Phil Cohen (1943 – 7 November 2024) was a British cultural theorist, urban ethnographer, community activist, educationalist and poet. He was involved in the London underground counter-culture scene and gained public notoriety as "Dr John", a leader in the squatter's rights movement, but became better known for his work on youth culture and the impact of urban regeneration on working-class communities, particularly in East London, with a focus on issues of race and popular racism. More recently the scope of his work widened to include issues of identity politics, memory and loss, and the future of the Left in Britain. His most recent writing and research focuses on the transformation of object relations within digital capitalism, especially in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic and the environmental crisis, and shortly before his death he embarked on a series of collaborative book projects with graphic artists.
Cohen's academic work is trans-disciplinary and draws on concepts from linguistics and narratology, psycho-analysis and anthropology, cultural history and social phenomenology. As of 2024, he was emeritus Professor at the Centre for Cultural Studies at the University of East London, and a member of the Livingmaps Network, which he founded in 2013. Cohen was also a member of Compass, a Gramscian think tank within the Labour Party, and he was on the editorial board of New Formations. His work has been translated into French, German, Swedish, Italian, French and Japanese.
Early life and education Phil Cohen was born into a medical family living in Bloomsbury, Central London. He was educated at St Paul's School, London, where he studied classics and history and won an exhibition to read history at Queens' College, Cambridge, in 1962. At Queens', he was one of a number of talented London-raised Jewish undergraduate historians, which included Paul Ginsborg (who was also a pupil at St Paul's), Jonathan Israel and Robert Wistrich. In 1965, Cohen dropped out of university and after a period of travelling, including work on trawlers, he became involved in the London underground counterculture scene; he subsequently became a community and youth worker in London.
Cohen was married to the late Pam Brighton, the theatre director, and their son, Ned, was born in 1970. He and Pam divorced in 1978 and in 1987 he married Jean McNeil, the painter. They adopted a son, Stephen, who died of an alcohol-related illness in 2013 at the age of 33. This event is a central reference point in much of the creative writing Cohen produced since then. Cohen's grandfather was a Jewish revolutionary from Vitebsk who emigrated to live in Glasgow before the First World War and was the subject of a recent prose poem.
Youth culture and the alternative society (1965–1978) Working as an assistant to the conceptual artist John Latham, Cohen scripted "happenings" with Latham and Jeff Nuttall at Better Books, and was involved in the Wholly Communion Poetry Event and the Dialectics of Liberation conference. He also wrote for the underground paper International Times. For a time, he was associated with the English Situationist group King Mob and its journal King Mob Echo and took an active part in several of its "provocations". In 1968, he became involved in a squat at the Bell Hotel in Covent Garden, out of which the London Street Commune movement emerged. Mass squats were organised in a number of prominent public buildings in Central London, culminating in the 1969 occupation of the Queen Mother's ex-residence at 144 Piccadilly, which became known as "Hippydilly" and made world headline news. As one of the leaders of the movement who spoke to the media, Cohen's pseudonym "Dr John" featured in newsreel reports and the national press. British Pathe described the occupiers as "scroungers and hell raisers" and Dr John "the hippy squatter" briefly became a figure of fear in what he later described as a hysterical moral panic about the perceived threat that squatting posed to home ownership and private property.
Following the closing down of the street commune squats, Cohen worked as a detached youth worker for the Soho Project, and then set up Street Aid as a legal advice and self-help organisation for homeless young people in Central London, based initially in Soho and then Covent Garden. In 1975/6, with a group of fellow Leftists including David Robins, Cohen occupied a derelict pub near King's Cross and turned it into a radical cultural and education centre for local estate youth. The pub was burned down in mysterious circumstances. Knuckle Sandwich: growing up in the working class city (1978), written by Cohen and Robins, gives a detailed account of the project and situates it within an analysis of urban working-class youth culture.
These experiences led Cohen to develop a Gramscian perspective on post-war youth subcultures in Britain spelt out in a working paper published by the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) in 1972 "Sub-cultural Conflict and Working Class Community" which subsequently provided the basis for a CCCS book, Resistance through Rituals, edited by Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson. The paper has since been translated into eight European languages and become something of a classic. In this text, Cohen develops the notion of youth cultures as collective responses to structural shifts in class identity formation, creating distinct sets of imaginary class relations though specific codes of dress, behaviour, music and language. This analysis was initially applied to Mods and Skinheads, in East London and subsequently to Beats and Hippies. In later work, this initial focus on the youth question broadened to include issues of inter-generational transmission, coming-of-age stories and ideas surrounding different life phases.
