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In 1926 the weekly journal of the Independent Labour Party (ILP), the New Leader, welcomed a new editor. Fenner Brockway was an experienced journalist, a committed socialist, and devoted to the ILP. His appointment was a consequence of a more militant left-wing outlook gaining prevalence in the party, careful political manoeuvring, and a desire to communicate the necessity for socialism to the ordinary working class. Until 1946 Brockway worked tirelessly on the New Leader, combining this with several other party roles and external commitments. This article scrutinizes the nature of the paper under Brockway's editorship, which has previously been cursorily dismissed as a failure and disappointment. It examines the format and content of the paper, its function within the party, staffing, circulation, and distribution. Despite the decline of the ILP, it is argued that Brockway delivered a newspaper which met the requirements of the party at the time. Further, it demonstrates that, despite the drastically decreasing party membership in these years, the New Leader consistently broadcast the ILP's message to a wider audience than previously thought. Finally, this article contributes the first account of Brockway's New Leader and a detailed provenance for a journal which has regularly been utilized as a source by historians of the ILP and of the wider labour movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The role of 'class strategies' in policy formation is sometimes unseen as plans are unrealised in practice over long periods of historical time. 'Subterranean class strategies' are an extension of existing work on class to consider 'class work' on policy in the 'long unenacted'. Using the example of emergency feeding in a national crisis, the stark difference in school meal planning for post-World War 2 emergencies when compared to the COVID-19 crisis is discussed. Through an analysis of archival records, it is shown that 'subterranean class strategies' - the devaluation of school catering expertise by the army and the private sector, the lack of co-operation of independent schools, and localisation and privatisation - diminished the role of schools in emergency feeding. The paper concludes by considering how the concept of 'subterranean class strategies' could inform work on educational think tanks, privatisation and subsumption, and intersectional areas such as race. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper rejects the cases made in recent volumes of this journal for incorporating political economy into youth studies. A brief review of young people's transitions from education into employment in the UK during and following the 2020 and 2021 lockdowns shows how youth transitions research engages routinely with changes and continuities in politics, state policies, the economy and labour markets. It is argued that the main weaknesses in current transitions research arise from our lack of an up-to-date class scheme within which to locate subjects' childhood origins and adult destinations. However, the paper illustrates how young researchers occupy a privileged position from which to identify emerging, consolidating and declining social classes. The conclusion is that youth studies must necessarily foreground young people, that it must engage with the outcomes of political and economic processes but has no need to 'dig deeper' into political economy for alleged underlying root causes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Homelessness remains a prevalent issue, and estimates of the number of people without adequate shelter in the UK suggest that the issue is growing. This research draws on literature on the cognitive impact of poverty, stigma, and self-esteem to show how confidence is improved by coaching programmes with those at risk of homelessness. The paper is based on empirical research into one such programme which offers one-to-one guidance on the interlinked issues of financial management, digital skills, and employability. The research shows that coaching helps to provide relief for participants, which in turn frees up "mental bandwidth", allowing them to focus on issues such as managing debt and rent arrears. Confidence and self-esteem, which are often lowered by class-related stigma, are also shown to improve, and it is concluded here that this is largely due to participants becoming more closely aligned with normative neoliberal assignments of value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers gender and social class in relation to teacher education through an episodic study of the development of adult educational institutions in Huddersfield. It briefly discusses nineteenth-century mechanics' institutes in the town before moving to a consideration of school teacher training college students in the twentieth century, highlighting aspects of the gendered and cultural ethos of teacher training. Local efforts to establish teacher training, and the wartime presence in the town of an evacuated women's teacher training college, provide a prism for the examination of transitions in social attitudes towards teaching as a profession, as do the educational aspirations of local working-class grammar school girls and boys during the 1940s/1950s. The paper then focuses on the establishment in 1963 of a 'new kind' of non-residential teacher training college and, in particular, on its introduction in the late 1960s of part-time provision designed specifically for 'married women'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The popularization of wine drinking was one of the most significant changes in British drinking culture in the twentieth century, in terms of the increase in both the availability and acceptability of wine for the general population. Based on a discourse analysis of 35 years of Jane MacQuitty's Saturday Times Wine Column (1982–2017), this paper argues that while wine has been discursively constructed as a drink of the many, the distinction traditionally associated with wine drinking in Britain remains. The data demonstrate how MacQuitty constructs wine through the media stylistically as everybody's drink, while also constructing and maintaining a distinction between "us" as an in-group whose wine knowledge and taste are distinct from "them." