EDITED BY PHIL COHEN AND MIKE DUGGAN
New Directions in Radical Cartography looks at the contemporary debates about the role of maps in society. It explores the emergence of counter-mapping as a distinctive field of practice, and the impact that digital mapping technologies have had on cartographic practice and theory. It includes original research, accounts of mapping projects and detailed readings of maps.… Read the rest
Phil’s has created a Vimeo video of the book with selected readings.
This is an afterword to my father’s memoir which I have just edited for forthcoming publication by eyeglass books.
I thought that the reader might be interested to know a bit more about the biographical background to this memoir, what motivated and influenced my father to write it, its relation to other books about life in the Gorbals, and finally what was at stake for me personally in editing the text.… Read the rest
By Phil Cohen
The text assembled here represents a thoughtful attempt to begin to find a way out of the current impasse in which progressive politics finds itself.
The collection explores the connections between the personal and political dimensions of mindfulness and how this might help us build strategies capable of winning the battle for hearts and minds in a post Brexit, post pandemic Britain.
Political Mindfulness and Left responses to a multiple crisisTaken together the pieces assembled here represent a thoughtful attempt to begin to find a way out of the current impasse in which the Left finds itself, caught as it is between the rock of supporting authoritarian state control with its top down one- size- fits- all solutions ( as represented by the Covid 19 lock down) and the hard place of blind faith in the People to come up with progressive solutions within civil society without the resources that only the state can provide for scaling them up.
We are living through disturbed and disturbing times in which the maps drawn by political scientists no longer make sense of what is happening on the ground. Against this background the propagandists of neo-liberal individualism urge us to cultivate ‘resilience’ and ‘mindfulness’ as a way of seizing and surviving the present moment. Mindfulness in particular has been popularised as a way of promoting well-being by enabling people suffering from anxiety or depression to become more aware of internal mental states and their relation to external circumstances.
In this prose poem Phil Cohen explores the ‘other scenes’ of his family history, the stories he was not told about where he came from. Many of them were about the mysterious, and in his eyes romantic figure of his father’s father, a Jewish revolutionary from Vitebsk who emigrated to live in the Glasgow Gorbals during the period of Red Clydeside before and after the First World War.… Read the rest
The conference was a day of discussions bringing together different generations of writers, researchers and activists to consider the political and cultural legacies of 1968, and their bearing on the future prospects for a more democratic, equal and participatory society. The aim was to help rekindle the intellectual excitement that characterised the political counter culture of the Sixties but focused on contemporary issues. … Read the rest
Phil is proud to announce his new book, Archive That, Comrade! Now available!
The book explores key issues of archival theory and practice that arise for any project aspiring to provide an open access platform for political dialogue and democratic debate. It is informed by the author’s experience of writing a memoir about his involvement in the London “underground” scene of the 1960s, the London street commune movement, and the occupation of 144 Piccadilly, an event that hit the world’s headlines for ten days in July 1969.… Read the rest
Edited by Phil Cohen and Paul Watt
Published Palgrave Macmillan May 2017 ISBN 987-1-137-48946-3
The strap line for 2012 was ‘Inspire a Generation’, and with the advent of the Rio Games a new chapter in Olympic history is being written – now is the time to both look back and forward , and reach a considered verdict about how far that promise has been delivered.… Read the rest
A deliberately hybrid text, the fruit of a partnership over many years between a poet/ethnographer and a painter who have mutually enriched each other’s understanding of the meaning of place, Graphologies takes a line of thought for a walk across poetry and the visual arts, autobiography and fiction, cultural and literary studies, exploring the emotional and narrative hinterlands of the commonplace.… Read the rest
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