’s Ironworks for this event on Thurs 30th March 7-9pm:
‘GONNA BREAK OUT OF THIS CITY’ A SOUTHEND ON ZINE EXHIBITION EVENT IN COLLABORATION WITH CLUB CRITICAL THEORY AT THE IRONWORKS, 90 SOUTHEND HIGH STREET, SOUTHEND ON SEA Thursday 30th March 2023 7pm – 9pm Info;
As part of the ‘Southend on Zine: Fifty years of voices and stories from Southend’s Underground and Alternative Press’ exhibition at The Ironworks this month, Club Critical Theory will be hosting an evening event remembering the scenes and places of Southend and the surrounding area. With a range of speakers and performers and some great Southend sounds we’ll be sharing and collecting stories of the rich heritage of venues, musical scenes and youth culture of this city, ranging from punk to jazz to indie to reggae to folk to mod to disco to goth to poetry to soul and everything in between… Have you got memories of The Railway, The Grand, The Pink Toothbrush, The Cliff, Reids, Focus, Grrrl Zine Fayre, Shades, The Goldmine, Preview Club, The Taste Experience, The Kursaal, Cult 13, The Swag Club, The Shrimpers, The Odyssey, Culture As A Dare, The Esplanade, Projection Records, The Sun Rooms or The Zero 6? Then this is an evening you can’t miss! This event is building on the conversations begun at the last Club Critical Theory event in October 2022, based around Graham Burnett’s ‘Southend on Zine’ publication, and is intended as the launch of a wider project documenting Southend’s rich subcultural history and it’s often long-forgotten venues, scenes, places and spaces – we need YOU to help make it happen, so see you there! After party at The Craftwerk to carry on the chats…
We start at 7pm. Join us for a drink and DJ sets from Al Johnson (Ship Full Of Bombs Radio, Middle Aged Spread, Alien Music, Control Voltage) and Andrew Branch inspired by 50 years of fanzine cultures in Southend.
Please join us for the main event centred around an open discussion on fanzine cultures and the publication of a new archive and reflection on zine cultures in Southend.
Confirmed special guests
Graham Burnett, the author/archiver of the new book, Southend-on-Zine, moved to Southend on Sea when he was eight years old in 1969, and has lived here ever since. He started his own fanzine New Crimes with a couple of friends in early 1980. Inspired by punk’s anarchistic ‘Do It Yourself’ attitude and has been been self-publishing ever since.
Syd Moore, a bestselling novelist and activist. Her novels are mystery thrillers inspired by myths from the English county of Essex. Syd was the founding editor of Level 4, an arts and culture magazine, and co-creator of Superstrumps, the game that reclaims female stereotypes and the founder of The Essex Girls Liberation Front. https://sydmoore.com/
Tim Burrows (chair), a journalist and author. Through the years he has written for a wide range of publications including the Guardian, New Statesman, Vice, the Telegraph Magazine, Dazed & Confused, the Quietus and Somesuch Stories. A recurring subject in his work is society, politics and Essex. He is from Southend. https://www.theguardian.com/profile/tim-burrows
Lu Williams (to be confirmed), an artist producing sculpture, print, zines, drawing, writing, video, events and workshops through research, community engagement, collecting and collaboration. They make work through the lens of queerness, neurodivergence and working classness. https://luwilliams.com/
Russ Bestley, editor of journal Punk & Post-Punk, published by Intellect Books. Hitsville UK: Punk in the Faraway Towns. Graphic Subcultures Research Hub convened by Russ Bestley, based at LCC. https://researchers.arts.ac.uk/78-russ-bestley
After the discussion, we will return to DJ sets – event closes at 10pm.
The event is hosted by the Cultural Engine Research Group (Tony Sampson, Andrew Branch and Giles Tofield) and supported by the University of East London.
We start at 7pm. Join us for a drink and DJ sets from Al Johnson (Ship Full Of Bombs Radio, Middle Aged Spread, Alien Music) and Andrew Branch inspired by 50 years of fanzine cultures in Southend.
Please join us for the main event centred around an open discussion on fanzine cultures and the publication of a new archive and reflection on zine cultures in Southend.
CERG are very excited to announce the soon to be published Southend on Zine project by Graham Burnett. We have written a foreword to this stunning collection of zines throughout the years – You can read our text below. As soon as it’s published, a link will appear on this blog.
