Twitter: @heat_mcknight
Heather McKnight is one of the co-founders of the Magnetic Ideals Collective, which works on projects that use creative and artistic ways of bringing communities together to create social change. Heather completed her PhD in Law Studies at the University of Sussex Law Department entitled ‘Reimagining the University through Resistance’ (2021) which addressed joint working between trade unions and students’ unions and their approaches to academic freedom. Since then, she has worked on research mapping anti-precarity movements across Europe for the European Society of Social Anthropologists (publication due 2024). She has also conducted research on the School Strikes Climate movement during the pandemic which is also shortly to be published via Routledge.
Recently, she has taken the Magnetic Ideals project on Menopause and Mind, creating a separate organisation to campaign for inclusive menopause representation and support and provide art-based support for those struggling with mental health during the menopause transition. Her 2024 research report, “I Suffer in Silence”, explores the troubling experiences with mental health that many have during the menopause transition in Brighton and Hove.
Diverse creative modes of engagement for development, training and research have always been a passion, and she is an experienced trainer with over 20 years of experience in developing and delivering training and a researcher in students’ unions, colleges, universities, and the public sector, as well as an activist and artist. Coming from a working background in equalities, campaigning and education research, she has worked for charities, students’ unions and local government.
Heather operates as a critical utopian scholar with research interests in unions, protest, education, feminism, gender, aesthetics, utopian analysis of science fiction television, and speculative fiction. She has worked to preserve the archives of the National Union of Students and has been involved in relocating them to the Modern Records Centre in Warwick where they will soon be available as a public interest archive.
Her teaching experience includes modules on Public Law and Order and Disorder (covering Law, Politics and Sociology) and MA seminars on critical theory at the University of Sussex, and the Self and Society Module on poststructuralism at the University of Brighton. She also has a background in student engagement and pedagogical research working in partnership projects between institutions and students’ unions and has delivered numerous research projects and developed training in these areas that have been delivered to students, and university staff from teaching staff and administrators to senior management.
She was the co-founder of the Critical Studies Journal at the University of Brighton, serving on the editorial board for three years and has also been the Co-Editor of Excursions Journal at the University of Sussex. She is a founding member of the anti-racist and trans-inclusive CHASE Feminist Network, which reaches across nine universities in the South East of England, aiming to create spaces of resistance in what continues to be a patriarchal higher education sector with ongoing and intersectional discrimination happening at all levels.
For a full work history please see Linkedin Profile Creative work Google Scholar
Publications
World-Building Enactments of The School Strike Movements During the Pandemic: Reading Youth Climate Crisis Movements Through a Micro and Nano-Utopian Lens, H McKnight, in Utopian and Dystopian Explorations of Pandemics and Ecological Breakdown – Entangled Futurities, Edited By Heather Alberro, Emrah Atasoy, Nora Castle, Rhiannon Firth, Conrad Scott, Routledge, June 2024
Reimagining the University Through Resistance—The Prefigurative Work of Trade Unions and Students’ Unions in Transcending Neoliberal Exploitation, H McKnight in Jorge León Casero and Julia Urabayen (Eds): Rethinking Democracy for Post-Utopian Worlds, Palgrave Studies in Utopianism, July 2024
“I Suffer in Silence” Brighton and Hove Menopause and Mind Report, H McKnight, Menopause and Mind, 2024
The Interdependence of Academic Freedom and Protest, H McKnight, Council for the Defence of British Universities, Academic Freedom Blog Series, 2021
Digital Carekit: Developing Activist Communities of Care Online. Audrey Verma, Heather McKnight & Griselda Gabriele, 2021
