matteo tiratelli

research topics

Alongside my general interest in the traditional questions of marxist political sociology - power, protest and social history - here are a few topics that might inspire potential research students:

• Technology and Britain's neoliberal transition. Most accounts of the transformative crises of the 1970s and 1980s focus on high politics, class struggle and macro-economic shifts. But technological changes remain a relatively under-theorised factor in the history of this period. How might our understanding of this history change if we incorporate changes in energy production (oil shock and coal strikes)? in printing technology (Wapping)? automation in the auto industry (opening of the Nissan plant in Sunderland in 1986)? the arrival of cheap camcorders (Black Audio Film Collective and the scratch video movement)?
  
• An intellectual history of the British Left's attempts to understand the various waves of "race riots" (using the term as a far-from-perfect shorthand) that have swept through Britain since WWII. The obvious case studies would be 1958, 1977-8, 1980-5, 2001, 2005, 2011 and 2024. (You could flip this to look at the British Right's responses.) Relevant archives might include publications like West Indian Gazette, New Left Review, Black Dwarf, Marxism Today, Institute for Race Relations, Race Today Collective, Brixton Black Women's Collective, Spare Rib, Shrew, Big Flame, End Notes and the papers of Claudia Jones, Olive Morris, Ambalavaner Sivanandan, Tariq Ali, Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, Leila Hassan, Martin Jacques.
  
• Analysis of party-movement relationships. There are two obvious approaches: Contentious Relationship Analysis (trawl newspapers or some other corpus to produce a list of interactions, group interactions into relationships between Party X & Movement Y, take the relationship as unit of analysis, search for common patterns of relationship development - this is basically an adapted form of PEA); or Case Study (pick particular relationship, e.g. the British Labour Party and the anti-war movement, and produce holistic in-depth study of evolution of that particular relationship).
  
• Operationalising 'emotional energy'. A key part of Durkheimian sociology and its modern micro-sociological variants (see e.g. Randall Collins), the metaphor of 'emotional energy' is often applied to social movements & revolutionary moments. But although we can recognise it when we see it, the concept has not yet been operationalised in a satisfactory way. This is a big challenge but an important one. For some starting points see: [1], [2], [3], [4], [5].
  
• Free spaces and urban social movements. Scholars and activists have often commented on the important role of "free spaces" or "oppositional enclaves" in the development of social movements [1]. 'Space' here is often used as a metaphor, but free spaces are often physical: community centres, churches, squats, social centres, etc. What interests me is the fact that the availability of these physical spaces is partly determined by urban political economy. Several questions therefore suggest themselves: Are changes to urban political economy and the availability of these kind of civic spaces a kind of "opportunity structure" for urban movements? Do particular kinds of spaces lead movements to develop in particular directions (in other words, are there any common patterns of movement development depending on the kinds of physical spaces they inhabit)? Has the securitisation and privatisation of cities led to a decline in movements (if not, why not)? Can particular spaces function as a kind of "abeyance structure"? Some of these questions could be quantified if appropriate measures of available spaces & mobilisation can be found for a particular city/region. Other would lend themselves to careful case study analysis.