Lisa Louise McKenzie (born March 1968) is a British anarchist and senior lecturer at the University of Bedfordshire whose work relates to class inequality, social justice, and British working class culture. She was active in the Class War party and her research and politics have been influenced by being a working-class mother of a mixed-race child in a poor area of Nottingham where she grew up.
Lisa Louise McKenzie [1] was born in March 1968[ citation needed ] and grew up in Sutton-in-Ashfield. [2] She moved from predominantly white suburbs to the inner city of Nottingham where she had her mixed-race son in 1988 as there were more black people there and she felt more comfortable.[ dubious – discuss ] [3] McKenzie attended university by going on an access course through which she realised that she could enter higher education. She earned her BA in 2004 and her master's degree in research methods from the University of Nottingham in 2005. She completed her doctorate in 2009 on "Finding value on a council estate: complex lives, motherhood, and exclusion", also at Nottingham, which dealt with working-class mothers with mixed-race children on the St Ann's estate where she lived at the time. [4] The decision to choose that topic was a result of McKenzie's experiences. [3]
McKenzie is active in left-wing politics and regularly attends demonstrations in London. She opposes social mobility and instead wants the living standards of all working-class people to rise. She opposes private education and the charitable status of private schools. She opposes the sale of public housing through the right-to-buy legislation and wants to keep it public. [5] In April 2015, she was arrested at a protest over the "poor door" at One Commercial Street in London and charged with three public order offences. She was subsequently found not guilty of joint enterprise for causing criminal damage, after a sticker was fixed on a window, as well as acquitted of intent to cause alarm and distress and causing alarm and distress due to lack of evidence. [6]
In the 2015 United Kingdom general election, McKenzie was the Class War party candidate for the Chingford and Woodford Green constituency; [7] [8] she came last, receiving 53 votes (0.1 per cent of the votes cast). [1] The Member of Parliament, Iain Duncan Smith, was re-elected. The Class War party was voluntarily deregistered with the electoral commission in July 2015, 17 months after initial registration. [9]
McKenzie has described the phenomenon of gentrification as a "violent process”. [10] In September 2015, Mckenzie took part in an anti-gentrification protest in London in which the Cereal Killer Cafe was vandalised. [11] [12] She was criticised for saying that the publicity was good for the owners. [13]
McKenzie has taught at Nottingham Trent University, University of Nottingham, LSE, Middlesex University, and Durham University. At LSE she was a research fellow on the Great British Class Survey. [4] As of 2023 [update] she is a senior lecturer in sociology in the School of Applied Social Sciences of the University of Bedfordshire, and serves as external examiner at University of Limerick and Bangor University. [14]
In April 2021 McKenzie launched a kickstarter appeal to fund the project Lockdown diaries of the working class. [15] [16] [17] The resulting book, funded by 800 donors, was published in 2022 by the Working Class Collective, [18] [19] of which McKenzie was a director. [20] It included extracts from the diaries of 47 people for the period of March to May 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. [21]
In 2012, McKenzie appeared on BBC Radio 4's Thinking Allowed with Laurie Taylor to discuss working class alienation in Nottingham. [3]
McKenzie has also contributed regularly to Times Higher Education, [22] Spiked, [23] and The Spectator [24]
Gentrification is the process of changing the character of a neighborhood through the influx of more affluent residents and investment. There is no agreed-upon definition of gentrification. In public discourse, it has been used to describe a wide array of phenomena, usually in a pejorative connotation.
The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) is a public research university in London, England, and a member institution of the University of London. The school specialises exclusively in the social sciences, including economics, politics, sociology, law and anthropology. Founded in 1895 by Fabian Society members Sidney Webb, Beatrice Webb, Graham Wallas and George Bernard Shaw, LSE joined the University of London in 1900 and established its first degree courses under the auspices of the university in 1901. LSE began awarding its degrees in its own name in 2008, prior to which it awarded degrees of the University of London. It became a university in its own right within the University of London in 2022.
Martha Beatrice Webb, Baroness Passfield, was an English sociologist, economist, feminist and social reformer. She was among the founders of the London School of Economics and played a crucial role in forming the Fabian Society. Additionally, she authored several popular books, with her most notable being The Cooperative Movement in Great Britain and Industrial Democracy, co-authored by her husband Sidney Webb, where she coined the term "collective bargaining" as a way to discuss the negotiation process between an employer and a labor union. As a feminist and social reformer, she criticised the exclusion of women from various occupations as well as campaigning for the unionisation of female workers, pushing for legislation that allowed for better hours and conditions.