Interventions in vocational and anti-racist education (1979–1992) In 1978, Cohen joined the Sociological Research Unit at the University of London's Institute of Education, run by Basil Bernstein and Michael Young, carrying out two research projects funded by the Leverhulme Trust into youth cultures and changing school transitions. This led to a series of publications challenging the "new vocationalism" and the youth training schemes then being introduced by the Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher with the aim of inculcating the values of "enterprise culture".
Moving to the Post-16 Centre at the Institute, Cohen collaborated with the Cockpit Cultural Studies Centre to produce a series of photographic exhibitions working with early-leavers focusing on their experience of schooling and issues of working class aspiration, gender identity, and ethnicity. The No Kidding Project, funded by the Greater London Council (GLC) produced learning materials to support alternative, more critical forms of vocational education. The theoretical framework for this was developed in a number of articles. This critical pedagogy was then further developed in the field of anti-racist education in a series of initiatives, films and teaching resources designed to offer an alternative to moral, symbolic and doctrinaire forms of anti-racism. These included:
Playgrounds of Prejudice, an ethnographic study of playground cultures in Dockland schools. This was supported by a film of the same title, analysing a playground fight between an Irish and a Black boy. Ananse meets Spiderwoman, a learning resource pack for primary schools, published by the British Film Institute. Anansi Rap Attack: a poster produced with the Art of Change. Empires of the Mind, a film produced by the Open University for the course on "Race, Culture, Difference". Tricks of the Trade: a project film, including an interview with Stuart Hall.
This teaching material was supported by a number of theoretical texts, including chapters in an Open University course reader, and in the Blackwell reader in Racial and Ethnic Studies.
During this period, Cohen co-edited with Angela McRobbie the Youth Questions series for Macmillan. His own books published in the series included Multi-Racist Britain (1994) and Rethinking the Youth Question: education, labour and cultural studies (1997), which brought together all his academic research on youth culture and schooling.
From race to regeneration (1992–2012) Cohen moved to the University of East London (UEL) in 1992 to set up and direct the Centre for New Ethnicities Research (CNER). The centre embarked on a programme of research and community engagement in East London around issues of popular racism and cultural identity. This included curating Rich Mix (2001), an exhibition of multicultural art in Tower Hamlets and a major conference Front Lines, Backyards (1998) which explored issues surrounding changing identifications people might make when confronted by rapid social and demographic change. Research projects included ethnographic studies of frontline situations of racial conflict in East London, a funded research programme on young people's perceptions of class, gender and ethnicity in two areas of London and Hamburg whose results were published as Finding the Way Home (2004); The centre organised a programme of talks and working papers, some of which was published in New Ethnicities, Old Racisms. The centre's work was influential, especially in directing attention to the deeper, more unconscious, reaches of the popular racist imagination. However, the use of psychoanalytic and anthropological concepts to understand the interplay of myth, ritual and phantasy in the construction of "common sense" racist narratives was controversial, especially among Marxist critics, who took this work to be symptomatic of false consciousness and an issue of Race and Class was devoted to attacking the centre's work.
In 2004, Cohen set up and co-directed the London East Research Institute (LERI), with the aim of co-ordinating the university's research on the regeneration of East London, which was gathering pace at this time and included UEL's new campus in the Royal Docks. Initially, the research concentrated on the Thames Gateway, the largest regeneration project in Europe at the time and this led to the publication of London's Turning, a collection of studies of different aspects of the eastwards turn in London's growth. With the announcement of London's bid for the 2012 Olympic Games and the decision to locate the main venue at Stratford, East London, the focus of LERI's work inevitably shifted to evaluating the impact on local communities of the rapid transformation of the area from industrial and residential use to hosting a world mega-event. Cohen conducted an ethnographic study of tunnellers and construction workers in the initial Dig, Design and Demolish phase and established ongoing focus groups with local residents and young people to chart their response to the unfolding impact of the Olympic project. This material formed the basis of his book On the Wrong Side of the Track: East London and the Post Olympics? in which Cohen explores the rhetoric and reality of the 2012 Olympic project and a follow-up study features in London 2012 and the Post Olympic City: a hollow Legacy? (2017). This concern with the Olympic Legacy inspired the Groundbreakers, an immersive trail and online guide telling the back story the Olympic Park site from the Bronze Age to the digital age.
From urban ethnography to critical cartography (2013 onwards)