Punk and education research: ‘Don’t want to be taught to be no fool’

It may be an anathema to many of those that maintain connections with punk that a scholarly interest and approach to engaging with punk is attempted at all, however there is increasingly an interest in punk from academics, and there aremany good reasons for why this is the case (Furness, 2012). The stereotypical representations and ideas associated with punk are best put aside at this point – while the enduring stereotype is of mohawks, ripped and dishevelled clothes, and explosions of anti-authoritarian rage, punk is better conceptualised as an understanding and view of the world that can be manifested in wide and creative articulations of cultural production. Hence, punk sensibilities and critique of materialistic massproduced culture (and the politics and economics that underpin this) can be communicated in a wide variety of ways, and similarly, a sense of community that fosters individuality and a commitment to rolling up your sleeves to get things done – rather than waiting around for things to get done by others, is demonstrated in equally diverse ways (Way, 2021). Punk demurs from being defined, and efforts to somehow frame or explain what it is, tend to result in contestations. This has not halted the fact that after several decades, punk is a phenomenon with a global presence (see above, Dunn, 2016). The emergence of punk has been linked with notions of ‘postmodernity’ in recognition that people – and in some respects initially it was ‘young people’ more specifically – were defiantly pushing back on dominant cultural, political and economic practices that were increasingly saturated by mass-media and