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper draws on the Wolf (2015) report(Heading for the Precipice: Can Further and Higher Education Funding Policies Be Sustained?)and other quantitative data, specifically that derived from HEFCE’s Participation of Local Area (POLAR) classifications. In addition it explores key literature and debates that associate higher education in further education (HE in FE) with the pursuit of social justice. This enables an interrogation of conceptualisations of vocationalism as well as a consideration of its articulation with class and gender. Whilst the paper is set within a particular and English socio-economic context, it addresses issues that have a much broader global significance. The paper argues that whilst HE in FE has limited traction in facilitating social mobility it does serve as a resource in the struggle for social justice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

E. P. Thompson's work on the making of the English working class is recalled in this paper for its continued relevance to historical materialist perspectives on global movements and class formations. Much commentary on Thompson's work confirms divisions between a first and second British New Left and largely confines the working class to an insular, English phenomenon, one which may present significant insight to a particular account of historical movement and change, but lacks wider spatial and conceptual resonance. This paper questions this view, and its wider implications for the writing of contemporary British history, while pointing towards the greater significance and application of Thompson's work on the making of the English working class than previously acknowledged. This has further implications for recent expressions of ‘global class formation’ as seen in the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper uses analysis of interview transcripts and notes from participant observation to explore white reactions to the introduction of diversity management in a large public sector workplace in Glasgow. The paper analyses white talk about racial equality in a social context where the shaming, exclusion and demonization of disadvantaged groups including migrants, asylum seekers and the poor have ensured that issues of entitlement and race are highly charged. It is suggested that in such contexts diversity management is being wielded as a new kind of civility by middle-class people invested in the objectification of poor whites. This represents a form of class conflict over belonging within the body of whiteness that risks reinforcing rather than redressing racial resentments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Young people's aspirations remain an enduring focus of education policy interest and concern. Drawing on data from an ongoing five-year study of young people's science and career aspirations (age 10-14), this paper asks what do young people aspire to at age 12/13, and what influences these aspirations? It outlines the main aspirations and sources of these aspirations as expressed by young people in England in the last year of primary school (survey of 9000+ Y6 pupils, aged 10/11, interviews with 92 children and 76 parents) and the second year of secondary school (survey of 5600+ Y8 pupils, aged 12/13, interviews with 85 pupils). We demonstrate how aspirations are shaped by structural forces (e.g. social class, gender and ethnicity) and how different spheres of influence (home/family, school, hobbies/leisure activities and TV) appear to shape different types of aspirations. The paper concludes by considering the implications for educational policy and careers education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines a case of social conflict in an overlooked corner of England (Lincolnshire) in the late 1980s when self-described 'local' people opposed private housing developments and the migration of 'southerners', 'townies' and 'commuters' into their towns and villages. Protestors lamented change and disliked newcomers. This was a reaction to the arrival of affluent, 'post-industrial' workers on the back of a booming service sector. They personified a series of complex, interconnected socioeconomic and cultural changes which disrupted patterns of life rooted in disappearing productive industries and destabilised communities amidst factory closures, agricultural mechanisation, job losses and now suburbanisation. This affected meanings ascribed to places and introduced hierarchies and conflicts structured around Britain's transition towards a service economy. Opposition was expressed through nostalgia, conservationism, inverse snobbery, anti-metropolitanism, attachment to 'local' identities, and concerns about declining independence, community and power. This paper argues that these protests demonstrate the emergence of new ideas about social relations, difference and distinction in post-industrial England. The findings also highlight feelings which would slowly seep into a new, reactionary politics foreshadowing the way that many towns and rural areas (including Lincolnshire) embraced a new political right in the first decades of the next millennium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews the reasons behind the absence of central Government funding for enterprise and innovation at Further Education Colleges (FECs). Enterprise and innovation are, according to conventional wisdom, crucial in rebuilding the UK's economy and providing jobs. In pursuit of this, the Government has provided central funding for enterprise promotion and education for both Universities and Secondary Schools, but not for FECs. The review starts by looking at recent Government policy papers on enterprise and innovation, then briefly considers the current economic characteristics that lay behind the need for enterprise education and innovation. The efficacy of the current proposals is questioned, looking at the concepts concerning the type and level of intelligence entrepreneurs need, also touching on what types of innovations can be expected to increase employment. The paper concludes by asking if elitist or class bias plays a part in the exclusion of Vocational Education & Training students at FECs from central funding for innovation and enterprise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper explores the conceptual limitations of the bully discourses that ground UK anti-bullying policy frameworks and psychological research literatures on school bullying, suggesting they largely ignore gender, (hetero)sexuality and the social, cultural and subjective dynamics of conflict and aggression among teen-aged girls. To explore the limitations of bully discourses in practice, the paper draws on a pilot, interview-based study of girls' experiences of aggression and bullying, illustrating how friendships and conflicts among the girls are thoroughly heterosexualized, en-cultured and classed. Drawing on girls and parent interview narratives, I also trace some of the effects of bully discourses set in motion in schools to intervene into conflicts among girls. I suggest these practices miss the complexity of the dynamics at play among girls and also neglect the power relations of parenting, ethnicity, class and school choice, which can inform how, why and when bullying discourses are mobilized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper asserts that academics, unless they work for or in malign regimes, do not make ‘mistakes’, but work within their own historical period using their knowledge of past thinking. Thus, debates on race, ethnicity, race relations and so on, and the plethora of competing definitions and approaches, take place within specific historical times. The paper notes that for John Rex, racism was always the problem, to be defined and explained. It reviews the research carried out in Handsworth, Birmingham 1974–78, Rex's use of classical social theorists, and it refutes Banton's assertion that Rex did not engage with his critics. It concludes that Rex may well have been prophet in foreseeing the permanence of issues of race, ethnicity, multiculturalism, migration, integration, citizenship and a ‘war on terror’ in a global era. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper considers how Paul Gilroy transformed hitherto dominant understandings of the relationship between race and class by developing an innovative account that foregrounded questions of racist oppression and collective resistance amid the organic crisis of British capitalism. The returns from this rethinking were profound in that he was able to make transparent both the structuring power of racism within the working class, and the necessity for autonomous black resistance. At the same time, significant lacunae in his account are identified, including the neglect of the episodic emergence of working-class anti-racism and the part played by socialists, particularly those of racialized minority descent in fashioning a major anti-racist social movement. The paper concludes with a lament for the disappearance of such work informed by a ‘Marxism without guarantees’ in the contemporary field of racism studies, and asks readers to consider the gains to be derived from such a re-engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper examines processes of cultural production and reproduction among members of the elite and upper-middle classes. Drawing on findings from a study of private education in England, it explores the utility of a conceptual framework to examine how practices in and across different sites may be reproductive of various forms of ‘privilege’. Three domains in particular – family, the school and individual young women’s projects of the self – together shape key meanings and orientations informing young women’s lives. These meanings and orientations in turn connect to ‘privileging practices’, both within each domain and beyond. The paper analyses data from three young women in one of the schools studied to illustrate how the framework may be used to examine privately educated young women’s different orientations to the present and the future. Findings point to some of the processes through which class and gender privilege may be variably reproduced. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Racist hate speech on UK university campuses remains an increasing concern. This article examines the widespread problem of racist hate speech through a multilayered theoretical approach; and suggests that a fuller appreciation of the problem can only be gained through a race-centred analysis. Drawing on Fraser's work on the problematics of misrecognition and identity-reification, the article extends Levine-Rasky's theoreticisation of power dynamics in the intersectionality between whiteness and middle-classness to intersections of whiteness with both middle-classness and working-classness as a contributing factor to mobilisation of lad cultures which is termed as white-laddism. The article advances the understanding of racist hate speech through a conjoined analysis of these concepts through a Critical Race Theory (CRT) lens. The conjoined analysis is informed by the Deleuzian 'rhizomatic' approach