I’m Jay Baker. My pronouns are he/him or they/them.
I have over twenty years of experience working for social justice. In my years as a guerrilla videographer, I’ve documented demonstrations, marches, movements – and the policing against them – and interviewed the likes of Kate Wilson, Prem Sikka, Teresa Hayter, Peter Tatchell, Shami Chakrabarti, Richard Murphy, Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson, in addition to numerous campaigners, academics, and activists.
As a child I was pulled from an abusive school environment and homeschooled by my anti-authoritarian mother (who I credit for my intersectional feminism) and went on to apply this DIY “punk” ethic to such documentary work as well as zines, books, and organising anti-fascist events, while helping to launch and run community projects and non-profits in both Britain and North America – where I’ve been fortunate enough to be invited to speak, chair, and MC at festivals, conferences, and events from Wilfrid Laurier University (Canada) and Huddersfield University (UK) to the Non-Violence Festival (Canada) and the Festival of Debate (UK).
Today, I mostly work in communications and community education, and as a freelance facilitator, illustrator, and copywriter. I’m also an unpaid carer for my partner, who has LongCOVID. I’m a member of the IWW and live in Park Hill, Sheffield, in the UK. I’d like to think of myself as harnessing a spirit of “Edward Carpenter-meets-Édouard Carpentier”!
I’ve written for Now Then, The Scavenger, and the award-winning zine La Bouche, amongst other websites, zines, and newspapers, and appeared numerous times for the BBC whilst writing for established commercial newspapers before I made the personal (and political) decision to completely boycott establishment media. I co-founded, and coached at, the left-wing women’s football club AFC Unity for nearly 7 years.
This website features both my personal blog as well as my political analysis, a motivation for media activism, and some digital resources.
I’m currently working on a mobile app to aggregate reliable news sources (you can see a list to the right/bottom of this page), trying to add to my stash of videos on Kolektiva, and am also keen to help develop a network of local radical media hubs as a counter to establishment media.
In what’s left of my spare time, when I’m not playing around with Linux (I use Arch btw), drinking too much coffee, or reading comic books, I can usually be found working on The Left Fist coverage of pro wrestling from a pro-union/leftist angle in written and podcast form. I love pop culture references, and am here to chew bubblegum and kick ass (and I’m all out of bubblegum).
For enquiries, email me.