Don't go down this road with Sheeran.

Wow.

As somebody who's studied popular culture for many years, I wouldn't want to say that taking Ed Sheeran seriously is a waste of time.

Obviously, Ed Sheeran exists within a huge capitalist music global industry, and he has now found himself in a position of absolute crisis, a crisis of liberalism.

Your point takes us back to Shakespeare versus Bob Dylan or Keats versus Bob Dylan.

I would say that the popular arts or popular culture now occupies such an important place in the public sphere, in our kind of everyday lives, that it would be amiss.

to simply say to students, oh, you can just ignore this.

charge, I guess I'm asking?

obviously a better title

Yeah, I agree.

I agree.

But the marketing would not have it.

So it just became the title of the German edition, which also included the neoliberalism and the gender regime.

which was much closer to what I was engaging with.

But the aftermath of feminism really was also in many ways key to the thesis of the book, which was that the object of study was the way in which in the run up to the election of the Blair government and then actively promoted in a much more overtly political way by the Blair, you know, environment, the whole kind of setup there was a very clear, explicit direction and agenda, which was to eradicate traces of the old left as well, particularly as feminism, And I have to say of multiculturalism.

And more recently, you've been continuing sort of thinking about...

So maybe you can tell us a bit about how you ended up at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in the 70s and what that was like.

Well, first of all, I should say that the volume actually contains four new essays, which are cited in the early section of the book.

And the reasons for producing actually... four new chapters as kind of updates were very much in line with the rationale for actually reprinting and republishing the old work.

And the narrative there is that I was incredibly ill with COVID and in an ICU ward on oxygen.

And when I eventually got home, and was able to speak again because I lost my voice, I said to my colleagues at Goldsmiths, look, why don't I just put together PDFs of all that early Birmingham work and make it available through a website for downloading? And perhaps we could even put it together as a kind of pamphlet So that it would all be in one piece and could be downloaded as one full PDF.

But my dear colleagues at that point said, no, no, and very generously, because there are expenses, as you know, involved in producing a book.

They said, no, no, we want it to be a book.

that didn't then tumble out

Thank you so much for joining us.

Hi there.

It's, uh, it's quite challenging to intervene with two very thorough and critical responses.

And I'm wondering why I don't wholly subscribe to such pessimism.

That's not to say that I've got optimism, but I think that, that there are several ways in which we still have to understand how neoliberalism has shaped the universities actually quite recently in the last twenty-five years.

Because prior to that, especially in the social sciences and arts humanities, uh, we did have a lot of scope for critical work, a lot of scope for theoretical work.

We had wonderful student bodies in the institutions that I worked for.