Young Punk, Old Punk, Running Punk: Keeping the Old Ones Cool and the Young Ones Fresh

Ideas about what it means to age in the past 20 years have shifted considerably. Late twentieth-century studies of ageing focused on the cultural constructing of ageing through a prism of negativity: fears around loss of identity, social and cultural depreciation and conflation of ageing with illness (Featherstone, 2000; Blaikie, Ageing and Popular Culture. Cambridge University Press, 1999). These notions have been shown to have played out in many ways across various different subcultural practices, yet as Way (Running Punks, 2020) confirms, there is very little research to date which addresses the ways in which older people engage with punk with some (e.g. Bennett’s research, Sociology, 40(2), 219–235, 2006) focusing on the context of music alone. Running Punks is a group of individuals who have gravitated together because of the punk ethos of the founders and their love of music. This chapter takes a unique approach to punk and ageing by taking the concept of punk as a ‘state of mind’ (Way, The Sociological Review, 69(1), 107–122, 2021), and exploring the sense of shared identity through auto-ethnography of two people, the authors of this chapter, who participate in this running group.