Being punk in higher education: subcultural strategies for academic practice

ABSTRACT

Since its beginnings in the late 1970s, punk culture has been associated with counter-mainstream ideology and anti-institutional antagonism. In particular, formal education has been criticised in punk for sustaining oppressive social and conceptual orders and associated behavioural norms. Drawing on literature and interviews, this paper focuses on the experiences of higher education teachers who self-identify as punks, and considers how they negotiate and reconcile their subcultural and academic identities in their academic practice. The findings reveal that participants’ affiliations with punk subculture give rise to counter-cultural pedagogies in which both the ethics and aesthetics of punk are applied in classroom contexts. Furthermore, the participants draw upon subcultural ethical and epistemological narratives to formulate and rationalise their responses to the state of contemporary UK higher education.

KEYWORDS:

• Punk
• counter-culture
• pedagogy
• higher education
• academia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. This is a reference to the famous cover of the Sideburns fanzine’s first issue, which featured diagrams of three guitar chords and the instruction ‘Here’s a chord. Here’s another. Here’s another. Now form a band’. This slogan has now taken a place in punk lore as a mission statement enshrining the DIY ethics of punk culture.

2. This is not to claim equivalency, and my analogy here is necessarily reductive; a more thorough application of Butler’s theories to a discussion of punk and pedagogy would be valuable.