The Nature of Gothic: Cultivation, Curation, and the Working-Class Voice
By Peter Shukie
When The Nature of Gothic opened at Blackburn Museum in autumn 2025, it did so within a broader ambition voiced by the institution itself: that ‘Blackburn is now redefining its identity through art, heritage and community partnerships’. This language of renewal — art as civic identity, heritage as shared ground — sets the terms in which the exhibition is presente, and against which it asks to be read. I come to exhibitions like this from the margins of the academy. Before working in a working-class HE-in-FE college, I had moved through more conventional academic and teacher-training spaces, shaped by outcome-driven frameworks, audit cultures and narrow definitions of success. In those settings, knowledge was often treated as something to be delivered, measured and corrected. Methods were constricting not because they lacked care, but because they left little room for lived experience, deviation, or voices that did not already speak the language of the institution.
For several decades, I then worked as an academic in a working-class college — a space formally designated as higher education but structurally peripheral. Most of my students were the first in their families to attend university. The problem was never that they needed to be reshaped to ‘fit in’; it was that higher education rarely recognised the value of what they already brought with them. My work in education and teacher training was shaped by that shift. We had to alter how we taught, what we counted as knowledge, and how people were allowed to speak. Projects, art, writing and poetry were not enrichment activities but ways of thinking and expressing that already existed in the room. That position sharpened in 2020 during lockdown, when the first Working-Class Academics Conference we organised — originally planned as a physical gathering — was forced online. What felt at first like a compromise became its defining strength. Geography fell away. Participants joined from the US, Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia. Experienced speakers worked alongside first-timers. Film, poetry and discussion sat alongside academic papers. What emerged was less a conference than a collective experiment in voice, and it made clear how unstable the language of class really is. ‘Class’ circulates as identity, label, method and marketing. Institutions are comfortable invoking working-class experience as an idea, far less comfortable relinquishing power or allowing people to speak for themselves. The paternalism has not disappeared; it has simply become more polished.
That context matters, because it explains why two events, encountered within days of each other, fused into a single argument in my mind. I was invited to attend a Ruskin College event at the Labour Party Conference because of earlier writing on class and academia, and because I had previously followed — and written about — Ruskin College during a period of intense controversy.
