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Phil Cohen Works

  • Autobiography
  • Poetics and Other Arts
  • East London and Post Olympics
  • Generation and Gender
  • Mapping the Pandemic
  • Race Class and Imagined Community
  • The Cultural Politics of Knowledge
  • Living Maps – Critical Cartographies of the City

Welcome to Phil’s Website

We are sad to inform readers that Phil Cohen passed away on Thursday 7th of November 2024.

His Obituary can be found at this link.

Further details of Funeral…

This web site contains a selection of past and present writings, supported by picture galleries, videos and other material generated by his research. Phil was an urban ethnographer by trade and worked mostly with young people and communities in East London, charting the impact of structural and demographic change on their everyday experience, and the stories they tell about the past, present and future of this area. The work draws on concepts and methods from a range of approaches in the human sciences, including anthropology, actor-network theory, psychoanalysis, narratology and cultural geography.  As Phil wrote: “I have always been concerned to relate my research to educational and political issues, and to create a dialogic framework for the research process.”    

Please feel free to contact the website using this link.

Phil Cohen also has a Wikipedia entry!  Click here to view it.


Forthcoming publication

Waypoints (Volume 2)

This new book brings together recent writing and spans the period from the Covid 19 pandemic to the ongoing wars in the Ukraine and Gaza. Like the pieces in the companion Waypoints (Volume 1), these essays are occasional in that they were prompted by particular contingencies, both personal and political. In selecting and bringing these texts together, the book traces an emergent set of connections between what have come to be known as the ‘grey zones’ of social, cultural and geo-political conflict. Expected publication date: first quarter of 2025.

Click here for more information

My Previous Book

Things Ain’t What They Used to Be

Three years in the making, this book is an experiment in close collaboration between a writer and four visual artists who together take a stab at capturing the zeitgeist from Left Field. This is no prophecy of Doom or New Dawn but a groundling’s view of the theatre of cruelty which currently passes for everyday life, and some pointers to what might lead us into a better social dance, for the enjoyment of the many, not the precious few. The book takes the form of three notebooks which explore different aspects of our once and future time, with the text being visually notated in full colour double page spreads.

Click here for more information

The book is available from Eyeglass Books.

Available from
EYEGLASS BOOKS
Available from
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Available from
EYEGLASS BOOKS
Available from
Compass
Available from
Compass
Available from
EYEGLASS BOOKS
Available from
EYEGLASS BOOKS

I would like to acknowledge those who have been essential to the creation of this website:  Norman Dallura (Dallura Web Design), Donald Nicholson Smith (editorial consultant)  and Jane Mullins (copy editing).

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Recent Posts

  • Phil Cohen Funeral

    December 1, 2024
    Sadly Phil Cohen died on November 7th 2024. Funeral details and a link to his obituary can be found here...
  • Phil Cohen Obituary

    November 27, 2024
    Phil Cohen 1943-2024  Professor Phil Cohen, radical activist, cultural theorist, memoirist, poet and urban ethnographer, has died aged 81. ‘When I first met Phil Cohen,’ recalls Dr Toby Butler, ‘he was professor of Cultural Studies at the University of East London. Fizzing with ideas, he drew together an astonishing array of artists, academics and policy […]
  • WHAT YOU SEE IS NOT ALWAYS WHAT YOU GET : A DOUBLE TAKE ON THE UK ELECTION  2024 

    July 15, 2024
    Note: These two short pieces written after the June 4th election result ,  are  extracted from a  collection of essays , Studies in the Grey Zone, due to be published by eyeglass books in October. Take One:  One Nation Labourism and the Great Moving Right Show The question of just how and from where, and […]
  • Waypoints 2

    March 27, 2024
    Publication date: first quarter of 2025. New introduction by Andrew Calcutt This new book brings together Phil Cohen’s most recent writing and spans the period from the Covid 19 pandemic to the ongoing wars in the Ukraine and Gaza. Like the pieces in the first Waypoints volume, these essays are occasional in that they were […]
  • Living Maps : towards a poetry made by all

    December 24, 2023
    Looking back on the first ten years of Livingmaps Network     Every project has its founding myth , a story about its origins in which the cold rational prose of ‘aims and objectives’ melts into  the thicker air of  an auto-poetics. The risk is that in the process  starting points become end points,  and the […]
  • ANTISEMIT-ORIENTAL- ZION-ISMS

    December 23, 2023
    The Triple Misalliance I An extract from‘Studies in thr Grey Zone; Waypoints Vol 2 to be published by eyglass books at Easter 2024 .Introduction One of the many  fallouts from the current  horrific conflict in Palestine/Israel is the way sections of the Hard Left have advanced an apologetics for the atrocities committed by Hamas, while […]

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