Networks: Logged on, An Introduction, H McKnight, Excursions 10.2: Reflections (1) 10th Anniversary Edition, 2021
Chaos and Hope – Nano-Utopian Moments of Activist Self-Organisation, H McKnight, Excursions 10.1: Chaos, 2020
The Storm: Processing Contradictions, H McKnight, Excursions 10.1: Research in Times of Chaos, 2020
Invisible Roots of Knowledge Production and their Role in Resistance to the Marketisation of Education H McKnight, Excursions 9 (1), 118 – 140, 2020
“SAVE THE FUTURE” – Utopian Temporalities of the School Strikes for Climate Crisis, H McKnight, Renewal Journal 28 (3) Political Temporalities, 2020
The Oceans are Rising and So Are We’: exploring utopian discourses in the school strike for climate movement, H McKnight, Brief Encounters 4 (1) 2020
Imaginary Songs from the Feminist Future – Unlocking Creativity in Lockdown, H McKnight, Everyday Feminist Lockdown, CHASE Feminist Blog (4), 2020
The Sussex campus ‘Forever Strike’: estrangement, resistance and utopian temporality H McKnight, Studies in Arts and Humanities 5 (1), 145-172, 2019
The Utopian ‘not yet’ of pop-up unionism [weblog article, 20 March 2019] H McKnight, AltVisions, 2019
Lessons in unionising the future: the art of estrangement and critical pedagogy on the picket line H McKnight, Art/Law Network [weblog article, March 2018] 2018
Editor’s Preface: Excursions – Networks, H McKnight, N Farrukh Hameed, Excursions 8 (1), 1 – 8, 2018
Ernst Bloch’s Theories Concerning Religion H McKnight, Springer Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion (Third Edition) 2017
Agamben as and through Benjamin’s storyteller and translator H McKnight, Critical Studies 1, 28-39, 2015
Conference Papers
2022 – Fail Again, Fail Better? Utopia, Memory, Radical Politics, and Radical Research, Roundtable – Anticipatory Failure: Sustaining Hope as Collective Care in Digital Campaigning and Online Activist Spaces
2021 – Acting as If: Prefigurative Politics in Theory and Practice, Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague – Chaos and Hope –Nano-Utopian Moments of Activist Self-Organisation
2021 – Critical Legal Studies, Frakenlaw Conference, University of Dundee – Educating Utopia: The School Strike for Climate Crisis and their Legislative Visions
2021 – Activism and Resistance, The London Science Fiction Research Community – “I don’t see how singing and dancing could be dangerous” Becoming Utopian in Utopia Falls – Interrogating a Nano-Utopian Moment in Teen TV
2021 – Living in the End Times, Cappadocia University, Turkey (online) – Unpacking ReGenesis from a Pandemic Perspective: Horizons of Transnational Cooperation and Human Connection
2021 – Taking Care in the Climate Crisis (online), CHASE DTP- Educating Utopia: Educating Utopia in the School Strike for Climate Crisis Movement – Video Essay
2020 The Conference at the End of the World, Alt-ac (online) – The Invisible Roots of Knowledge Production, and Their Role in Resistance to the Marketisation of Education
2020 Brief Encounters Journal Launch (online) – “The Oceans are Rising and So Are We” – Utopian Discourses of the School Student Strike for Climate Change
2019 London Science Fiction Network, Birkbeck, The Economies of Science Fiction Conference – The Commons of Consciousness: Labour, dispossession and enclosure in Falling Water and Sense8
2019 The Art of Not Doing Conference, Interdisciplinary conference on rest, resistance and pleasure activism – Forever Strike! Estrangement and Utopian Temporality on Sussex Campus
2019 Utopian Studies Society Conference, Prato Italy – “The Oceans are Rising and So Are We” – Utopian Discourses of the School Student Strike for Climate Change
2019 ‘Faking It’ Excursions Symposium, University of Sussex – The Invisible Roots of Knowledge Production, and their Role in Resistance to the Marketisation of Education
2019 Disruption, Transition and Transformation Symposium at LSE – Sussex Campus on Strike: Estrangement, Resistance and Utopian Temporality
2018 Academic Identities Conference – The Peaceful University: aspirations for academic futures – compassion, generosity, imagination, and creation, Hiroshima University Japan – Unionising Hope: Collective Subjectivities of Resistance in Higher Education
2018 The Social Life of Time Conference, University of Edinburgh – Exploring Unionised Potentiality: The 2018 Strike as a Site of Utopian Temporality
