Nazi Punks Folk Off: Leisure, Nationalism, Cultural Identity and the Consumption of Metal and Folk Music

Far-right activists have attempted to infiltrate and use popular music scenes to propagate their racialised ideologies. This paper explores attempts by the far right to co-opt two particular music scenes: black metal and English folk. Discourse tracing is used to explore online debates about boundaries, belonging and exclusion in the two scenes, and to compare such online debates with ethnographic work and previous research. It is argued that both scenes have differently resisted the far right through the policing of boundaries and communicative choices, but both scenes are compromised by their relationship to myths of whiteness and the instrumentality of the pop music industry

The Strange and Spooky Battle over Bats and Black Dresses: The Commodification of Whitby Goth Weekend and the Loss of a Subculture

From counterculture to subculture to the ubiquity of every black-clad wannabe vampire hanging around the centre of Western cities, Goth has transcended a musical style to become a part of everyday leisure and popular culture. The music’s cultural terrain has been extensively mapped in the first decade of this century. In this article, we examine the phenomenon of the Whitby Goth Weekend, a modern Goth music festival, which has contributed to (and has been altered by) the heritage-tourism marketing of Whitby as the holiday resort of Dracula (the place where Bram Stoker imagined the Vampire Count arriving one dark and stormy night). We examine marketing literature and websites that sell Whitby as a spooky town, and suggest that this strategy has driven the success of the Goth festival. We explore the development of the festival and the politics of its ownership, and its increasing visibility as a mainstream tourist destination for those who want to dress up for the weekend. By interviewing Goths from the north of England, we suggest that the mainstreaming of the festival has led to it becoming less attractive to those more established, older Goths who see the subculture’s authenticity as being rooted in the post-punk era, and who believe that Goth subculture should be something one lives full-time

Sport and British Jewish identity

This article examines the relationship between sport and Jewish identity. The experiences of Jewish people have rarely been considered in previous sport-related research which has typically focused on ‘Black’ and South Asian individuals, sports clubs, and organisations. Drawing on data generated from interviews ( n = 20) and focus groups ( n = 2) with individuals based in one British city, this article explores how their Jewish identity was informed, and shaped by, different sports activities and spaces. This study’s participants were quick to correct the idea that sport was alien to Jewish culture and did not accept the stereotype that ‘Jews don’t play sport’. The limited historical research on sport and Jewish people and the ongoing debates around Jewish identity are noted before exploring the role of religion and the suggestion that Jewish participation in sport is affected by the Shabbat (sabbath). Participants discussed how sports clubs acted as spaces for the expression and re/affirmation of their Jewish identity, before they reflected on the threats posed to the wider Jewish community by secularism, assimilation, and antisemitism. The article concludes by discussing how the sporting experiences of the study’s British Jewish participants compare with the experiences of individuals from other ethnic minority communities

Physics at a Neutrino Factory

In response to the growing interest in building a Neutrino Factory to produce high intensity beams of electron- and muon-neutrinos and antineutrinos, in October 1999 the Fermilab Directorate initiated two six-month studies. The first study, organized by N. Holtkamp and D. Finley, was to investigate the technical feasibility of an intense neutrino source based on a muon storage ring. This design study has produced a report in which the basic conclusion is that a Neutrino Factory is technically feasible, although it requires an aggressive R&D program. The second study, which is the subject of this report, was to explore the physics potential of a Neutrino Factory as a function of the muon beam energy and intensity, and for oscillation physics, the potential as a function of baseline.Comment: 133 pages, 64 figures. Report to the Fermilab Directorate. Available from http://www.fnal.gov/projects/muon_collider/ This version fixes some printing problem

The association between maternal and partner experienced racial discrimination and prenatal perceived stress, prenatal and postnatal depression: findings from the growing up in New Zealand cohort study

Background A growing number of studies document the association between maternal experiences of racial discrimination and adverse children’s outcomes, but our understanding of how experiences of racial discrimination are associated with pre- and post-natal maternal mental health, is limited. In addition, existent literature rarely takes into consideration racial discrimination experienced by the partner. Methods We analysed data from the Growing Up in New Zealand study to examine the burden of lifetime and past year experiences of racial discrimination on prenatal and postnatal mental health among Māori, Pacific, and Asian women in New Zealand (NZ), and to study the individual and joint contribution of mother’s and partner’s experiences of lifetime and past year racial discrimination to women’s prenatal and postnatal mental health. Results Our findings show strong associations between lifetime and past year experiences of ethnically-motivated interpersonal attacks and unfair treatment on mother’s mental health. Māori, Pacific, and Asian women who had experienced unfair treatment by a health professional in their lifetime were 66 % more likely to suffer from postnatal depression, compared to women who did not report these experiences. We found a cumulative effect of lifetime experiences of ethnically-motivated personal attacks on poor maternal mental health if both the mother and the partner had experienced a racist attack. Conclusions Experiences of racial discrimination have severe direct consequences for the mother’s mental health. Given the importance of mother’s mental health for the basic human needs of a healthy child, racism and racial discrimination should be addressed

Heavy genealogy: mapping the currents, contraflows and conflicts of the emergent field of metal studies, 1978-2010

What is metal studies? How can we define and characterize it? How has it emerged as a body of academic enquiry? What are its dominant disciplinary strands, theoretical concepts and preferred methodologies? Which studies have claimed most attention, defined the goals of scholarship, typical research strategies and values? How has the claim for the legitimacy or symbolic value of metal scholarship been achieved (if it has): over time and through gradual acceptance or through conflict and contestation? How can this process of formation, or strategy of legitimation, be mapped, examined and interrogated and which methods of historical, institutional and cultural analysis are best suited to this task? Working with the most complete bibliography to date of published research on heavy metal, music and culture (the MSBD), this article employs Foucault’s archaeological “method” to examine the institutional, cultural and political contexts and conflicts that inform the genealogy of this scholarship. Such analysis reveals a formative, largely negative account of heavy metal to be found in the “sociology of rock”; a large volume of psychology work, examining heavy metal music preference as an indicator of youth risk, deviance and delinquency; sociological work on youth and deviancy critical of the values of this research and its links to social policy and politics; culminating in the work of Weinstein and Walser, who advocate a perspective sympathetic to the values of heavy metal fans themselves. Following Bourdieu, I interpret such symbolic strategies as claims for expertise within the academic field that are high or low in symbolic capital to the extent they can attain disciplinary autonomy. I then go on to examine the most recent strands of research, within cultural studies and ethnomusicology, concerned with the global metal music diaspora, and consider to what extent such work is constitutive of a coherent subfield of metal studies that can be distinguished from earlier work and what the implications of this might be