Ian Gwinn

My PhD focused on the inner life of cultural and intellectual activism in Britain and West Germany since the late-1960s. I have a range of research interests, both historical and contemporary, related to cultural and extra-institutional forms of politics, in particular social movements and civil society, youth culture and subculture, and working-class, socialist, and feminist organisations. I am a trained oral historian and have used recorded testimony and memory extensively in my work, in order to explore both individual experience and large-scale processes of historical change.

I am currently developing a project entitled 'Two Tone Towns', a study of the impact of 2-Tone and ska in rural and small-town England, which explores how their meaning was taken up and re-appropriated by youth subcultures in places and regions very different to the urban centres from which the movement sprang.