I wanted to explicitly post here an update about Clive Barnett’s website, pop theory.org
This is difficult. Talking about Clive in a non-academic way is hard. I’m not going to pretend I had a closer friendship with him than anyone else, I didn’t. But I was working with him when he very sadly passed away and, of the many people that expressed a care for Clive and his legacy, I remain working at Exeter, which was the university he was working at too.
As many have noticed, Clive’s website – poptheory.org – is not currently live. The domain name has lapsed and we don’t currently have access to the ‘back end’. A couple of us managed to pay for an extension to Clive’s site so that WordPress kept it live. We had asked for this to be maintained but the payments failed and there was no reminder sent to an email to which anyone in my department had access. While this is not my responsibility per se, I do want to issue a public apology.
I am sorry that Clive’s website was not better cared for.
Where does this leave things now?
A number of people have asked me what is going on, so this is one way I can provide an answer. The University of Exeter Geography department, led by our Head of Department, is working with Clive’s family to secure a permanent solution to maintaining Clive’s website as an archived website, and hopefully re-secure the domain name. This may take a little while but I am hopeful that we can make this happen. If you have any concerns or questions, please feel free to get in touch with me and I can do my best to answer them, or put you in touch with someone who can, and keep you updated.
This is hard. I miss Clive greatly. I will try to write something one day soon but I don’t think I can just yet.
Hi Sam,
I just went to look for something in Clive’s blog but ended up here, reading your post. Thanks for clarifying the situation with the site!
Just a small addition: poptheory.org seems pretty well archived and accessible through Wayback Machine. Links seem to work alright. So if anyone else is looking for something specific from Clive’s wonderful site, https://web.archive.org/ is worth trying.
This said, hope to see Clive’s website properly archived someday — especially knowing the Internet Archive’s current struggles. There is so much in there worth not only preserving but reiterating, relearning, rethinking.