Launch of ‘Punk Now!! Contemporary Perspectives on Punk’

Punk Now!! (published by Intellect in 2020) explores contemporary and non-Anglophone punk as well as its most anti-establishment tendencies through a collection of papers from the second Punk Scholars Network International Conference and Postgraduate Symposium hosted by Birmingham City University. This edited collection informs us about punk today and punk at the margins, areas that are often poorly served in punk studies. For this book launch Edward Avery-Natale, Professor of Sociology in the Liberal Arts Department at Mercer County Community College, discusses the background to the development of the volume and its content with the editors Matt Grimes (BCMCR and BCU) and Mike Dines (Middlesex University). They will also be joined by contributing authors of the volume, to discuss their research interests and motivations for their chapters on contemporary perspectives on punk rock. This will be followed by a Q&A session.

Matt Grimes is a senior lecturer in music industries and radio and course director of the BA(Hons) Music Industries course at Birmingham City University. His research interests include British anarcho-punk and its ideological significance in the life courses of ageing fans. He has published on the subjects of anarcho-punk identity and ageing, anarcho-punk ‘zines, DiY punk culture, punk spirituality, punk pedagogy and radio for social change, as well as other subjects. He is the general secretary of the Punk Scholars Network and on the editorial board for the journals Punk & Post- Punk and RIFFS. Matt is also a lifelong supporter of Millwall FC.

Mike Dines is a British musician, writer, scholar and publisher. He founded Itchy Monkey Press (http://itchymonkeypress.com) with the publication of the anarcho-punk novella the darkening light (2014), followed by Tales From the Punkside (2014), Some of Us Scream, Some of Us Shout (2016) and And All Around Was Darkness (2017) with Greg Bull. As a scholar he has written widely on subcultures and popular musicHis current writing takes him in the direction of punk and spirituality with the co-edited collection Exploring the Spiritual in Popular Music: Beatified Beats (Bloomsbury, 2021). He is currently a lecturer of music at Middlesex University and is an avid supporter of Portsmouth Football Club

Edward Avery-Natale is a Professor of Sociology in the Liberal Arts Department at Mercer County Community College. He is the author of the book, Ethics, Politics, and Anarcho-Punk Identifications: Punk and Anarchy in Philadelphia as well as numerous articles on the topics of race and racism, Deleuzian approaches to identification, and punk rock and anarchism. He is currently working on an edited compilation that will push the theoretical boundaries of subcultural studies while applying theory to empirical studies of punk rock. He is also working on several articles applying Deleuzian concepts to the sociological study of identifications.

The book can be purchased at https://www.intellectbooks.com/punk-now

Use the discount code PUNK20 for a 20% discount.