Essay #10: Jack Saunders, 'What are we clapping for?'

04/05/21 • 16 min

In this essay, Jack Saunders explores our complex relationship with the NHS, its staff and its history.

Jack Saunders is Lecturer in modern British history at University College London. He is author of Assembling Cultures: Workplace Activism, Labour Militancy and Cultural Change in Britain's Car Factories, 1945-82 (2020) and has published widely on the history of work in post-war Britain. This essay draws on his research for the People's History of the NHS project, some of which will published in the forthcoming edited volume by Jenny Crane and Jane Hand, Posters, Placards and Prescriptions: Cultural Histories of the NHS.

Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group. For more information on the ARG, visit www.lboro.ac.uk/subjects/politics-international-studies/research/arg/ . You can follow us on Twitter @arglboro

Our music comes from Them'uns (featuring Yous'uns). Hear more at https://soundcloud.com/user-178917365

Artwork by Sam G: https://www.instagram.com/passerinecreations

In this essay, Jack Saunders explores our complex relationship with the NHS, its staff and its history.

Our music comes from Them'uns (featuring Yous'uns). Hear more at https://soundcloud.com/user-178917365

Artwork by Sam G: https://www.instagram.com/passerinecreations

Previous Episode

Essay #9: Dani Spinosa, 'Theft on the Ground Floor'

In this essay, Dani Spinosa reads the contemporary campus as a non-place for the precarious labourer. She considers the role of labour relations and the remote teaching of the pandemic to consider how and where the precariat can work against this dislocation.

Dani Spinosa is adjunct faculty at three different institutions in southern Ontario, Canada. She is the Managing Editor of the Electronic Literature Directory, a Fellow of the Electronic Literature Organization, and a co-founding editor of the feminist micropress Gap Riot. She is the author of Anarchists in the Academy (U of Alberta P, 2018) and OO: Typewriter Poems (Invisible Publishing, 2020). Her recent work considers feminist and anarchist themes in contemporary avant-garde and visual poetry, including studies of revisionist mythmaking and materialities of digital literary texts.

Our music comes from Them'uns (featuring Yous'uns). Hear more at https://soundcloud.com/user-178917365

Artwork by Sam G: https://www.instagram.com/passerinecreations

Next Episode

Essay #11: Craig Clark, 'Publishing is Posh'

In this essay, Craig Clark explores the incompatibility of publishing that hopes to shape events and the publishing industry – and some anarchised alternatives.

Craig Clark is a member of the Dog Section Press workers’ cooperative and an editor of DOPE Magazine. This essay draws on his experience of several years of involvement in various attempts to spread propaganda, with varying degrees of success.

Our music comes from Them'uns (featuring Yous'uns). Hear more at https://soundcloud.com/user-178917365

Artwork by Sam G: https://www.instagram.com/passerinecreations