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.
Early life and education
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]
Politics and activism
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]
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]
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]
Media appearances and articles
In 2012, McKenzie appeared on BBC Radio 4's Thinking Allowed with
Laurie Taylor to discuss working class alienation in Nottingham.[3]
Atkinson, Rowland; McKenzie, Lisa; Winlow, Simon, eds. (2017). Building Better Societies: Promoting Social Justice in a World Falling Apart. Policy Press.
ISBN978-1447332022.[26]
Lockdown Diaries of the Working-Class. The Working Class Collective. 2022.[17][27]
Richard Longman, "Lockdown stories (un)told: Challenging official narratives through working class solidarity", Organization,
doi:
10.1177/1350508423119843