Failed States and Creative Resistances: The Everyday Life of Punks in Belfast, Banda Aceh, Mitrovica and Soweto

This project seeks to explore the everyday lives and creative activities of punk communities in Belfast (Northern Ireland), Banda Aceh (Indonesia), Mitrovica (Kosovo), and Soweto (South Africa). The everyday life-worlds of these 'punk hinterland' communities offer a set of critical perspectives on their 'failed state' contexts, experienced across a spectrum of neglect/restraint.

The punks' own Do-It-Yourself cultural and media production practice grounds a recognition of cultural value beyond, and in opposition to, the narrow economism of entrepreneurial, industry and state discourses - this creativity shapes the resistant subjectivities of punk. The artefacts that are produced through this DIY cultural industry are part of the shared language of 'global punk', and the project's methodologies draw on this by generating inter-contextual dialogue through compilation records produced in each locale (in addition to participant observation and interviews).

This critical-regionalist, cross-comparative, qualitative and participant-centred method of analysis sets out five critical challenges:

- This project is contemporary. We are interested in 'punk-now' not a punk history or 'punk-as-history'. We choose punk that is alive, contemporary and relevant over dead, calcified punk nostalgia.

- This project challenges neo-colonial flows of culture. Analyses of punk are still too often confined to Anglo-American place-specific moments (New York '76, London '77, etc.). Our engagement with these 4 'hinterland' contexts is critically decentring and provides an appreciation of contemporary punk's vibrant global spread.

- This project questions the 'entrepreneurial rationality' that dominates analysis of the creative industries. We critique punk DIY cultural production, especially in terms of the direct challenge to state and industry norms represented in this alternative field of production.

- This project is about the experience of 'failed states'. Each of these contexts has recent history of intra-state violence, and we explore this 'post-conflict'/'failed state' framework by focusing closely on the punks' own agency and lived experience. It is the context of neglect/restraint by the 'failed state' that these punk communities experience and to which they respond.

Our analysis is informed by the productive tension that emerges between 'failed state' as both a dysfunctional social formation and the lived experience of neglect/restraint.

- This project's methodologies are innovative, participatory, cross-comparative and dialogical. This approach is non-exploitative, informed as it is by the PI's insider perspective on global punk. It involves the participants in shaping the research, and invites them into dialogue with the researchers and with one another across the 4 research contexts.

This dialogue is especially focussed on the compilation records as material artefacts emerging from the punks' own DIY cultural production, which operate as a 'shared language' across the global punk scene.

This research process offers the opportunity for critical transformation in the self-perception of these punk scenes and their individual participants through cross-comparative dialogue. As a key outcome of this research, the punks will come to better understand their own experience of creative resistance in a 'failed state' context by self-reflection, through the process of sharing that reflection creatively, and by engaging with the reflections of their comrades elsewhere in the world's punk hinterlands.

There will also be a direct impact in terms of enhancing the punks' creative output, via the compilation records. The insights and critiques generated in this process will be disseminated via a co-authored monograph, a series of academic articles, a series of punk zines, a project website, a symposium (including display of the records), and the compilation records themselves.