Strathclyde

Faculty Member, History

About

My research interests cover social and cultural change in the second half of the twentieth century, with specific interests in the role of the arts in society, cultural policy, and the construction of ‘the sixties’ alongside ongoing interests relating to youth gangs, violence, media representations of young people, and official responses to delinquency.

At the moment I'm working with Susan Batchelor and Alistair Fraser (both Sociology, University of Glasgow) on a project titled 'Narratives of Glasgow: Growing up in Easterhouse, 1960-1975'. We are interviewing youth workers, community activists, police, ministers, social workers, residents and ex-'gang members' about life in Easterhouse during the period in which it became represented as an area of gang violence.

I've also begun working on a project titled 'Maydays to Mayfests: Cultural Politics and the Popular Arts in Glasgow, c.1983-1997', which seeks to explore effects that interactions between cultural politics and the popular arts had on the development of culture as a tool for urban regeneration, shifts in cultural policy, and community engagement with culture in the period 1983 to 1997.

I'm based in the Scottish Oral History Centre at the University of Strathclyde, where I deliver training in oral history and provide support and direction on oral history projects to a range of audiences, within and outside HE. I'm also a regional representative for the UK Oral History Society and a Research Affiliate of the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling at Concordia University, Montreal.

My PhD,' Festival City: the Arts, Culture and Moral Conflict in Edinburgh, 1947-1967' was completed at the University of Dundee in 2007 (supervised by Prof. Callum G. Brown and examined by Prof. Robert Hewison) and is currently being reworked into a monograph.