2026Poem
Writing · 2004 — present
Articles, essays & reviews.
New writing, poems and essays, followed by journal articles, book chapters, and the occasional review — each with its full abstract. Click on for PDFs, journal pages, or open-access copies on Goldsmiths Research Online.
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Selected publications
Articles & Essays
2020Article
Culture and Religion
Astrology, modernity and the project of self-identity
This speculative and interdisciplinary article about Western and UK astrology recognises a fluid craft steeped in pre-modern 'magical' symbolism accommodating, to differing degrees, the modern, linear and literal. Astrology may appear detached from its traditional religious foundation and has struggled for cultural legitimacy, but it offers a spiritual understanding, self-knowledge and self-determination. It divines a range of symbolic possibilities that encourages elective biography and instructs the project of self-identity, assuaging the existential need to find meaning and questioning established 'rational' cultural practices.
DissonanceDivinationLegitimacySelf-reflexivitySpiritualityTrans-rational
2017Article
Space and Culture
Highgate Cemetery heterotopia: A Creative Counterpublic Space
Highgate Cemetery is analysed as a heterotopia through three articulated spaces: first, a public space organising individual and social relationships with death; second, a creative space materialising memory and cultural capital; and third, a celebritised counterpublic expressing dissent, exemplified by the Marx Memorial.
HeterotopiaPublic spaceMemoryCounterpublic
2014Article
Art & the Public Sphere
The Consumption of Communism: Changing Representations of Statue Park Museum and Budapest
Statue Park Museum on Budapest's outskirts symbolises Eastern and Central Europe's transformation. The park features decommissioned communist-era statuary, functioning as a site where modernist and postmodernist discourses overlap. The research examines how post-communist agendas, historical reconstruction, and heritage concerns have reshaped cultural meaning, alongside Budapest's rebranding in relation to national identity within neo-liberal frameworks.
IdeologyIronyMemoryPostmodernismPOPSRepresentation
2011Article
International Journal of Art and Design Education
The Recuperation of Participatory Arts Practices
Creative participation in the arts is a complex and abstract concept that bridges the gap between cultural production and its consumption. It is highly contextual and defined through a range of discourses besides aesthetics that concern access and inclusion, cultural identity, socio-political rights, collective working, transformation and emancipation as advocated by community arts philosophy and praxis. These ideas are theoretically explored and critically evaluated in practice through three popular visual arts events in which the general public engaged and performed, demonstrating varying degrees of active involvement and dialogue. They also highlight the recuperation of radical cultural activism and communality where participation has become associated with spectacle and the co-option of self-determined thinking and resistance. Such cases are of obvious interest to community arts educators, particularly their value, the terms of participatory engagement and the extent to which radical non-authoritarian and collective practices have been appropriated by cults of individuality and celebrity.
ParticipationCommunity artsRecuperationSpectacle
2009Article
Leisure Studies
Cultural Legitimacy or 'Outsider Hip'?: Representational Ambiguity and the Significance of Steely Dan
Steely Dan, a rock band which has consistently produced high calibre songs but eschewed celebrity, embodies a particular idiosyncratic rock genre that contains originality, craftsmanship and a critical attitude to art and life. In many ways the core musicians can be regarded as intellectuals whose songs offer particular individualised and self-driven ‘outsider’ identities for the fan but also claim cultural authority. This article explores the ambiguous socio-cultural and musical space occupied by the band in relation to rock music and the 1970s context more generally. It examines techniques of production, lyrical content, fan attachment and broader signification with regards to individual style and cultural legitimisation. It also critically assesses theoretical arguments that consider the positioning of the music within modernist and postmodernist discourses.
AlienationManneristMiddle-browPopular modernSelf-styled distinction
2008Article
Journal of Visual Arts Practice
Public art: radical, functional or democratic methodologies?
There is much debate regarding the purpose and legitimacy of public art, which is an integral aspect of the cultural public sphere. The commissioning process, for example, may consider its value and function, influenced by cultural policy and the agendas of intermediaries which impact upon methodological and democratic concerns. Related to these practical issues are a range of theoretical binary tensions which help construct a classification of public art methodologies, two of which crystallize many of these problems. Firstly, the extent to which public art is an individual or collective practice, and secondly, the degree to which it is an expression of hegemony or a radical process of resistance. These concepts are investigated through various examples in order to help map a range of public art praxis.
Public artCommissioningHegemonyResistance
2007Article
International Journal of Art and Design Education
The evaluation of community arts projects and the problems with social impact methodology
This article focuses on the evaluation of participatory community arts programmes and analyses the shift in educational emphasis from aesthetic to social outcomes. It considers a range of theoretical models and practices in the field which includes my own experience. The history of evaluative methodology highlights procedural concerns which are applied to current strategies of evaluating social impact. This is critiqued with regards to consent and participant intention, lack of discrimination between ‘natural’ and ‘synthetic’ instrumentality, and issues surrounding measurement and the validation of impact through social auditing. This foregrounds broader debates concerning the politics of evaluation. An ideal democratic method is suggested that encourages participant involvement, empowerment and self-management. This is compared to normative bureaucratic and autocratic approaches steeped in top-down agendas which may exacerbate social problems.
