Mass squats were organised in a number of prominent public buildings in Central London, culminating in the 1969 occupation of the Queen Mother's ex-residence at 144 Piccadilly, which became known as "Hippydilly" and made world headline news.

[8] British Pathe described the occupiers as "scroungers and hell raisers" and Dr John "the hippy squatter" briefly became a figure of fear in what he later described as a hysterical moral panic about the perceived threat that squatting posed to home ownership and private property.

[3][9] In 1975/6, with a group of fellow Leftists including David Robins, Cohen occupied a derelict pub near King's Cross and turned it into a radical cultural and education centre for local estate youth.

Knuckle Sandwich: growing up in the working class city (1978), written by Cohen and Robins, gives a detailed account of the project and situates it within an analysis of urban working-class youth culture.

[11] In later work, this initial focus on the youth question broadened to include issues of inter-generational transmission, coming-of-age stories and ideas surrounding different life phases.

This led to a series of publications challenging the "new vocationalism" and the youth training schemes then being introduced by the Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher with the aim of inculcating the values of "enterprise culture".

[15] The No Kidding Project, funded by the Greater London Council (GLC) produced learning materials to support alternative, more critical forms of vocational education.

[18][19] This critical pedagogy was then further developed in the field of anti-racist education in a series of initiatives, films and teaching resources designed to offer an alternative to moral, symbolic and doctrinaire forms of anti-racism.

Research projects included ethnographic studies of frontline situations of racial conflict in East London, a funded research programme on young people’s perceptions of class, gender and ethnicity in two areas of London and Hamburg whose results were published as Finding the Way Home (2004);[28][29][30] The centre organised a programme of talks and working papers, some of which was published in New Ethnicities, Old Racisms.

Cohen conducted an ethnographic study of tunnellers and construction workers in the initial Dig, Design and Demolish phase and established ongoing focus groups with local residents and young people to chart their response to the unfolding impact of the Olympic project.

Cohen's approach to ethnography from the outset had a strong spatial as well as visual emphasis and he experimented with narrative mapping methods in research with young people around issues of public safety and danger.

The network runs a programme of public events and delivers a variety of mapping projects in partnership with schools, community organisations and local authorities.

Plans include a toolkit of resources and workshops to train young people in mapping methods to represent issues about the past, present and future of their areas".

[28][42] Cohen's recent work has focused on the narrative grammars through which life stories are constructed, and the generational shifts in way "youth" is both imagined and remembered as a formative stage.

[43] From the outset Cohen's ethnographic work has been grounded in the specificities of place, as an anchorage of symbolic or moral claims over public amenity and resource as well as a locus of collective identity and belonging.

[44] In more recent work, this model was refined, drawing on the ideas of Michael Balint and Jay Appleton to outline a psychosocial geography of place attachment.

In some of his research, he traced the evolution of these representations within specific social groups especially those who perform "elemental" labour: miners, tunnellers, sweeps, mariners, foundry workers and roustabouts.

[30][50] Starting from a critique of reductive psychologies of racism, which reduce it to patterns of prejudice, or individual pathology, Cohen looked for the social structures and cultural norms through which Freud's concept of "narcissism of minor difference" might become racialised.

The rise of communitarianism and populism is analysed from this standpoint and a political actor network theory proposed as a way of mapping this more fluid space of ideological affiliations and affinities.

[53] Over a 40-year period, some twenty projects were carried out in different parts of East London, including the Isle of Dogs, Whitechapel, The Royal Docks, Stratford and Barking.

[1] He spent five years in the British Museum Reading Room following a course of independent study, and observing how some of his early ideas were taken up by academics and exploited for their own career advancement.

[54] He wrote on the curriculum of the Multicultural University,[58] the historical relationship between Black and Jewish intellectuals,[59] the limits and conditions of dialogic/participatory research, citizen social science and the critical pedagogy of anti-racism.

[60] The extent to which it is possible to sustain a culture of critical enquiry and dissent within the neo-liberal university, and in the face of toxic forms of student identity politics is considered in further studies.

"Things Ain't What they Used to be: Notebooks from a once and future time" is an experimental image/text, produced in collaboration with four graphic artists, which explores the post pandemic zeitgeist was published by eyeglass books in the spring of 2023.