Stir (2020) is a collection of poems which were written while I was the research associate on the Distant Voices project (2017-2020).[1] I'm a visual sociologist (sociologist with an art practice as part of their approach) and these poems reflect on my experience of doing ethnographic research in carceral spaces, written from the perspective of an …
Continue reading Stir, field works from the Distant Voices project
In this blogpost, I share a few insights from my analysis of the songs so far produced in song writing sessions as part of the Distant Voices project. I’ve been exploring how we can use these songs – which were largely written in collaboration with serving prisoners, as ways to explore the issue of ‘coming …
In this PODCAST I interviewed S Code: the co-writer of the song Weather You about his favourite tracks in his music collection. The idea for this podcast came out of an earlier conversation with S Code about the restrictions put on the number of albums and DVDs you’re allowed in prison. With no ability to stream music …
Continue reading Castaway (podcast) for the Distant Voices project
In this PODCAST the co-writers of ‘Pure and Right’: musicians Jenny Reeve and Jill O’Sullivan aka Bdy_Prts, and Mark Holloway (Acting) Head of Operations HMP Inverness share the ideas and experiences that shaped their song. The co-writers are currently living far apart in New York, Glasgow and Inverness, so the podcast was constructed out of …
Continue reading Like Birds Flying Towards the Light (podcast) for the Distant Voices project
‘Science fiction doesn’t try to predict the future, but rather offers a significant distortion of the present… [we] look at what we see around us and we say “how can the world be different?”’ – Samuel Delany (1984). Thomas - We who are about to... Chapter oneDownload The text in the link above is the first chapter …
It was great sharing an office with Ashleigh Watson when she visitedGoldsmiths in 2017, and talking with her about making fiction and sociology. I contributed a short piece to the first issue of So Fi - her zine dedicated to sociological fiction. The piece I contributed: In Her Direction reflects on a moment during my doctoral …
Continue reading In Her Direction (sociological fiction) in So Fi Zine (#1)
In response to a request from the 1752 group and because it was always designed to be an activist workshopping tool, I have made my play The Girls Get Younger Every Day open access. It is available to download here: Thomas_The Girls Get Younger Every Year_script I wrote this play several years after the experiences that …
Continue reading ‘The Girls Get Younger Every Year’ (play). Open access and available to download.
https://www.thesociologicalreview.com/grand-designs/ Upon our time, a widower there was in rural France, who had strangers crossfingered to claim his home when he died. Neither had squeezed, softly skulled from his wife’s belly, their gym-bodies were hard from a different sort of labour. City of Londoners. Roast Beef. With manicures clamped around his writ, searching a flailing …
This might read like a painfully earnest fable about Brexit, so I want to point out that this story is based on an incident that happened on a friend’s allotment in the run up to the referendum. https://cucrblog.wordpress.com/2016/12/04/shrug-by-phil-thomas/ .
Ali Eisa and I organised a stream on 'The Politics andPractice of "Just Making Things,”' as part of the annual London Conference in CriticalThought, hosted by University College London, 26th & 27th June, 2015. Ali and I were also both part of the organising team for the conference as a whole. In my experience LCCT …