Community artsEvaluationSocial impactMethodology
2007Article
Youth & Policy, Vol. 94, pp. 61–77
The Cultural Aspects of Social Exclusion and the Stereotyping of Adolescent Males
This paper focuses on excluded representations of adolescent males in the UK and situates this within policy and broader cultural discourse. The complex factors that help determine the exclusion of this constituency are highlighted as well as the impact of New Labour initiatives. Its idealisation of social inclusion problematises cultural difference and plurality exacerbating the tensions between excluded youth and official expectations. Culture offers teenagers distinction and difference realised through the construction of resistant identities and lifestyles. Whilst critical of policy the author accepts that there are real problems associated with male adolescents and their ‘rite of passage’ into adulthood. Therefore a hypothetical remedy is suggested to help formalise this transitional process within an educational framework.
Cultural exclusionYouthRepresentation
2006Article
Journal for Cultural Research
The Excluded Terms of Culture: Cultural Exclusion as Spectacle
The artistic production of particular disabled individuals and groups in the UK is presented to portray the tensions within and between the social and cultural conditions of inclusion and exclusion. To help understand, articulate and embed these terms Bourdieu’s theoretical discourse on distinction where taste and cultural capital are determined by broader socio-economic factors, is applied and evaluated. A Foucauldian analysis is also utilised to illustrate how the arts represent excluded constituencies as spectacles within normalising discourses. Consequently, two frameworks and representations of arts practices by excluded constituencies are explored, one “high” art by “outsiders”, the other a more functional welfare orientated art by those with mental health problems.
Cultural exclusionSpectacleRepresentation
2004Article
International Journal of Art and Design Education
The rehabilitative role of arts education in prison: accommodation or enlightenment?
The prisoner constituency is one of the most excluded in society. Addressing recidivism requires amongst other considerations, an enabling of these individuals to fulfil rehabilitative intent. The article argues that this necessitates an educational discourse and methodology that is embedded in concepts of emancipation and empowerment, where creativity and heuristic learning enable personal transformation. The arts are one of the agents that can naturally encourage spontaneous and participatory learning, enabling a more liberating and self-directed rehabilitative process. Notwithstanding, arts education in prison illuminates the struggle between individual creative needs and social accommodation. Historically the shifting paradigm of penal policy has reflected a wider political intention. But there is an irony as the New Labour government that champions social inclusion has overseen the reduction of opportunity in prison to engage with the arts, replaced by an instrumental agenda concerning basic, key and cognitive skills. Furthermore, this has arguably been costly and ineffectual, hence the need to accommodate a more creative and expressive curriculum. The article has been divided into two parts. The first examines competing discourses of penal educational provision in order to assess the role of the arts. The second part examines a radical educational agenda of inclusion based on emancipatory theory, as a conduit for personal transformation, in which the creative arts have a central role.
Prison artsRehabilitationEmancipationPedagogy
Book Chapters
2017Chapter
Routledge · book chapter
The construction of post-communist ideologies and re-branding of Budapest: the case study of Statue Park Museum
In Hungary today ideology is grounded in 'post-communism', referring to a range of discourses related to democracy, neo-liberal capitalism and nationalism. The trajectory of this chapter begins first with a focus on Statue Park, which comprises three related themes: situating the museum within the cultural trail of Budapest and the Hungarian story; a critical evaluation of the museum itself; and theoretical models of audience reception to help establish the complexity of meaning. Second, the emphasis shifts to highlight notions of commodification, memory and brand in relation to Statue Park and Budapest, which comprises four related concerns: the museum signifying the consumption of communism; national governance encouraging the transformation of public space in Budapest; the convoluted reconstitution of memory; and the conceptualisation of visitors that befits the re-branding of the city.
Post-communismMemoryBudapestHeritage
2011Chapter
Whitechapel Gallery · in Education: Documents of Contemporary Art (ed. Felicity Allen)
The rehabilitative role of arts education in prison
Reprinted as part of the Whitechapel/MIT Press Documents of Contemporary Art series, this chapter argues that arts education in prison must be grounded in emancipatory pedagogy if it is to be more than instrumental skills training — that creativity, heuristic learning, and self-directed practice are the conditions under which rehabilitation becomes something other than accommodation.
Prison artsRehabilitationPedagogy
Book Reviews
2024Review
Theory, Culture & Society: Global Public Life
Review: Howard Feather, Social Theory of Displacement: Adventures in the Everyday
Howard Feather examines disorientation and self-estrangement in postmodern life, theorising displacement of social meanings through translation within capitalist modernity. The review discusses how dualism creates internal and physical exile, exploring the paradox of living in parallel worlds where everyday social networks are continuously displaced, presenting confusion as authentic while intensifying social anxiety.
DisplacementSocial theoryPostmodern lifeConsumerismSocial anxietyDualism
2022Review
The European Journal of Humour Research
Book review: Rowden, Claire (2020), Opera and Parody in Paris 1860–1900
A review of Claire Rowden's study of opera and parody in late-nineteenth-century Paris — the satirical edge of high musical culture, the politics of Wagner's reception, and the role of parody as cultural critique.
OperaSatireFranceWagnerParody