How did you become involved in the Punk Scholars Network? It was in 2012 or 2013, I think more likely 12, Mike Dines got in touch via email and introduced himself and asked if I would be interested in supporting and / or contributing to a collection he was putting together called “Tales from the Punk Side”. I contributed to the go fund me for it as I thought it was a really interesting idea and I wrote a chapter on punk in Northern Ireland, which is where I am from. It was fun, and put me back in love with writing about punk again – something I had lost after my PhD (2011). Mike stayed in touch and we got to know each other, and Sam, better over the years, eventually becoming good friends. He would send me details of things that were going on, but they were always out of reach as I lived near Stirling at the time. Mike introduced me to Russ who quickly asked me to write something for the journal, which became a special edition of the journal on religion that I co-edited with Jim Donaghey. Mike also introduced me to Laura, who was doing her PhD on punk women, and she very kindly stayed in touch as well. Slowly, and largely online I was brought into the punk scholars and met Pete, Matt, Kirsty and Gords (I’ve yet to meet Matt Worley in person). When I moved to Lincoln in 2018 I was then in a position to be able to attend the events, and work with Laura to create new events, so I was asked to join the steering group of the PSN and was delighted to do so.
Why do you feel it's important that a network for those involved in the study of punk/punks exists? Many of us exist as outliers in our departments, and for some of us our fields as well. Certainly in the entire time I was teaching in Stirling there was no-one else in Scotland who was researching on punk and religion – there are still precious few of us who do and we are scattered around the globe. Therefore a network helps us find and connect with those who study punk within our field that we might otherwise not be able to connect with at all. However it does a lot more than that, it helps us to connect with scholars from other fields, UK academia can be very myopic and people get very closed within their disciplines despite all the talk of the wonders of interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary work. Being able to connect with other scholars from other fields – sociology, graphic design, music, gender studies, critical race studies and more has really challenged and broadened my thinking and scholarship. There is also a tendency within certainly UK academia to privilege some topics over others, and I think that punk has been sidelined and ignored, or viewed as just ‘titilation’ rather than serious scholarship for too long. The PSN network is vital redressing that and showing how vital punk scholarship is to a whole raft of disciplines.
Tell us a bit about your own (punk) research? My PhD was in religious studies, I am a sociologist of religion by training, and was the first ever study of straight edge in the UK and Northern Ireland, it was also the first ever study of straight edge in relation to the concept and construct of religion, and its supposed counterpart the secular. It was very much inspired by Ross Haenfler’s work on straight edge. He had a line, and it is just a line, about how straight edge adherents have a black and white view of the world that makes them more aligned to dogmatic faiths. I was fascinated by that and wanted to delve deeper into that. At around the same time I was given Noah Levine’s “Dharma Punx” by a monk at a Buddhist Centre and found it really equal parts intriguing and frustrating. So my PhD was born of that. Since 2011, when my PhD was awarded, I have focused more on punk in Northern Ireland – this is something that grew out of my thesis, as I noticed how different the experiences of sXe punks where there to everywhere else I was exploring and doing fieldwork in. This also coincided with a personal realisation that I would likely never be able to get an academic job there and so since a return home was not possible then I wanted to better understand and know more about where I came from and how it shaped things like punk and especially straight edge punk. Currently I am working on a project that looks at how marginalisation within punk manifests and is reinforced through narration, sound and curation, and what role, if any, religion has within that.
What is your connection to punk/background in punk? I grew up in Northern Ireland (we moved around the country a lot, my favourite places where Portrush and Belfast) and became involved with the Warzone centre in Belfast, as a gig space as well as an activist space. Stiff Little Fingers was the band that brought me into punk, and they remain a firm favourite, but I branched out into anarcho-punk, hardcore and even some of the pop elements like Green Day. I loved being able to write off from the back of magazines and fanzines and getting tapes back. Often on these, the person making them would throw on a few songs from other bands that they also liked and that’s how I came across Minor Threat. Their album was incredible and I just played it non-stop for about 3 or 4 days. There wasn’t a redundant song on there, every lyric, every beat, every sound was doing something. The song straight edge was the most powerful at the time for me and gave me the language to articulate the way I had already chosen to live my life. It will always be a ‘regret’ that I am too young to have seen them play live (I was a toddler and small child at that time). DIY ethic has always been a central core to my punk identity. I have no discernible musical talent or capacity, and no real desire anymore to get up on a stage although I love live music. I do find real value in what I can contribute through writing in fanzines, animal activism, supporting local bands wherever I live and putting on events for other punks. In her post Laura talked about the events she and I have been putting on in Lincoln together and she quite correctly noted that they are embedded in the punk principles and values that we both hold - DIY, grounded in the sense of community, breaking down hierarchies between academia and the wider public, and dismantling barriers. I love putting these events on – they range from live gigs, to documentary screenings, to panels and art exhibits, they are great fun, they always challenge me to think in new ways and it is wonderful being able to open up what we do with our research to the people it matters most to and the scene we are a part of.
Francis is the director of the Edward Bailey Research Centre, and the Implicit Religion Research Fellow at Bishop Grosseteste University in Lincoln. Her monograph “Punk Rock is my Religion”: Straight Edge Punk and ‘Religious’ Identity came out in 2017 and she also has a co-edited collection with Laura Way forthcoming on punk pedagogies. She is the author of “No More Heroes Anymore: Marginalization in Punk Curation” which was in Punk & Post-Punk, Vol 8.2, and she has a chapter in the forthcoming third edition of Global Punk, in which she writes about the straight edge women in Northern Ireland. Find out more on the ‘About’ page.