Radical Formations

The Radical Formations cluster was created in 2013. It is led by Dr Ben Harker and includes members Professor Peter Buse, Dr Kristin Ewins, Professor Antony Rowland and 6 doctoral students. Three of its members (Morgan, Taylor and Harker) run the University-wide Radical Studies Network, which holds regular seminars at the Working Class Movement Library. The cluster has recently set up a Radical Formations reading group in which staff, graduates and undergraduates come together to discuss current debates around capital, class and cultural formations.

Current interests

• Engaging critically with, and developing, materialist and historicist methodologies for cultural analysis. We have particular expertise in photo-materialism (Buse), cultural materialism (Ewins) and the work of Walter Benjamin (Buse), Raymond Williams (Harker) and Theodor Adorno (Rowland).
• Analysing issues of class and politics across a wide range of cultural forms: poetry (Rowland), journals and community magazines (Rowland, Richardson, Morgan, Taylor), fiction (Darlington, Taylor, O’Brien), music, radio and theatre (Harker)
• Recovering and analysing overlooked radical cultural formations and texts (Morgan, Richardson)
• Studying the relationships between culture and the political left in the interwar period (Ewins, Kavanagh, Taylor, Harker)
• Interpreting the texts and activities of radical women (Ewins, Taylor, Morgan).
• Analysing the politics of education (Kavanagh) and of avant-garde movements (Darlington)

Current projects

AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award: ‘Culture, Journals and Working-Class Movements 1820-1979’ (2010-15; £237,337.)

Three of our members (Morgan, Kavanagh and Richardson) are doctoral students on this project, run in collaboration with the Working Class Movement Library. The project explores, through three PhDs, how culture has informed and expressed the ideologies of working-class political movements over 150 years of British history. Key findings will be discussed at the project’s conference, to be held on 16 May 2013 at the Working Class Movement Library.

Other projects

2013: grant from the Raymond Williams Foundation to support the conference ‘Culture, journals and working-class movements 1820-1979’ (Kavanagh, Morgan, Richardson, Harker; £300)

2013: Yale University Fellowship, ‘Cultural Communism, the Lawrence & Wishart Records and the Beinecke Library’ (Harker; £5000)

2013: AHRC-funded ‘Issues in the Digital Humanities: A Key Skills Package for Postgraduate Researchers’ (Taylor, Morgan; £2474)

2012-3: AHRC Funded International Placement Scheme at the Library of Congress, Washington, ‘Frances Wright and the Female Editor in Owenite Socialist Print Culture’ (Morgan; £ 3,000)

2010-11: British Academy Small Grant, ‘Communists on BBC Radio, 1935-56’ (Harker; £2,990)

Research students

• Joseph Darlington, ‘British experimental novelists in the 1960s and 1970s’ (2010-13)
• Matthew Kavanagh, ‘The Communist Party of Great Britain, teachers and education in schools, 1929-79’ (2011-14)
• Elinor Taylor, ‘Popular Front politics and the British novel, 1934-39’ (2010-13)
• Jen Morgan, ‘The reception and transmission of P.B. Shelley’s Poetry in the newspapers and Journals of Owenite Socialism and Chartism’ (2010-13)
• Phil O’Brien, ‘The working class and the novel in neoliberal Britain’ (2012-15)
• Sally Richardson, ‘ Political cultures in British trade unionism, 1931-79’ (2012-15)

Key publications

Buse, Peter et al, Benjamin's Arcades: An Unguided Tour (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999)

Taylor, Elinor, ‘Recovering Thirties Fiction’, Keywords: A Journal of Cultural Materialism 10 (2012), pp. 141-50

Harker, Ben, Class Act: The Cultural and Political Life of Ewan MacColl (London and Ann Arbor: Pluto Press, 2007)

Harker, Ben, British Communism: A Documentary History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011). Co-edited with John Callaghan.

Harker, Ben, ‘ “The trumpet of the night”: interwar Communists on BBC radio.’ History Workshop 75 (Spring 2013), pp. 1-20.

Teaching

The cluster’s research informs teaching across the curriculum at all stages, including the first year module Popular Fiction, where students read leftist thrillers of the 1930s. Second year students benefit from our expertise on modules including Writers on the BBC, where they study writers such as Jim Allen, whose papers are archived at the Working Class Movement Library. Third year students on Modernism benefit from our expertise in Soviet Cinema, while The Twentieth-Century British Working-Class Novel module, taught by Harker and Taylor, hosts the annual Walter Greenwood Essay Prize.

Graduate students on the MA in Literature, Culture and Modernity encounter the cluster’s theoretical and cultural expertise on modules including Modernity and Cultural Form, Theory, Text and Writing, and Culture and the Popular Front, 1935-39.

Beyond the Radical Formations research cluster

We share people and interests with the Radical Studies Network, and collaborate on an ongoing basis with external partners including the Raymond Williams Society. We implement and develop the University strategy of pride in the region and its heritage—especially its industrial history—and work closely with the Working Class Movement Library on a range of projects. Several of our members (Buse, Ewins, O’Brien) teach on the ‘Book Tour of Northern Cities’ outreach project, which runs free classes in community libraries.

Our members are on the editorial boards of a number of leading international academic journals including New Formations (Buse), Key Words (Ewins and Harker), Twentieth Century Communism (Harker), the B.S. Johnson Journal (Darlington) and Critical Survey (Rowland); three members of the cluster are on the editorial board of North West Labour History (Kavanagh, Morgan, Harker). We communicate our work beyond the academy through appearances on BBC radio (Harker, Rowland), blogging (the Radical Studies Network), public lectures, and collaborations with artists, museums and galleries (Harker, Buse, Rowland)