Michael S. Drake

University of Hull, Department of Social Sciences, Faculty Member

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I write and teach political, cultural and historical sociology, social and political theory, on violence and war, political memory, and the body in culture, politics and society. I am currently working on a number of interrelated projects, including: the political significance of the dead body, literary sociology, new theories of power and the state, social conditions of creativity, and the cultural constitution of collective identities.

I am Co-investigator for 'Heroes and Loved Ones', a case-study of the commemoration of military deaths in combat, on the AHRC-funded project Remember Me: The Changing face of Memorialisation, at: http://www2.hull.ac.uk/fass/rememberme.aspx

I present my work at national and international conferences, I convene conference panels, and I organised the international conference, Social Pathologies of Contemporary Civilization at Hull in 2012. My photographic work has been used in publishing.

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Books by Michael S. Drake

Imaginative Methodologies in the Social Sciences: Creativity, Poetics and Rhetoric in Social Research, eds. Michael Hviid Jacobsen, Michael S. Drake, Kieran Keohane and Anders Petersen.

Problematics of Military Power: Government, Discipline, and the Subject of Violence, 335 pages, London: Routledge Frank Cass, 2002, ISBN: 0-7146-5202-4

Political Sociology for a Globalizing World, Polity Press, September 2010.

Description This accessible book addresses one of the twenty-first century’s most important issu... more Description
This accessible book addresses one of the twenty-first century’s most important issues: the increasing lack of connection between political institutions and the social reality of our everyday lives. A gulf between popular expectations and formal politics has widened continually since the revolts against authority of 1968, the Eastern European revolutions of 1989 and the growth of new social movements. Today, popular disillusion with politics is ubiquitous. Enormous social transformations on a global scale since the 1970s have produced no fundamental change in what are considered normal political institutions such as the state, or in mainstream political ideologies and parties.

This book provides tools to understand the apparent irrelevance of formal political institutions and practices to social life. In order to enable us to begin to rethink the relations between politics and society, Michael Drake ably synthesises the new theoretical developments that social transformations have produced, including the analysis of power, representation, social identities, social movements, sovereignty, statehood, globalization, revolution, risk and security. Ultimately, the book explores the emergent potentialities and problems of this new politics in a world of continuous transformation, where the parameters of the political are continuously shifting.

Papers by Michael S. Drake

Art squats, artistic critique and resistance: Between recuperation and obliteration

In: Prace Kulturoznawcze Vol. 19 (special ed Uczestnictwo, ruch, wspólnota, ed. Magdalena Matys... more

Commemorating Fatalities of War and National Identity in the Twenty-First Century

José Saramago’s Sociology

In: Imaginative Methodologies in the Social Sciences: Creativity, Poetics and Rhetoric in Social ... more

Discourse Analysis and the War on Terror

Globalisation, Citizenship and the War on Terror, 2007

‘Erving Goffman’s Political Sociology and the Politics of the Disabled People’s Movement in the UK’, pp 61-73, in ed. B. Haas, Macht: Performativität, Performanz und Polittheater seit 1990, Würzburg: Köningshausen & Neumann, 2005. ISBN: 3-8260-3040-0

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‘Power and the State: Flourishing union, divorce or metamorphosis?’

The body of the dead: Political funerals and revolution in a mediated world

Between harmony and hotels: Reykjavik through music festivals and financial crisis

Precarity as condition of creativity? Reykjavik's Menningarnott and Melodica Festivals

This paper is based on observational fieldwork, interview and documentary research into two annua... more This paper is based on observational fieldwork, interview and documentary research into two annual events in Reykjavik, Iceland - Menningarnott (Reykjavik Culture Night) and Reykjavik Melodica (the unique Icelandic stage of a global series of songwriter-musician-led acoustic concerts). Both events are studied as responses to the economic and political crisis in Iceland ensuing on the collapse of the banks in 2008.These are two very differently-scaled events, with different organizational forms, but both are non-profit, and are not directly related to the promotion of Iceland as a tourist destination. Rather, each ostensibly aims to foster ‘community’. The paper critically analyses and discusses this aim and shows how the two events articulate contention of the concept. However, both events produce subjective conditions which can be analysed as conditions of creativity.
One of the key motivations behind this research is to challenge the assumption that precarity must be negatively valued, without falling into the obverse axiom that precarity automatically stimulates creativity. Through this question, the paper proposes an alternative to the commonplace environmentally determinist explanation of why it is that Iceland has such a massively disproportionate musical output (both formal and informal) in relation to its population and formal economy, with wider consideration of the relationship between funding and policy, and creativity and cultural (re)generation, through consideration of these two events.

