It’s 2025, and the PSP team will not sugarcoat it; we know it has already been quite a mixed bag for many of us. And yet, we can say that our first PSP episode of the New Year offers some critical respite and contemplative hope through much-needed insight into the historical narratives, systematized barriers, and problematic feedback loops that echo loudly in the process of punk’s institutionalization. Join Jessica Schwartz and guest co-host Mike Dines as we talk with our guest, Francis Stewart, about how her scholarship and organizing (in and beyond academia) challenge the taken-for-granted concepts and locate the terms on which these inequitable processes are founded and become the modes of exclusion and control, and, in doing so, amplify the stories and voices of people who have never accepted the punk’s normalizing gatekeeping mechanisms.
Guest Bio.
Francis Stewart is a lecturer in social theory and postcolonial sociology within the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Stirling in Scotland (and accepting PhD students). She is also the Director of the Edward Bailey Research Centre for the study of Implicit Religion. Born and raised in Northern Ireland, Francis did her PhD at Stirling for the first ever study of Straight Edge punk and its connections to categories or understandings of religion (2011). This became Punk Rock is my Religion: Straight Edge Punk and ‘Religious’ Experiences, published by Routledge in 2017. In the intervening years she has been a research fellow and the programme leader for Sociology in Lincoln, before returning to Stirling in August 2023. She has published extensively on aspects of punk and religion; punk and animal rights, marginalisation in punk; punk pedagogies; and punk and anarchism in Northern Ireland. She recently co-edited Punk Pedagogies: Disruptions and Connections with Laura Way, published by Intellect in 2023. She is currently working on two projects, one exploring disability within Irish and N Irish punk as a legacy of colonialism, and the other on demarcation and borders through sound within Northern Ireland.
Links
Northern Ireland punk scene documentaries:
–
We’d love to hear from you and are soliciting episode ideas and guests.
Contact us at: punkscholarspodcast@gmail.com
The PSP theme music is excerpted from “Crows” by. All rights reserved.
Season 1, Episode 8 was recorded on January 18, 2025 over Zoom with participants in the UK and the US. Jessica Schwartz and Mike Dines co-hosted and co-produced this episode. Jessica Schwartz edited the audio. Jessica Schwartz and Mike Dines edited the transcript, available.