Meet the tutors: Dr Ray Kinsella and Kevin Quinn

What is your background and research area?

Ray: My name is Dr Ray Kinsella and I’m an associate lecturer at Central Saint Martins. I’m currently working on turning my PhD research into a book. My research was about the Bebop jazz in Soho, London in the mid-1940s, from 1945 to 1950. I was looking at the music, style and transracial relationships across gender that provoked a moral panic at the time.

Kevin: My name is Kevin and I’m a part-time PhD student at Central Saint Martins. I’m analysing the New Musical Express (NME), which was a big weekly music paper that ran from 1982 to 2018. I’m investigating the period 1979-1983 when the paper was selling a quarter of a million copies a week. I’m particularly interested in the performative power the critics had as well as the idea of the paper’s role as a cultural tastemaker during a period of cultural, political and social unrest.

How did you come to work in your field?

Ray: I left school at 14 – so I was really young. I sort of dropped out of society really. It wasn’t until my mid-thirties that I decided to come back and get an education. I did a return to study course at City Lit, an adult education centre, and just kind of got my teeth into that, and 11 years later I’ve got a PhD.

Kevin: I left secondary education with very few qualifications and got into higher education in my thirties. Not having a solid, standard education behind me meant that I struggled initially. But by sticking at it I got there in the end. I was predominately a self-taught youth and it was only by attending evening classes that I realised I could turn my own passions and interests into something and use it as a springboard for development. I’m always learning more, it’s forever an endless cycle.

Tell us about something you've been working on recently

Ray: I’ve recently started researching the late 1980s and 1990s subcultural scene in Islington, London. I’m working on turning the focus from a national perspective to a local level to see what that reveals about the scene as a whole. When I say Islington, I mean the whole borough, from King’s Cross to Archway, from Finsbury Park to Old Street – all the pockets of industrialised spaces in that borough. There’s a lot of people from that borough who pioneered acid house. Even where Central Saint Martins is based now, there was a history of old warehouses and a lot of illegal acid house parties took place.

Read about Dr Ray's Kinsella's interest in the acid house and rave subculture.

Kevin: I’m currently looking at a cassette that was released in conjunction with Rough Trade, the independent record label. I’m exploring what it meant culturally in terms of the NME (New Musical Express) and my argument is that it signified an eventual decline. I’ve also been looking at the year 1981. In 1981 there were over 60 riots across the UK, and I’m focusing on one riot which the NME covered in quite a prejudiced manner. I’m analysing a strand of Punk which the NME took against and exploring the reasons why. It’s unearthed a lot of issues around class, taste and race.

Can you tell us about the webinars that you run?

Ray: Our webinars are about the study of post-war British youth subcultures, beginning from the very first time they were studied in Chicago in the 20^th century, up until they were adopted by British cultural studies in the 1970s. The study of subcultures goes back to the 1920s when the University of Chicago started doing ethnographic research into gang culture and deviance. By the 1970s, researchers were studying post-war British youth subcultures. They began with the 1950s by looking at the working-class deviant subculture, the teddy boys, but my research has taken it back a little bit further than that and I’ve challenged the idea that it begins in the 1950s. I’ve used the jazz scene, specifically one genre of the jazz scene, namely bebop in 1940s Soho London, to demonstrate that we can actually read subcultures at the beginning of the 1940s. In the webinars we go right through the history of subcultures and look at subcultures in the virtual worlds, with a focus on how they manifest online and in the 21^st century.

Want to find out more about subcultures and their relationship to fashion, style and community? Take a look at our Upcoming Webinars with Dr Ray Kinsella and Kevin Quinn.