Foreword
Kicking Cultures: How Fanzines Make the Alternative
The impetus for Graham Burnett’s wonderfully comprehensive curation of local fanzine culture apparently began after he attended one of our Club Critical Theory (CCT) events back in 2018. The modest aim of this event, and the others we organised between 2014-18 at the much-missed Railway Hotel, was to generate critical discussion about the usefulness (or otherwise) of theorising the everyday practices we find in local communities. In some ways, we might consider CCT as a kind of hybrid format of fanzine culture. We certainly concentrated on alternative culture, albeit, in our case, the focus was on the application of critical theory to a wider range of cultural and political concerns. CCT was evidently delivered in person rather than in print, nevertheless, like most groups with a vested interest in local culture, we felt our approach deserved a wider audience. For us, criticality is all too often restricted to the rarefied confines, norms and paywalls of the university lecture theatre, as well as the status-seeking antics of a predominately middle-class academic population. CCT was our alternative to this world.
There are other associations to be made between CCT and fanzine culture. All three of the founding members of CCT have participated in the local music scene to some degree at various points in the trajectories of our lives. We have played in bands, DJ’d and significantly contributed to fanzines. Subsequently, from our experiences, we know first-hand that passionate discussions about the ideas and values people care about are always going on in every pub, bar and venue you enter. Another aim of CCT was to provide some structure to these debates. We invited people to speak who had something interesting and relevant to say. One such speaker was the journalist Tim Burrows, an Essex native himself, working for TheGuardian at the time. In short, Tim’s writing documents Essex in alternative ways to the norm. His work presents a version of our much-maligned county that reaches out beyond the stereotypes of TOWIE and Essex Boy gangsters that tend to dominate mainstream media accounts. His interest in Essex resonates in many ways with the aims of CCT. Indeed, it was the interaction between Tim and Graham at this particular CCT event (on media demonisation and governmental neglect of coastal towns) that provided the inspiration for the fanzine project. Which is to say, beyond the clichés of seaside culture; beyond the tourist assets of Southend Pier, the amusement arcades and variety show venues, there were seemingly misplaced alternative histories of local culture. Graham’s conclusion at the time was that if these alternative cultures were to be acknowledged by a wider public, then, he needed to document them!
And now, over three years later, in this brilliant publication, Graham’s extensive documentation project has finally been realised. So, as critical theorists, our job in this foreword is to briefly ponder over what Graham’s efforts might tell us about the practices that have made Southend and its surrounding areas such a vibrant space for alternative cultures. One approach to this dynamic might draw on another CCT contributor, the historian Matt Worley, who takes his lead from the notable cultural theorist, Raymond Williams. For Matt, culture can be ‘bottom up’. It can be, as such, what Williams calls ordinary. We might say that the ordinariness of alternative culture emerges because people are impatient to make their voices heard and impart their own take on the world they inhabit.
Another approach needs to consider that all culture is produced. Culture is never a given; it is made. Importantly, then, the creative aspect of alternative culture does not occur in isolation. There needs to be a counter force! As the title of one of the fanzines discussed and archived in this collection makes clear, Southend’s music scene was not only Alive in the 1980s. It was Kicking too! Along these lines, the production of alternative culture needs to be negotiated in opposition to a standardised model of culture; it needs to importantly kick against the norm. But what is the norm that the alternative kicks against? As Matt would readily acknowledge, the production of alternative culture occurs against the backdrop of a relentless reiteration of what we might call official history. Exactly what these official histories amount to is, unsurprisingly, contested in critical theory. On one hand, we might consider them authorised histories, sanctioned by established agencies of the State who have a vested interest in promoting a sanitised version of the world that accords with the values and beliefs that maintain hierarchies of power. In some cases, these are histories of the so-called highbrow cultures one might experience through a ‘good’ education. In others, they are the result of neoliberal economics and crass commercialisation. Culture of this kind is made by local authorities interested in promoting bland tourist economies or local newspapers reporting on culture alongside column space for an advert for double glazing. On the other hand, though, these official histories seem to become further intertwined with the productions of discursive formations of power, which can, sequentially, produce their own stereotypical subjects. For example, dominant media culture can render working class communities, like those living in Southend, as somehow lacking in supposed cultural capital. Condensed in this way, Essex boys and girls become ideal fodder for such things as reality TV, poverty porn and low budget gangster movies.
Nonetheless, wherever we locate the dominant norm, people can become alternatively inspired by what they learn through direct interactions with their local environment. For instance, as an alternative to experiencing culture through the mediation of a local authority press release in TheEvening Echo, people can simultaneously negotiate their own experiences in contrast to the normative assumptions they are presented with. Profoundly, then, to be alive; to even exist, alterative cultures need to kick against a norm. As follows, Graham’s documentation of alternative fanzine culture works like an underground press since it only really makes sense if there’s a ‘mainstream’ to kick against. In other words, there is no alterative radical underground culture without a mainstream conservative set of conventions to rally against.
