Cox, Laurence (2007) Counter culture and social change since the 70s. Everyday creativity, counter cultures and social change. Symposium proceedings. pp. 12-19.

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Abstract

What I want to do in this presentation is to set Donagh’s research, and maybe the rest of the day, in a broader context, coming out of my own research on the counter culture of the late 1980s but going beyond that to think about the various counter cultures in Ireland since the 1970s or so. And the first question that has to be answered is maybe: why does it matter? So here’s a quick answer to that. If we’re interested in social change, there might be all sorts of reasons why it comes about; and people are often very attracted to explanations which somehow go behind the backs of people who are alive at the time and make it look as though it was going to happen anyway. We could ask very interesting questions about why those kinds of answers are attractive, but for my purposes today the main point is that they are irrelevant. There may indeed be things going on, forces for change or against change, that are not particularly visible to us, but they aren’t that relevant to our action, because we can’t do anything significant about them. (This may of course be why they are attractive – because they let us off the hook, break the connection between what we feel is wrong in the world and ourselves as people who might actually take some action.)

Item Type:	Article
Keywords:	Counter culture; social change;
Academic Unit:	Faculty of Social Sciences > Sociology
Item ID:	1533
Depositing User:	Dr. Laurence Cox
Date Deposited:	14 Sep 2009 09:55
Journal or Publication Title:	Everyday creativity, counter cultures and social change. Symposium proceedings
Publisher:	NUIM
Refereed:	No
URI:
Use Licence:	This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here

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