Punk is not dead. A history of the punk scene in France (1976-2016) – PIND

PIND is the first research project dedicated to France’s punk scene from 1976 to today. PIND, an emphatically cross-disciplinary project, aims to take up a threefold challenge : that of being an object of study which is illegitimate (in French society and academia), vulnerable (due to the urgent nature of the project, linked to the fragility of the actors) and paradoxical (because of the very nature of punk). Relying on three main hypotheses (time, space and paradigmatic coherence) and making use of the notion of scene as a prism of analysis, it seeks to reassess the relevance of the periodizations and disruptions which help shape the definition and organization of the punk scene in France, to escape the dismissive tendency to reduce the phenomenon to a product of Anglo-American culture, and to examine how the boundaries of a hegemonic culture and of a relatively subversive culture are constructed and negotiated. Our project, distributed over eight fields of research (historicity and genealogy, aging and memory, mediation and mediatisation, violence, the body, gender, aesthetic homologies, mapping the punk scene), should enable us to give thematic, academic and epistemological legitimacy to our object of study by showing how punk offers a useful and valuable prism through which to grasp and understand the innovative mechanisms of creation and resistance which structure the development of contemporary society. In addition to the undertaking of a key research project, PIND wishes to devote itself to the extensive task of heritage conservation by relying on associative networks and on numerous institutional partners.