The recollections in this archive are mostly accounts from people producing their own kind of kicking cultures. These are people doing it for themselves, seizing the initiative, and often in less-than-ideal material circumstances. This is because the production of alternative fanzine culture necessitates innovation and street-savvy approaches to resources with near to zero budgets. Certainly, the relation between bottom-up cultural production and cost-cutting exploratory uses of technologies, like early photocopying machines, Letraset transfers and DTP, warrants its own alterative history. This kind of cultural labour requires a highly motivated and skilled worker with an extraordinary degree (not a BA!) of visual creativity. The accounts in this publication of people looking back on what motivated them to produce their fanzines is in itself a fascinating archive of alternative cultural enterprise. In an age when there’s a design app to reproduce every established aesthetic take, it’s remarkable to be reminded of what people with drive, ambition, and a little kick can do on a limited budget. We enjoyed the ride, we’re confident you will too.
Andrew Branch and Tony Sampson
Co-founders, along with Giles Tofield, of the Cultural Engine Research Group, incorporating Club Critical Theory
After a long break in our events programme, due to the pandemic, CERG are back with the first in a series of Free Market Radical events.
The first event takes place in Rochford, Essex on Friday 10th Sept where our guest speaker, Jon Cruddas MP, will help frame the localism debate (for details see postcard below). This is also an opportunity for people in the town to discuss the future of Rochford.
Free Market Radicals is a project that is focused on developing good ideas and providing support to local partners who want to do good things. It is focused on understand what ‘localism’ means given the challenges faced by towns and villages across the UK today. A lot has happened in the last few years, and certainly since Covid-19 that has changed the context for town and village centres. We are keen to share reports, concepts, ideas and theory that may be of interest for people that want to take action, and some of it may be helpful in making a case for support or investment.
The Cultural Engine Research Group picked up two awards for our community engagement work in June at the University of East London. The first was for ‘Glocal’ Engagement. The second for contribution to the local community through research and project work.
This Silvertown Session invites you to debate Youth in the Community from a range of viewpoints, including strategies for youth empowerment, critical thinking on youth crime prevention practice and neighbourhood policing, as well as local perspectives from community leaders on youth safety. We will also hear from Newman Council about the Mayor’s Youth Safety Board and invite you to have your say on these policies.
Join the Debate
Youth culture can play an incredibly important role in sustaining
and reinventing the local community. Youth can bring together and refresh
communities.
In the past decade, local communities have seen funding cuts to
many youth services and crime prevention agencies supposed to help young people
flourish and maintain stability in the community. The current rise in youth
related violence is arguably a symptom of this decline leaving all of
the community feeling increasingly unsafe.
Can this decline be reversed? There are some encouraging signs.
The Mayor of Newham, Rokhsana Fiaz, has ‘made youth safety a
major priority’ in the borough. In 2018 she announced the launch of Youth
Citizen Assemblies, enhanced activities and transformed services, including
doubling the number of youth hubs. The local authority says they are ‘listening
to… young people about their experiences living in the borough,’ asking them
what they need to make them feel safe.
Come and join the debate on 28th November
Speakers
Prof William ‘Lez’ Henry (AKA British Reggae Deejay Lezlee Lyrix) was born in Lewisham, of Jamaican Parentage. He is a writer, poet and community activist. Lez has lectured nationally and internationally, featured in numerous documentaries and current affairs television and radio programmes and have written and published extensively on many of the concerns of the African Diaspora in the UK.
Dr Anthony Gunter, Principal Lecturer in Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of East London and author of Race, Gangs and Violence: Policy, Prevention and Policing (2017), and Black Youth ‘Road Culture and Badness in an East London Neighbourhood (2010). He worked as a community and youth work practitioner for many years prior to entering academia.
Frances Winter is a Senior Policy Officer at the London Borough of Newham, where she focuses on policy relating to children and young people, and has this year been supporting the Mayor of Newham’s Youth Safety Board
Throughout
the programme there will be a creche and activities activities for
young people provided by Fight for a Peace, RDLAC and the Woodcraft
Folk.
