Politics, Research & Writing

adamgough@clara.co.uk

The research, writing and teaching I have done has been to a large extent propelled by my political passions. In my paid work, in my 20s and 30s I was a policy researcher on urban industries and economy, and in my 40s, 50s and 60s a university lecturer and researcher in social science, human geography, and the political-economy of cities. This working life was not planned as a career (my friend Noel Grieg once remarked that ‘career’ is what people do off the edge of a cliff). I did my first degree and a PhD in physics. But this was in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a period of tumultuous political struggles around the world; the Vietnamese were resisting the US’s invasion, trade unions were taking on employers and government, the women’s and lesbian and gay movement erupted, African Americans had transformed US society. These struggles first impacted on me first during a year I spent between school and university in California, when I learnt about the US war against Vietnam and joined protests against it. In 1972 I joined a newly formed Gay Liberation Front group in Oxford, where I was doing my PhD, which brought me out of my agonised closet, and for the next two decades my main political activism was around lesbian and gay rights. This experience led me to wish to do work which engaged with society rather than become a physics academic. Because I had been interested in urban landscapes and architecture as a child, I decided to do a MPhil in Town Planning. During my MPhil studies I became involved in the squatting movement in London