School of the Arts and School of Humanities, York St John University presents
1984/85 A Symposium of Art & Politics, June 17, 2025 (on campus and online)
Call for Papers, deadline – 15th March 2025
‘In contradiction to the popular sentiment, it’s not so much that history repeats itself, it’s that it crushes on, relentlessly’. Andrew McMillan, Pity, (2024)
Forty years after the bloody clash between striking miners, mounted police, and army officers in police uniform at the Orgreave coking plant in South Yorkshire, York St John University invites artists, curators, and historians to come together to interrogate the cultural and political events of 1984 and their legacies in the twenty-first century.
In The Battle of Orgreave, a 2001 documentary film devised by artist Jeremy Deller in collaboration with filmmaker Mike Figgis, industrial historian and former NUM Branch Secretary at Hatfield Main Colliery, David Douglass, described the miner’s strike of 1984/85 as a ‘crossroads’ for economic policy in the UK: ‘Had they held that picket line and [the Miner’s] had won […] the whole change in social policy about benefits and privatisation, the whole things that could have happened that didn’t happen’ David Douglass, (Deller, 2002). In 1984 the BBC infamously reversed its news footage: showing the miner’s throwing the first stone, rather than the police making the first move. Thatcher’s handling of the 84/85 miner’s strike had been modelled on the hard line that Regan had taken in 1981 in response to the strike of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers (PATCO); a decisive move intended to break the power of the trade unions and usher in a new neoliberal era of deregulation and free trade (Cooper, 2012).
In Britain the representation of the miners has been endemic of the misrepresentation of the working class as a thuggish unthinking herd (Williams, 1976). Their transformation from the backbone of the war effort and British industry from the 1940s-1960s, to what Thatcher named the ‘enemy within’, has been instrumental in the cultural estrangement of the working class in the post-industrial era, paving the way for the rise of populism and racism. In the discourses on art and culture questions about class have been rarely considered because low socio-economic status is something that is to be overcome and renounced in a world governed by a ‘pure aesthetic’ (Bourdieu, 2017). After Brexit, the shame that subtends this enforced forgetting has been augmented by the mobilisation of immigration by right wing politics, creating a false bifurcation of class from the differences of disability, gender, race, and sexuality in academic discourse.
This symposium invites delegates to think across culture, history, literature, and politics to consider how class has been absented and inflected in the experiences and rights of different abilities, genders, races, and sexualities. This approach is framed by Achille Mbembe’s analysis of what he calls our brutalist age, where ‘contemporary capitalism crushes and dominates all spheres of existence’ (2024), his earlier treatise Necropolitics (2019) and Zygmunt Bauman’s thesis of ‘negative globalisation’ (2007). By these means this symposium aims to make tangible the networks of capital, employment, and exploitation that have circulated across national and international geographies since the 1980s, cementing transgenerational disadvantage across a complex and cumulative set of subjective experiences, historical events, and policies.
We invite proposals for 20 minute presentations from across the arts and humanities. Please email abstracts of 250 words, your name, affiliation (if you have one) and whether you wish to participate in person or remotely to:
Vanessa Corby v.corby@yorksj.ac.uk and James Cooper j.cooper@yorksj.ac.uk
Image: Wiki Commons – CC 2.0