2018 Utopia Now, Chelsea College of Arts – Unions as Utopian Spaces: Narratives of Resistance in the Fight Against Marketised Education
2018 Critical Legal Conference, University of Warwick – Student Resistance Between and Beyond: How the Charitable Status of Students’ Unions is Relocating Student Activism, Paths in the Midst of Collapse: The Role of Academic Freedom in Resisting the Marketisation of Education
2017 University of Sussex, Art and Law Workshop, Dystopias of Motherhood and Fear: An Absence of Legal Interventions against Weaponised Reproduction in Television Sci-Fi
2017 Solidarity and Utopia Conference, Gdansk, Utopias of shared anticipatory
(pre)consciousness: Blurring the thresholds of self in Falling Water and Sense8
2017 Encounters, University of East Anglia – Theorising the ‘Not Yet’: The Value of Critical Utopian Theory in Interdisciplinary Research and Discourse Analysis
2017 Postgraduate Workshop, Sussex – Dystopias of Motherhood and Fear: An Absence of Legal Interventions against Weaponised Reproduction in Television Sci-Fi
2017 Bringing Life to Politics Conference, University of Brighton – Narrating the Boundaries of Being Human: Blurring the thresholds of of self in Sense8
2017 Politics of Temporality Postgraduate Workshop, Sussex – Exploring Unionised Potentiality: Heterotopian Sites of Resistance and Utopian Temporality in Higher Education
2017 Politics of Temporality ‘Time and Fear’ Workshop, Sussex – A Heritage of New Terrorisms: The Chronotopology of Prevent Legislation in University Spaces
2017 Dystopia Now! Conference, Birkbeck – Dystopian Narratives of Motherhood and Reproduction in TV Science Fiction: Challenging the Patriarchy or Reinventing the Witch Hunt?
2016 Society for Utopian Studies, St. Petersburg, Florida Tracing the Edges of Contemporaneous Contradiction, Paths in the Midst of Collapse: Preventing Prevent
2016 Critical Studies Research Group Resistance Conference, University of Brighton: Unionising the Future? Potential resistance to marketisation of education between Trade Unions and Students’ Unions
2016 (16th June) Utopia Research Workshop – 500 Years of Utopia, University of Nottingham: Utopian Temporalities and Horizons of resistance between Trade Unions and Students’ Unions
2016 (17th June) Society for Women in Philosophy Conference Precarity: Passion, Rage, Reason, University of Brighton: “I am not your property; I am not your Weapon” – Weaponising Reproduction: Motherhood, pregnancy and cloning as forms of control in TV Sci-fi
2016 (12 – 13 May) International Institute for the Sociology of Law, Onati, Workshop on Radical Temporality: Law, Order and Resistance: Mapping Radical Utopian Temporalities of resistance between Trade Unions and Students’ Unions
2016 Buzzcuts Conference, University of Glasgow: Unionising the Future: Trade Unions, Students’ Unions and Resistance
2015 Society for Utopian Studies Conference, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Messianic Cooperisms and Fantastic Trees: Tracing the Utopian Horizons of Twin Peak & Mother, Martyr, Cyborg: Dystopian Dialectics of Feminine Power in Continuum
2015 Utopias CAPPE Conference, Brighton: Reclaiming the Night: Fatal Intersections in Concrete Spaces – An analysis of Reclaim the Night Marches through Foucault’s notion of Heterotopia concurrently with Bloch’s Utopian Function
2015 Utopian Studies Society Conference: Utopia and the End of the City: Daydreams of becoming Human: Conflicted Horizons of Identity & Reclaiming the Night: Fatal Intersections in Concrete Spaces
2015 Feminist Futures Conference, London: Reclaiming the Night: Fatal Intersections in Concrete Spaces – An analysis of Reclaim the Night Marches through Foucault’s notion of Heterotopia concurrently with Bloch’s Utopian Function
2015 Quality Assurance Agency Enhancement Themes Conference: Conflicting Roles? Student Representatives as the Storyteller and the Translator – Applying Benjamin in the student movement
2015 Vanishing Acts: Exploring Marginalised Television Identities, Newcastle University: Mother, Martyr, Cyborg: Dystopian Dialectics of Feminine Power in Continuum
2015 The Practice of (in)Visibility,University of Brighton: The Ideology of Community Organising: (in)visible (dis)courses of Power in the Student Movement
2015 Disorienting the Topological Conference, London: Reclaiming the Night: Fatal Intersections in Concrete Spaces – An analysis of Reclaim the Night Marches through Foucault’s notion of Heterotopia concurrently with Bloch’s Utopian Function
