Owain Burrell

Everyone mentions The Making of the English Working Class for obvious reasons, but so much of Thompson's work is crucial - The Poverty of Theory is up there, as is his CND piece Protest and Survive

Appropriately on his 102nd birthday, I've been reading E.P. Thompson's The Poverty of Theory today. One of the very best to ever do it (it being disagreeing with French high theory)

Attention @bacls.bsky.social members. We recently launched the BACLS 'Work in Progress' Group, where members can get collegiate and supportive feedback on academic work. If you have work to submit or want to act as a reader do get in touch! Not yet a member? Visit our website to register bacls.org

Call for Papers: Cultural Materialism, Fascism and the Far Right, A Special Issue of Key Words: A Journal of Cultural Materialism Speaking in 1980 amid the New Right upsurge, Raymond Williams noted that ‘cultural struggle is absolutely crucial, because this is the terrain on which the interpretation of the crisis had to be es…

🚨🚨CALL FOR PAPERS🚨🚨Fancy contributing to a special issue on Cultural Materialism, Fascism and the Far Right, edited by @elinormtaylor.bsky.social? Look no further... Details, including the deadline, at the link: raymondwilliams.co.uk/2026/01/28/c...

It's a great piece, John! And obviously an excellent companion to the Corelli Barnett one

The satire of the meritocracy: foreclosed futures in Michael Young, Raymond Williams, and Muriel Spark The high summer of the post-war British consensus is often seen as a period of social promise, in which the opportunity for social mobility was made available to all through the technocratic basis ...

Anyway, Michael and I wrote about the connection between Time & Motion and meritocracy in the late '50s in our article 'The satire of the meritocracy: foreclosed futures in Michael Young, Raymond Williams, and Muriel Spark' ( www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....) if anyone is interested

The ideal reconstruction of society held by the nuclear technocrats held in the management vaults is an efficiently productive society ruled by a 'meritocratic' management class

The nuclear technocracy of Fallout embodies this ideology of abstracted violence, particularly through Hank, whose argument for a nuclear strike on Shady Sands is predicated on managed nuclear destruction being morally superior to the pathetic violence of Wastelanders fighting over bottlecaps

This lines up with Michael Gardiner's argument about the liberal ideology of nuclear weaponry as the ultimate sublimation of violence, the abstraction of violence into a button-pushing, managerial efficiency (Nuclear Fictions: Violence and the Narration of the Anglosphere, 2025)

Even more interesting is Hank's argument that the mind control is necessary to prevent violence: the precise, productive movements of Time & Motion are the antithesis of the excess of movement of destructive violence, and that only technocratic management can curb or sublimate excessive movement

Of course, this synchronisation is made possible through technological pacification of the workers through mind control, rather than the self-disciplining ideologies of productivity from the '50s (e.g. as described in Nikolas Rose's Governing the Soul)

The production line they construct relies on perfectly synchronised movements from the workers as a kind of choreography, for 'the least loss of energy and time' as Spark describes T&M in The Ballad of Peckham Rye, and could be a scene from a classic '50s information film by the BPC

The most recent episode of Fallout (S2EP6) really hammers home the perpetual '50s ideology of the nuclear technocracy by using a Time and Motion-style production line as the ideal form of management

James Goldsmith, godfather of British populism Unlike Nigel Farage or Rupert Lowe, Goldsmith told the truth

For the New Statesman I tracked the career of the corporate raiding Thatcherite turned populist tribune, James Goldsmith

www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2026/0...

Thanks Jen! Hope you're enjoying your very well-deserved study leave!

Thanks so much Dominic! Hope all is going well with you!

I don't know enough about the Jamaican case to make an argument, but it seemed to me to be an interesting biographical coincidence

Really, it's the failure of these labour rebellions which functions as a spectre over their political thinking of the societies of their birth (both quite different to the academic contexts they ended up in) - neither uses the term 'hauntological' but I think there is something to that in both cases

Both frame organised workers' uprisings as significant to their thinking as shadows cast in their childhood over their social formation - Hall was 6 in 1938, Williams 4 in 1926.

I'm thinking here of Hall's long reflection on the labour rebellions of 1938 in Jamaica, and the significance they had to the mindset of his family and their class in comparison with Williams' writing on the 1926 general strike in Britain

I was particularly struck by the resonances between Hall's descriptions of his early life and Raymond Williams' various writings on his early years in Wales.

I've just finished Stuart Hall's 'Familiar Stranger' and it's an absolutely fantastic (auto)biographical text with a richness of thought that rivals any work or theory - the way he thinks Jamaica and Britain together is masterful

Interested in guest editing a special issue of Key Words: A Journal of Cultural Materialism? We've made it easier than ever to pitch us. Download our special issue proposal form here: raymondwilliams.co.uk/submission-g...

I passed my viva today with no corrections - couldn't and still can't quite believe it! Very grateful to my examiners, Mike Niblett and Nick Bentley, and as always a constant debt of gratitude to my supervisor Michael Gardiner

Definitely contemplating this. Anyone interested in doing a panel on Scottish SFF. I'm thinking modern modern or contemporary but always open to ideas. #fantasy #sciencefiction #ScottishSFF

Presentation slide that has a black background and reads 'Living with Ghosts book launch, 31st Oct 2025, roxanne.n.douglas@warwick.ac.uk, @Roxanne.N.Douglas@warwick.ac.uk' on the left inside a tombstone shape, and an image of the cover of 'Feminist Gothic, Critical Irrealism and Arab Women's World-Literature: "Living with Ghosts"' on the right.

👻 Preparing for my book launch on Friday (Hallowe'en!) 1pm UK - if you'd like to join online drop me an email!

You can read and access LIVING WITH GHOSTS here link.springer.com/book/10.1007... with institutional access 👻

Thanks Dominic! Congratulations on the position at Essex, hope term gets off to a good start for you!

Think you probably made the right choice - I managed to join YP just before it all came crashing down...

Thank you Roxanne!!

Finally submitted my PhD yesterday - feels very odd to have let it go but pleased to have it in!