Those who've visited my website before will notice that the site have changed. I've included a blog on the front page and integrated my Metal Jew blog into the site as a separate page. The site still needs a fair bit of work so bear with me...
I was interviewed about the project in a couple of English-language media outlets in Luxembourg:
In wort.lu
I am currently working on a book to be entitled 'The Best Water Skier in Luxembourg: Tales of Big Fish in Small Ponds' . The book will be something of an adventure for me - I will travel to a number of places to investigate experts and champions in small fields in small countries. As the title of the book suggests, I will start with a chapter on water skiing in Luxembourg. After which I aim to investigate:
The book is being funded through a new crowd-funding publishing platform called Unbound where writers take their book pitches directly to readers. If readers like the pitch they pledge to support the project and if enough people do so the book gets written. The link to my pitch and video is here.
The first chapter has now been funded and in December 2011 I visited Luxembourg to conduct research. The chapter will be published by next spring, after which I will be seeking funding for the rest of the book.
Scroll down for updates on the project (this post will stay on the top of the page for the time being).
[Cross posted from New Public Thinking]
We are looking for contributions to our first New Public Thinking book, a moment of reflection at the end of a year of networked disruption. More from Keith Kahn-Harris and Dougald Hine…
2011 has been an extraordinary year. It was the year of Occupy, the Arab Spring, Wikileaks and the humbling of Rupert Murdoch. It was also the year of the meltdown of the Eurozone and the Fukushima reactor, both part of an eruption of risk and collapse.
More personally, both of us have experienced 2011 as a year of excitement and inspiration. We found ourselves impressed and energised by new possibilities: new ways of finding each other, coming together and making things happen, embodied in a torrent of innovative start-ups, projects, initiatives and movements. We have tried to make some contributions to this wave of creativity, through our involvement in the University Project, New Public Thinking, Unbound and much else.
So what did it all mean? What exactly has happened? We feel a strong need to mark 2011 in some way. We want to take stock and look around us at the world that is being remade, moment by moment. We also want to look at what failed to happen and what didn’t change, at the limitations of the changes we have witnessed. Was the energy and vitality that we drew on in 2011 ultimately just playing at the edges of a collapsing global system?
We are also concerned that our own efforts in 2011 to make an impact on a fast-changing situation are in danger of getting lost in the flood of work. We are aware that some of the projects we started never quite took off, as we struggled with burnout and the ever-changing reality. We want to create some kind of modest legacy to this year that may provide a starting point and a conceptual structure for what comes next.
So this is our plan: we are going to assemble a collection of our own and others’ responses to 2011. These will be short, impressionistic and provisional. The collection will be published as an e-book and possibly as a hard copy too. We will work fast and collaboratively, deliberately avoiding setting up elaborate plans that we cannot complete. We aim to complete our work by February/March.
We therefore invite you to send us your responses to 2011, taking these brief reflections as a starting point. Do you share our sense that something extraordinary happened? How do you make sense of the events that surround us, within the experience of your own life? What hopes or warnings do you have as we head into 2012?
Contributions should be up to 3000 words and should reach us by December 31st. Please send them to ReflectionsOn2011@gmail.com.
Published by Continuum, 2012
The first book-length study of contemporary British Jewry , Turbulent Times: The British Jewish Community Today examines the changing nature of the British Jewish community and its leadership since 1990.
Keith Kahn-Harris and Ben Gidley contend that there has been a shift within Jewish communal discourse from a strategy of security, which emphasized Anglo-Jewry’s secure British belonging and citizenship, to a strategy of insecurity, which emphasizes the dangers and threats Jews face individually and communally. This shift is part of a process of renewal in the community that has led to something of a ‘Jewish renaissance’ in Britain.
Addressing key questions on the transitions in the history of Anglo-Jewish community and leadership, and tackling the concept of the ‘new antisemitism’, this important and timely study addresses the question: how has UK Jewry adapted from a shift from monoculturalism to multiculturalism?
Reviews, interviews and articles on ‘Turbulent Times’
[NB: if you know of any more then please get in touch]
Review in the Jewish Journal of Sociology, volume 53, 2011
Review in Jewish Socialist magazine, summer 2011
Review in the Jewish Quarterly by Tony Lerman, Winter 2010/2011 [download a scan here]
Review in the Jewish Chronicle by Miri Freud-Kandel, December 1 2010
Interview with the authors in the Jewish Chronicle, July 28 2010
Short article in British Religion in Numbers, July 2010
Article promoting the book by Keith Kahn-Harris in Ekklesia, July 2010
Published by Berg, 2007
Extreme metal–one step beyond heavy metal–can appear bizarre or terrifying to the uninitiated. Extreme metal musicians have developed an often impenetrable sound that teeters on the edge of screaming, incomprehensible noise. Extreme metal circulates on the edge of mainstream culture within the confines of an obscure ’scene’, in which members explore dangerous themes such as death, war and the occult, sometimes embracing violence, neo-fascism and Satanism.
In the first book-length study of extreme metal, Keith Kahn-Harris draws on first-hand research to explore the global extreme metal scene. He shows how the scene is a space in which members creatively explore destructive themes, but also a space in which members experience the everyday pleasures of community and friendship.
Including interviews with band members and fans, from countries ranging from the UK and US to Israel and Sweden, Extreme Metal: Music and Culture on the Edge demonstrates the power and subtlety of an often surprising and misunderstood musical form.
Reviews of ‘Extreme Metal: Music and Culture on the Edge’
[NB: if you know of any more then please get in touch]
Metal Rules, February 2012
Circle of Destruction, February 2009
Journal of Popular Music Studies, Volume 20, Issue 2, Pages 194–207
Popular Music,Volume 27, Issue 2, May 2008, Pages 338-9
Nordicum- Mediterraneum, Vol 3, No 1, March 2008
Xtrememusic.org 2008
Zombiegirlsonline 2008
Metal Injection 11th July 2007
Decibel Magazine (US) July 2007
Times Higher Education Supplement March 16th 2007
Copyright Volume! 5/2 2006 [in French]
Published by I.B. Tauris, 2011
Music and religion have, throughout history, walked hand in hand. In the rites and rituals of small tribal religions, great world religions, and more recent New-Age and neo-heathen movements, different kinds of music have been used to celebrate the gods, express belief and help believers get in contact with the divine. This innovative book focuses on how mainstream and counter-cultural groups use religion and music to negotiate the challenges of modernisation and globalisation in the European context: a region under-explored by existing literature on the subject. With its internal ethnic diversity, ever-expanding borders and increasing differentiation, Europe has undergone massive dislocation in recent years. The authors show that, in the midst of such change, rock, pop and dance music may in their various forms be used by their practitioners as resources for new kinds of spiritual and religious identification, even as these forms are used as symbols of the deficiencies of secular society. Focusing on Christianity, Judaism, Islam and New Religious Movements, the book explores such topics as Norwegian Black Metal and Neo-paganism, contemporary Jewish Music in the UK, the French hip hop scene, the musical thinking of Muslim convert Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam and European dance music culture. It offers an ideal introduction to leading-edge thinking at the exciting interface of 'music and religion'.
Published by Palgrave, 2004
