Plot

The Poor Stockinger, the Luddite Cropper and the Deluded Followers of Joanna Southcott focuses on the work of the Marxist historian Edward Palmer Thompson, who was employed from 1946 by the Workers' Education Association to teach literature and social history to adults in the industrial towns of the West Riding. These classes were open to people who historically had been unable to access a university education. Thompson became synonymous with the discipline of 'cultural studies' that emerged in Post-War Britain. Artist Luke Fowler draws together archival material from television, local sources and the Workers' Education Association archive itself, and combines them with new film and audio gathered on location in the former West Riding region of Yorkshire.—anonymous