Benjamin McKenzie Schenkkan is an American actor, author and commentator. He is best known for his starring television roles as Ryan Atwood on the teen drama The O.C. (2003–2007), Ben Sherman on the crime drama Southland (2009–2013), and James "Jim" Gordon on the crime drama Gotham (2014–2019). McKenzie made his film debut in the Academy Award-nominated film Junebug (2005), before appearing in films including 88 Minutes (2007), Goodbye World (2013), Some Kind of Beautiful (2014), and Line of Duty (2019). In 2020, he made his Broadway debut in the Bess Wohl play Grand Horizons.
Queenie McKenzie (Nakarra) (formerly Oakes, or Mingmarriya) (c. 1915 – 16 November 1998) was an Aboriginal Australian artist. She was born on Old Texas Station, on the western bank of the Ord River in the East Kimberley.
McKenzie Kate Westmore is an American actress and singer most popular for having played the role of Sheridan Crane on the television soap opera Passions from 1999 to 2008.
Ralph Miliband was a British sociologist. He has been described as "one of the best known academic Marxists of his generation", in this manner being compared with E. P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm and Perry Anderson.
St Ann's is a large district of the city of Nottingham, in the English ceremonial county of Nottinghamshire. The population of the district at the time of the United Kingdom census, 2011 was 19,316.
Craig Jackson Calhoun is an American sociologist who currently serves as the University Professor of Social Sciences at Arizona State University. He is a strong advocate for applying social science to address issues of public concerns. Calhoun served as the Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) from September 2012 until September 2016 and continues to hold the title of Centennial Professor of Sociology at LSE.
McKenzie Wark is an Australian-born writer and scholar. Wark is known for her writings on media theory, critical theory, new media, and the Situationist International. Her best known works are A Hacker Manifesto and Gamer Theory. She is a professor of Media and Cultural Studies at The New School.
MacKenzie Scott is an American novelist, philanthropist, and ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. As of June 2024, she has a net worth of US$36.1 billion, owning a 4% stake in Amazon. As such, Scott came out of her divorce as the third-wealthiest woman in the United States and the 47th-wealthiest individual in the world. Scott was named the world's most powerful woman by Forbes in 2021 and one of Time's 100 most influential people in 2020.
Cody Steven McKenzie is an American mixed martial artist. A professional competitor since 2007, McKenzie mostly competed in his regional circuit, before signing with the Ultimate Fighting Championship to appear on The Ultimate Fighter: Team GSP vs. Team Koscheck, and has also competed for M-1 Global.
David McKenzie was an Australian fencer. He competed at the 1956, 1960 and 1964 Summer Olympics. He was an International Olympic Committee member from 1974 to 1981. He replaced Lewis Luxton who had resigned. McKenzie gained notoriety for encouraging Dennis Tutty to go to court to challenge rugby league's restraint of trade clauses, a case that would change professional sport in Australia.
Sir John Robert Hills, was a British academic, latterly professor of Social Policy at the London School of Economics. He acted as director of the ESRC Research Centre for the Analysis of Social Exclusion from 1997. His work focused on inequality, and the role of social policy over the life course.
Ashley McKenzie is an England-born Jamaican judoka competing at the men's 60 kg division. He was a member of the Great Britain Olympic Judo Team at London 2012 but was defeated in the second round by Hiroaki Hiraoka of Japan. He also appeared in, and made it to the final of Celebrity Big Brother 10 in September 2012. In August 2018, he appeared on the first series of Celebs on the Farm. In January 2020, he appeared on Celebrity Ex on the Beach.
Martin Ramsay McKenzie is a Rugby union footballer who plays as either a Fly-half or Fullback. He represents the Southland Stags in the Mitre 10 Cup. He currently plays for the Chiefs in super rugby.
Norman Ian MacKenzie was a British journalist, academic and historian who helped in the founding of the Open University (OU) in the late 1960s.
Damian Sinclair McKenzie is a New Zealand rugby union player who plays fullback or First five-eighth for Waikato in the Bunnings NPC competition and Chiefs in super rugby. McKenzie has played 40 tests for New Zealand since his international debut in 2016.
Dispossession: The Great Social Housing Swindle is a feature documentary, narrated by Maxine Peake, exploring the failures and deception that have caused a chronic shortage of social housing in Britain.
Katherine Frances Russell was an English social worker and university teacher. She began working as a volunteer for the Time and Talents settlement in Bermondsey and supported families affected by illness, poverty, slum housing and overcrowding. Russell was employed as the community service organiser on Lewisham's Honor Oak housing estate in 1937 and became the warden of the mixed-sex Archers Youth Centre in Southampton during the Second World War. She was appointed the chief administrator of five one-year emergency courses run by the Institute of Almoners in 1945 before becoming a practical work organiser and then as a senior lecturer of the London School of Economics from 1949 to 1973. Russell was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1976.
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