in order to examine the process by which multiple, diverse and non-hierarchical lines of connection between the concepts shape, dislocate, modify each other in variable ways. The detail behind the bigger picture helps further our understanding of the inadequate nature of equality policies and strategies that often look at issues in isolation, and thus fail to address the inequality and injustice being perpetuated on campuses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the century following their conquest of the province, the British in Punjab erected an administrative apparatus that, like those of precolonial regimes, relied heavily upon the support of the province's landed class. The relationship between the landed class and the colonial state was one of mutual benefit, with the latter using the former to ensure the maintenance of order and collection of revenue in exchange for state patronage. In this paper, it is argued that this administrative framework gave rise to a path-dependent process of institutional development in Punjab, allowing for the different fractions of the province's landowning class to increasingly entrench themselves within the political order in the postcolonial epoch. This paper outlines the mechanisms underlying this process of institutional development, focusing, in particular, on the strategies adopted by the landowning class to reproduce its power. This paper also considers the potentialities for institutional change in Punjab, allowing for the creation of a more democratic and participatory politics in the province. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores strategies Polish migrant mothers undertake in order to achieve a state of 'normalcy' as they perceive it themselves, in particular with reference to their children's education and to their future prospects in the UK. 'Normalcy' in this paper denotes a state which is desired, projected and placed in the future rather than seen as everyday reality which surrounds the mothers. This article focuses on various ways the mothers negotiate in order to achieve the desired status and state of well-being and discusses these in the light of Pierre Bourdieu's habitus and capital and with reference to Erving Goffman's notions of normality, stigma and rules of conduct. I look at three aspects through which mothers strive to reach their imagined 'normalcy': (1) a belief in meritocratic values; (2) the feeling of 'classlessness' and (3) management of the 'migrant stigma'. The study is based on qualitative in-depth interviews with 36 Polish migrant mothers mainly from London with children in primary or secondary state schools. Even though it could be said that mothers as a social group represent social heterogeneity, the majority of the mothers in the study are educated to a post-compulsory level, having some sort of post A-level qualifications. Half of the 36 mothers arrived in the UK after Poland's EU accession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper builds upon an earlier analysis presented in this journal. Using official figures for school compositions and for outcomes at KS4 from 1997 to 2007, this paper considers each of the annual cohorts of new Academies in England, from 2002 to 2006. It shows that their level of success in comparison to their predecessors, national averages, their changing compositions and their changing exam entry practices are insubstantial. Of course some schools are gaining higher scores since Academisation, but others are gaining lower scores. Using the most recent results available there is no clear evidence that Academies produce better results than local authority schools with equivalent intakes. The Academies programme therefore presents an opportunity cost for no apparent gain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The understanding of feminist pasts has been largely ignored in the history of education. This paper suggests that the historical sociology of Olive Banks provides fresh starting points for future research exploring the relationship between the history of social and political movements and a reassessment of contemporary and historical forms of 'radical education.' The article proceeds to use group biography to explore a municipal socialism that has been over-ridden in historical memory by the classic political histories that take the view from Westminster and Whitehall. In so doing it seeks to show the contribution of six educator activists who were participants in the making of a metropolitan political elite emerging from the association between feminism, socialism and the labour and trade union movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite embracing the rhetoric of transnational flows and networks, comparative research on media content continues to fall prey to methodological nationalism. When it comes to empirical measurement, researchers often, despite their best intentions, fall back on techniques that assume that the discourses circulating within particular nationally bounded communicative spaces are homogenous. In this article, we developed a set of propositions and analytical approaches that should help to overcome this impasse, and used them to examine the newspaper debates on the EU Constitutional Treaty in seven European states: the Czech Republic, Germany, France, the Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Switzerland, and the UK. We suggested that instead of focusing solely on comparisons between nationally bounded communicative spheres, we should also look at differences between class-related communicative spaces. By adopting such an approach, we can acknowledge both sub-national segmentations of communicative spaces and transnational linkages, while at the same time not losing sight of the importance of the national. The results support our initial contention that