2014 Society for Utopian Studies Conference, Canada, Montreal: Towards Violent Utopias? Butler and Agamben as manifesting Bloch’s utopian function – Funded by the University of Brighton, School of Humanities
2014 Workers in Democracy and Representation Conference, Manchester: Measuring Without Numbers: A Story about Enhancement – Resituating Evaluative Structures in Students’ Unions through Bloch’s Theory of Deficits and Realisation, and Benjamin’s concepts of the Storyteller and Translator
2012 Workers in Democracy and Representation Conference, Leeds, Improving Voter Turnout and Participation
Creative Projects – Music, Video, Interdisciplinary
Full page here: https://www.magneticideals.org/home/people-2/heather-mcknight/creative-work/
Heather McKnight is a multidisciplinary academic, artist, activist, published writer and creative facilitator. Having from an early age engaged in acting and poetry that tackled issues of youth disempowerment through local projects, she has gone on to engage in a combination of politicised artistic and research projects which range from music to visual arts. She has been performing as musician (and working intermittently as a promoter) since 2005, this has included playing bass, double bass, guitar and singing in industrial projects, rock bands, folk bands, indie-rock, punk, noise and performance art projects and constructing live and recorded soundscapes for sound art projects. She is a published utopian theorist and uses expressive paintings to explore the utopian impulse, which she is now working to transform into works of kinetic video art. This has been part of her development into expressive video work from 2019. The video work has included live/curated film works for gigs, music videos, immersive works, depending on the project this involves filming as well as curating archive footage. She has been moving into working her academic papers into more accessible immersive video essays.
2022 – Present, The Swamp: Ritualising our Biodiversity as Somatic Practice
2019 – Present, Band (guitar, synth, songwriting, videos) Fuck You and Your A-Sides, Bandcamp, YouTube, Facebook, Lockdown Blog Post
2022 – Present, Video and Soundscape Subjects of Withdrawal
2014 – 2016, Band (bass, vocals, songwriting) Ottermatic
2012 – 2014, (double bass, vocals) Burnt Canvas
2010 – Present, (performance, curation, bass, double bass, vocals) RAAD with 2 As
2010 – Present, (bass, vocals, songwriting) Plastic Heart Attack
2005 – 2010, Dead on the Live Wire (bass, double bass, vocals, songwriting, beats) Review, Facebook, Soundcloud, ReverbNation
Steering Committees
2022 – Present, Secretary Arts for Life
2022 – Present, Director – LORE Arts School – Legal literacy
through arts and nature-based education, research and advocacy
2018 – Present, Founder and Blog Editor of CHASE Feminist Network
2018 – Present, Member of SLS Legal Education Research Group
2017 – 2018, Chair of CHASE Student Advisory Group
2016 – 2017, General Editor for Excursions Journal, University of Sussex
2016 – 2017, Postgraduate Research Representative for Law, University of Sussex
2016 – Present Member of Art and Law Research Network, University of Sussex
2016 – 2019, Member of Politics of Temporality Research Cluster, University of
Sussex
2015 – 2016, Member of Organising Committee for CSRG Resistance Conference,
University of Brighton 2016
2015 – Present, Founding Member of Magnetic Ideals Steering Committee
2015 – 2016, Volunteer at Oasis Project (working with children from families
affected by drug or alcohol abuse)
2014 – 2015, Organising Committee for the Practicing (in)Visibility Academic
Conference, University of Brighton
2014 – 2017, Founder and Editorial Board Member, Critical Studies Journal
2013 – 2014, Organising Committee for Ontologies of Conflict Academic
Conference, University of Brighton
2013 – 2017, Member of Critical Studies Research Group Steering Committee at
University of Brighton
2010 – 2011, Elected member of National Union of Students Women’s Committee
2007 – 2010, FTSC Promotions – events management/copywriter
2006 – 2008, Member of Scottish Cross Parliamentary Group on the Contemporary
Scottish Music Industry
2006 – 2008, Member of Student Footprints Steering Group, NUS Scotland
2005 – 2006, Charity Corporate Decathlon Council Organiser
2003 – 2004, Notion: Facilitator of Inclusive Cultural Art Workshops for
Teenagers