The Elephant in the Room: Celebration, Commemoration and Cultural Contradiction

11th and 12th December 2026
Middlesex University, London.

If the 100 Club Punk Special, the first Sex Pistols single or the now infamous Bill Grundy interview can be taken as ‘year zero’, punk is currently celebrating its 50th anniversary. Yet anniversaries often tend to present linear narratives, stories of origin, and canonical histories. However, punk’s histories are multiple and contested, not least in notions of definition, timescale, musical and subcultural style. This conference therefore raises questions over the elephant in the room: what does it mean to celebrate 50 years of punk? What does it mean to celebrate a movement grounded in refusal, immediacy and a suspicion of both tradition and futurity?

On the one hand, the anniversary itself is not a neutral marker but instead a site of contention, and this conference raises questions over how one might impose coherence on punk, canonising what resisted preservation and transforming antagonism into heritage. In other words, raising questions over the implications of translating an anti-establishment ethos into a heritage discourse. Of how practices of celebration intersect with ambiguities around nostalgia and the politics of memory. And asking to what extent does the framing of ‘fifty years’ obscure ongoing, localized, trans-global and global iterations of punk that complicate any singular timeline?

On the other hand, scholars also have a well-deserved opportunity to commemorate punk: to celebrate its emergence in the mid-1970s, drawing renewed attention to punk as a musical, cultural and sartorial explosion which encompassed a unique sense of creativity, resistance, aesthetics and politics. Here, the anniversary may not only be a moment of reflection on how punk challenged conventions and thus created new spaces for youth expression, but also a place where we, as scholars, can reflect on the role of the Punk Scholars Network in helping to develop the field of punk studies within academia: a field that had previously been under-represented.

Hosted by the Middlesex University, the Punk Scholars Network’s 13th Annual Conference and Postgraduate Symposium will explore the ambiguities, contradictions, and critical/cultural frictions that emerge in the attempt to mark punk’s longevity. If punk once rejected the past and distrusted the future, how does it now accommodate retrospection, legacy, and endurance? What kinds of narratives are produced in the act of anniversary-making and what do they include, exclude, simplify or distort?

We invite papers that interrogate the instability of punk’s fifty-year milestone and engage critically with the ways in which celebration intersects with canon formation and cultural memory. At the same time, we invite papers that reflect on punk’s cultural contribution and ongoing significance at a symbolically important point in its history.

We invite papers that address – but are not limited to – the following:

• Memory and nostalgia
• Oral histories
• What does ‘50 years of punk’ measure, and what does it obscure?
• Celebration or neutralisation – does commemoration domesticate punk’s oppositional attitude?
• Canon and gatekeeping – which histories, scenes, and voices are privileged in anniversary narratives, and which remain marginal?
• Heritage – punk in archives, museums, academia, and institutional discourse.
• Commodification and nostalgia – has punk simply been transformed into brand, style and a marketable past?
• Temporal disruptions – how do ongoing practices, revivals and global scenes unsettle linear histories of punk?
• If ‘punk’ exists as both a visible aesthetic and a diffuse cultural signifier, what – if anything – anchors its meaning?
• What is the future of punk scholarship as we enter punk’s second half-century?

Submission Guidelines

Please submit an abstract of 250–300 words, along with a brief biographical note (100 words).
Panel and roundtable proposals are also encouraged.
Submission Deadline Tuesday 1st September 2026
Decision will be sent by Thursday 15th September 2026
Please send proposal to Mike Dines at [email protected]