Dr Geoff Bright

Geoff Bright is a former Research Fellow and currently a Visiting Scholar at ESRI. A former steel worker and rail worker, he has a work background in trade union, adult and further education and an academic background in philosophy. His PhD study was an ethnography of the intergenerational intersection of class, place and gender as it impacts on education in deindustrialized coalmining communities, and his current work grows out of a lifelong relationship to mining communities and ideas of independent working class education. He is now leading his fourth AHRC Connected Communities funded project in that area, which uses arts-based methods and the idea of a ‘social haunting’ to co-produce possible futures for such communities. He is also currently involved in the EU funded Partispace project which is looking into “styles and forms of participation” among under 30s, and is a network convener for the ethnography network at the European Education Research Association (EERA). His 2016 article in Ethnography and Education: “The lady is not returning!: Educational precarity and a social haunting in the UK coalfields” won the WCSA international prize for best academic article.

Living something of a double life, he also works in critical cultural practice as an improvising musician, experimental vocalist and provocateur and is associated with the following projects and collectives: Oppositional Defiance Disorder; Alchemy/Schmalchemy; Dividual Machine and the anti-choir Juxtavoices. In one such guise he co-curated the large-scale (50+ instruments/voices) sonic occupation of a former steel works: Magna: Node/Flow/Mass.

He welcomes inquiries about doctoral supervision in overlapping studies of class, gender, community, affect and psychosocial aspects of deindustrialization; the interdisciplinary field of New Working Class Studies; and arts-based community co-production.

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