Talks begin in main hall
7.30pm Introduction to Silvertown Sessions (Andrew Branch and Joy Caron-Canter) 5mins
The next In the City seminar is at UEL’s USS building on Weds November 6th
The Municipal Commons: Urban governance and the idea of community
After nearly a decade of austerity-led neglect, many local urban communities are struggling to cope with the erosion of important services that help to bring them together. Amid all the gloom, however, there are a few encouraging signs on the horizon. Local authorities like Preston and Newham have engaged with the concept of community wealth building and its aim to produce inclusive and seemingly democratic local economies [1]. Similarly, while under economic pressure to grow student numbers and become global players, universities are also being asked to consider how their research can engage with, and impact on, the places in which they are located [2]. Certainly, in contrast to the metrics intended to gauge the global reach of academic work, these institutions need to…
Was the cultural commentator, Jacques Peretti correct
when he accused retro obsessed ‘cultural necrophiliacs’ of vampirically
draining subcultures of their youthful vitality? In enduring the
nostalgic proclamations of these middle-aged reactionaries as they
assert ownership of a self-proclaimed legacy of radical politics, what
does it mean to witness yet another launch event for an
institutionalised celebration of an ‘underground’, ‘edgy’ youth tribe?
Conversely, how can current dispossessed youth acquire an authorial
voice when its public value is limited to news fodder for a rabid
right-wing press cynically seeking scapegoats in austerity Britain? Who
would want to be young now?
This latest Cultural Engine Research Group event, chaired by Dr
Andrew Branch (CERG, UEL), will address these questions by focusing on
the challenges and opportunities facing curators of British youth
subcultures and how we might usefully define the concept itself. Invited
speakers will debate how curatorial bodies can reflexively engage with
academics whose work documents the politics of youth subcultural
practice, past and present, and why these legacies matter.
Speakers
Iain Aitch Iain Aitch is an author, journalist and artist whose
work looks at the social history of the working class. He is a Director
of Rendezvous Projects and is currently working on a book and exhibition
about beauty queens. Of particular relevance for this event, Iain has
been artist and writer in residence at Turner Contemporary, Margate,
producing a photographic show about subcultures as a} result of working
with those living in the town and identifying with its subversive
heritage. This work was shown alongside work by Banksy, Bowie and
Warhol.
Dr Andrew Calcutt Since graduating 40 years ago, Andrew Calcutt
has been a record producer (praised by radio djs John Peel and Charlie
Gillett), magazine journalist (his byline appeared in Arena, Blueprint,
Living Marxism and The Modern Review, to name but a few), broadcaster
(from BBC Radio Four’s Moral Maze to Channel 4’s Zeitgeist), digital
pioneer (commissioning editor for Channel Cyberia and award-winning
Cscape), and prolific author of a host of books on culture and society,
including Fictitious Capital: London After recession, White Noise, Cult
Fiction, BritCult, and his own ‘cult classic’ from the 1990s, Arrested
Development: pop culture and the erosion of adulthood, which has just
been reissued by Bloomsbury. Andrew teaches at all levels of the
University of East London’s BA Journalism programme. His research
interests include the regeneration of East London and the remaking of
journalism. Twenty years ago he coined the term ‘hackademic’ to describe
his own transition from journalism to academia.
Dr William Henry Born in Lewisham of Jamaican parentage, William
Henry DJs as British Reggae icon Lezlee Lyrix, as well as being a
writer, poet and community activist. Lez’s experience of formal
education has taken him from access course student to teaching and
researching at the University of West London in his current role as
Associate Professor of sociology and anthropology. He is what Gramsci
would have identified as an organic intellectual. Lez also has a passion
for karate, which reminds us of Pierre Bourdieu’s definition of
sociology as a martial art: a tool used by the dominated to defend
themselves against the dominant.
Dr Sarah Raine Sarah Raine is a Research Fellow at the Birmingham
Centre for Media and Cultural Research (BCMCR). Having completed a
funded PhD at BCU on the contemporary northern soul scene, she is now an
AHRC Creative Economy Engagement Fellow, working in partnership with
Cheltenham Jazz Festival on their Keychange (PRS Foundation) initiative
pledge. Sarah is a founding member and co-manages Riffs, a journal run
by the staff and students of the BCMCR. She is also the Review Editor
for Popular Music History.
Prof Matt Worley Author of numerous highly-rated journal articles
and books, Matt Worley’s (Reading University) interests lie in the field
of subcultural histories, and how British youth practice has responded
to the divergent political discourse shaping post-war Britain. His most
recent book is No future: punk, politics and British youth culture,
1976-1984. Matt has also worked regularly outside of the academy,
collaborating recently with the artist, Scott King on the project,
Crash! Nostalgia for the Jet Age. His current project is curating the
complex histories of British fanzine cultures during and beyond
first-wave punk.
Music and visuals on the night. Food avaliable to order, with private outdoor space and bar open until 12am.
Community Engagement Initiative 