Kate Wilson

HEI: University of Strathclyde

Project Title: Current living places and future utopias: community writing in Glasgow 1967 – 1990

 

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What was your research about?

This thesis examines community writing in Glasgow in the latter half of the twentieth century, locating this literature within the context of the city’s post-war urban regeneration project. Beginning from 1967, the year Scotland’s first community newspaper The Gorbals View was founded, the thesis traces how community writing evolved throughout changing urban contexts in the 1970s and 1980s, exploring how writers and activists met the shifting contours of the city’s urban project. The end point, 1990, reflects the year Glasgow was crowned European City of Culture, marking a new phase in its development. Drawing on community newspapers and writers’ group publications, as well as 18 oral history interviews with those who were involved in their creation, this thesis argues that community writing which emerged during this period was a way for those living and working in urban restructured communities to contest, negotiate and participate in top-down urban regeneration projects which often largely excluded their voices.

In exploring the creation of this community literature, this thesis makes a vital contribution to understandings of post-war Scottish culture and society more broadly. Through its chronological framing, this thesis generates insights into how wider social, political and cultural contexts were felt in primarily working-class spatial communities in Glasgow, tracing the impact of ideations of autonomy which developed in the 1960s through to 1990. In doing so, it contributes to research on community action, community work and adult education, as well as work in Scottish literary studies, by foregrounding the complex interplay between conceptions of community, self, culture and state in post-war Scotland.