Feeling / No Feelings and the Margins Research Group present

Margins Make Meaning: Punk, Post-Punk, and Cyberpunk across Literatures, Media, and Cultures, organised by the Feeling / No Feelings conference series, now in its third edition, and developed in collaboration with the Margins Research Group, brings together punk and post-punk studies with broader reflections on margins as spaces of cultural production and critical negotiation. The conference explores punk and post-punk as cultural practices shaped through conflict, exclusion, experimentation, and alternative forms of cultural belonging. The conference welcomes contributions from literary and cultural studies, linguistics and discourse analysis, translation studies, sociology, media and visual culture, pedagogy, and related interdisciplinary fields. It aims to examine how punk and post-punk cultures challenge established forms of representation and legitimacy across different historical moments, from the emergence of punk in the mid-1970s to contemporary reactivations.

Within this framework, punk and post-punk are approached not as marginal objects in a reductive sense, but as practices that make the structures of the centre visible. Margins are understood not as spaces of lack, but as sites where aesthetic norms, identities, cultural hierarchies, and forms of representation are questioned and reworked. Hebdige’s reflections on subculture as resignification and friction with dominant culture remain central in this respect (1979). This perspective also enters into dialogue with Hall’s work on representation (1997) and Foucault’s analyses of discourse, visibility, and regulation (1977; 1978). The transition from punk to post-punk expanded these dynamics towards experimentation, visual culture, performance, and new media practices. Reynolds’ work on post-punk (2005), together with Ngai’s reflections on irony, flatness, and suspended affect (2005), offers useful perspectives for examining tensions between intensity and detachment, political urgency and anti-expressivity, and the relationship between affect and cultural production.

The conference also encourages work on literature, discourse, multimodality, translation, and cultural circulation. Literary texts, song lyrics, manifestos, interviews, fanzines, performances, visual materials, and digital practices all contribute to the production of meaning within punk and post-punk cultures. Particular attention may be given to literary representations of punk and post-punk, the relationship between literary form and subculture, and the ways literary texts engage with questions of marginality, identity, resistance, memory, and cultural change. Contributions on cyberpunk literature and related speculative traditions are also welcome, particularly where they intersect with questions of technological mediation, marginality, resistance, alternative futures, and countercultural imaginaries. Approaches drawn from literary studies, discourse analysis, multimodality, intermediality, and translation studies (van Dijk 2008; Kress and van Leeuwen 2001; 2006; Rajewsky 2005; Tymoczko 2007) are particularly relevant in this context.

Questions of identity, embodiment, scenes, cultural memory, and forms of preservation also remain central to the conference. Feminist critiques within subcultural studies (McRobbie and Garber 2006; Reddington 2012; LeBlanc 1999), together with work on scenes and cultural memory (Straw 1991; Thornton 1995; Cohen 1991; Duncombe 1997; Triggs 2006; Taylor 2003), provide important perspectives for examining how punk and post-punk cultures are produced, circulated, preserved, and reinterpreted across different contexts.

The conference welcomes historical and theoretical proposals, case studies, textual and visual analyses, archival research, and reflections on contemporary reactivations of punk and post-punk cultures.

Thematic Areas The following areas identify the main thematic directions of the conference. While interdisciplinary approaches are welcome, proposals should engage clearly with the conference’s core focus on punk and post-punk as forms of cultural production shaped through margins, discourse, media, and social practices:

• Punk, Post-Punk, and Cultural Margins We welcome contributions that explore punk and post-punk as cultural practices shaped through marginality, resistance, exclusion, conflict, and alternative forms of belonging. This area includes questions of identity, gender, class, sexuality, subculture, counterculture, social conflict, cultural politics, commodification, and forms of negotiation between underground and mainstream cultures. Particular attention may also be given to scenes, communities, urban spaces, peripheral geographies, and the relationship between centre and margin.

• Literature, Language, and Discourse This area focuses on lyrics, literary writing, manifestos, interviews, reviews, fanzines, and other textual or discursive forms connected to punk and post-punk cultures. We welcome contributions in literary studies, stylistics, discourse analysis, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, cultural linguistics, and rhetoric. Topics may include voice, irony, negativity, anti-rhetoric, metaphor, multilingualism, linguistic variation, the relationship between language and forms of cultural belonging or exclusion, as well as literary representations of punk and post-punk cultures, cyberpunk literature, speculative writing, and the intersections between literary form, technology, marginality, and subcultural imaginaries.

• Translation, Circulation, and Transnational Perspectives We invite proposals on translation, rewriting, adaptation, subtitling, dubbing, multilingual circulation, and the reception of punk and post-punk across different linguistic and cultural contexts. This area also includes studies on transnational scenes, local appropriations, cultural transfer, editorial mediation, and the ways non-Anglophone contexts reshape punk and post-punk cultures through translation and reinterpretation.

• Media, Visuality, and Multimodality This area includes visual culture, photography, cinema, performance, fashion, graphic design, album covers, comics, digital media, and intermedial practices. Contributions may explore margins and punk and post-punk as multimodal phenomena in which meaning emerges through the interaction of verbal, visual, sonic, bodily, and material elements. Studies on embodiment, self-styling, performance practices, and contemporary digital reactivations are also welcome.

• Scenes, Memory, and Cultural Production We welcome work on archives, fanzines, oral histories, DIY practices, underground publishing, collections, independent labels, and alternative networks of cultural production. This area includes reflections on memory, preservation, canon formation, and the circulation of marginal cultural materials, as well as studies on local scenes and informal or extra-institutional archives.

• Pedagogies and Critical Practices This area focuses on teaching, collaborative learning, translation pedagogy, multimodal practices, workshops, archival work, and public engagement. We are interested in how punk and post-punk can function as tools for critical interpretation, creative practice, collaborative learning, and interdisciplinary forms of knowledge production.

(Cont. to the bibliography below)