Autobiography as culture politics

Jonathan Gross researches and teaches in the department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries, King’s College London.

In this specially repeated episode, Sophie Hope talks to him about the relationship between autobiography and cultural action, and the needs to explore memory and history as a means of making sense of one’s own cultural politics. 

During the conversation they each discuss how they came to view cultural democracy as a meaningful idea and a useful tool, and what inspired them to do so.

The conversation then broadens to include the work of Aristotle, Sheila Rowbottom, Lynn Segal and Hilary Wainwright. They then begin to ask whether we should see cultural democracy primarily as a kind of practice or as a demand for systemic change.