The Sociology of José Saramago’s novels

eds. Michael Hviid Jacobsen, Michael S. Drake, Kieran Keohane and Anders Petersen, Imaginative Methodologies in the Social Sciences, 2013

Zombinations: Reading the undead as debt and guilt in the national imaginary

eds. Lavina, M. and Bui, D-M. T. Monster Culture in the 21st Century: A Reader (ISBN: HB: 9781441187970/ PB: 9781441178398), 2013

The war dead and the body politic in the era of globalization

This paper surveys the commemoration of the military dead through changes in state and society as... more This paper surveys the commemoration of the military dead through changes in state and society as a consequence of globalization. It shows how new forms of commemoration have emerged which correspond to those new conditions. However, the close identification of the military dead with the body politic, as a figure for the unity between population and the state, also opens that commemoration to political contention in a context where the material foundations of the classical conception of nationalism, as analysed by Anderson (1991), have eroded away and national identity has become a purely fantastic imaginary. The paper concludes by outlining emergent responsibilities and conditions of legitimation for military institutions and operations in the contemporary world.

Speculating trust and mistrust in the sociological fiction of social change

Abstract This paper begins by establishing the premis that fiction can be understood as specula... more Abstract
This paper begins by establishing the premis that fiction can be understood as speculative sociology. The work of the Swedish author John Ajvide Lindqvist explores the consequences of mistrust, doubt, uncertainty and fear in our social and cultural expectations, performing a sociological analysis of the implications of contemporary social change and developing insights in ways that our conventional methodologies are unable to apprehend.
The paper will consider two of Lindqvist’s novels, Let the Right One In (subsequently made into an internationally released film that was also subject to a US remake) and Handling the Undead. The analysis of this fictional oeuvre will be supported by drawing upon a minor but rich tradition of reading literature as sociology (Brown 1977, Coser 1963, Suchoff 1994), which has recently been revived by Michael Hviid Jacobsen (Jacobsen 2011). This 'literary sociology' approach is contrasted to the sociology of literature. Utilising Walter Benjamin’s concept of allegory, this paper makes a claim for a sociological approach which has new relevance in the context of globalisation and the disembedding of hitherto ‘minor’ national literatures.

Terrorism and counter-terror: The mirror of strategy

Abstract Focusing on post-9/11 terrorist incidents from Mumbai to Oslo, this paper develops an a... more Abstract
Focusing on post-9/11 terrorist incidents from Mumbai to Oslo, this paper develops an analysis of the relationship between terror and counter-terror as symbolic exchange in operational form. That relationship is traced through the historical development of terrorism and counter-terrorism across the major ‘break’ in violence theorised by Michael Wieviorka (2009) as the structuring of violence in industrial society, by analysing contemporary terrorism as an aspect of the decomposition of guerrilla warfare and total warfare in postindustrial conditions.
Terrorist tactics develop globally through networks, but also via the mediatisation of terrorist incidents that is part of their practitioners’ aim. Similarly, counter terror develops via the globalised function of the security state and networked exchanges of personnel and expertise and through market exchanges of technology, but also through response to only indirectly related terror incidents, communicated via global mass media. The two opposed forms thus constitute a complex system of exchange that is reflected in the symbolic analogies to be drawn between terror and counter-terror at operational, tactical and strategic levels, which will be drawn out in the paper. The effect is to turn trust against itself, inducing a cycle of fear which serves the practitioners of both parties in the exchange (Joas 2003: 193).
Keywords: Terrorism, counter-terrorism, symbolic exchange, trust, fear.

‘Art Squats Today: Between Recuperation and Obliteration’

If the 1990s saw the re-appearance of critical art practice in the public sphere through a re-eng... more If the 1990s saw the re-appearance of critical art practice in the public sphere through a re-engagement with radical politics and a revival of art squats, the first decade of the new millennium saw the fetishisation of creativity in service to capital accumulation, producing the problems of how to maintain radical and innovative creativity under pressures of recuperation through projects which enrolled artistic imagination and energy in biopolitical governance. In that decade, culturally innovative art practice was able to lay a self-compromising claim to social legitimation and to access state funding through its role as a catalytic factor in urban regeneration. With the onset of economic recession and the political response, the very continuity of such art practice comes into question as state funding disappears and those spaces that opened up on the leading edge of neo-liberal cycles of neglect and regeneration become subject to state repression acting in corporate interest. Following the avante-garde of the later twentieth century, the art squat as a nomadic, temporarily autonomous social space is corporeal, embodied, consisting as much in performative lifestyle as in the production of traditional artefacts. The art squat has thus played a major part in reconstructing the social identity of the artist and the social milieu of ‘art’ in recent decades. Through a comparative study of a representative sample of art squats including Tacheles in Berlin and Schijnheilig in Amsterdam, this paper questions their future between governmental recuperation and repressive obliteration.

‘The war dead and the body politic: Rendering the dead soldier’s body in the new global (dis)order’,

‘The returns of war: Repatriating the war dead from Iraq and Afghanistan’

Michael S. Drake

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