the research on European mass communication ought to move beyond comparisons between national units and the levels of their respective Europeanization, and examine how European issues are conveyed in media catering to different social classes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1873,The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazineextolled the values of swimming for women and gave advice on the best form of bathing dress, one which preserved modesty and met the demands of contemporary fashion. This essentially impractical type of bathing outfit has been the subject of much of the historiography surrounding female swimming costumes but it was not the only swimming dress on show during the “long” Victorian period. The women of all classes who participated in more serious swimming required something functional rather than fashionable while working-class professional natationists, who appeared regularly in water shows throughout the country, wore attire that combined functionality, tight to the body while allowing freedom of movement, with public appeal, a critical consideration for female exhibitors. Their activities and costumes challenged prevailing notions of “separate spheres” and this paper explores Victorian aquatic dress in the context of class, gender and social space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For most of the twentieth century, the UK ‘art school’ was widely seen as an accessible alternative to University. InArt into Pop, Simon Frith and Howard Horne revealed how this state-funded art and design training, linked to manufacturing industries and backed by relatively low or informal entry requirements, offered the prospect of social and economic uplift for hitherto marginalised working-class youth. More recently, however, while enrolments have expanded, art schools have become absorbed into conventional universities and the class profile, at least at the more prestigious colleges, has changed significantly. Simultaneously, art schools, together with other forms of higher education (HE) have been yoked to a broader public policy agenda of the ‘creative economy’ – one that often marginalises working-class people. This paper takes the changing nature of the art school as its starting point for discussion of class, HE and the creative economy workforce. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Once societies embarked on programmes of mass education home schooling became essentially a middle-class project and remains so. This paper looks at the educational experiences of some lower middle class women at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for whom the resources of the middle-class home were simply not available. It explores both their experiences of formal schooling and of the educational provision they chose to seek and found among other groups and institutional frameworks in their society. The range and extended chronology of their educational experiences highlight the need to reconceptualise education as extended processes of physical, intellectual and moral socialisation not necessarily limited to the years of childhood and/or adolescence or time-stopped in any way. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper situates E. P. Thompson and the attraction and influence of his major study,The Making of the English Working Class(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), within his insistence on constructing history as argument. Often polemical, Thompson's approach to history also appreciated paradox. In writing as he always did, against the grain of conventional wisdoms, be they of the right or the left, Thompson understood that he would always be situated awkwardly in terms of how his interpretation challenged established orthodoxies. This awkwardness, and its rootedness in refusal to accommodate too easily to established analysis, has proven Thompson's lasting contribution. It nurtured unique historical sensibilities, creative and rigorous use of source materials, and writing marked by panache and passion. The result is thatThe Making of the English Working Classremains as relevant today as it was 50 years ago, a landmark study whose arguments and their implications are with us yet, and whose suggestions have spawned countless fresh studies and endless research questions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

One of Andy Furlong's abiding concerns was to show how the problems of working-class youth are often, straightforwardly, the outcome of inequalities in employment opportunities. On rarer occasions, however, this explanation fits less well. Some young people grow up in families where poverty seems more deeply embedded and inherent to those families. Here, old ideas about a cultural 'underclass' can be tempting to politicians and policy makers. Our qualitative research, with 20 families living in extremely deprived U.K. neighbourhoods, showed that neither a simple lack of job opportunities nor 'cultures of worklessness' explained why hardship persisted for them. Our argument is that circumstances which appear to fit with the idea of an inter-generational, cultural 'underclass', in fact, have their provenance in a semi-permanent constellation of external socio-economic pressures bearing on successive generations of families over decades. Examples did include a shared context of declining job opportunities but extended to a contracting and disciplinary Welfare State, punitive criminal justice systems, poor-quality education and the physical decline of working-class neighbourhoods. We take one example – the destructive impact of local drug markets – to uncover the complex, obscure processes that compound the disadvantage faced by working-class young adults and their families over generations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study uses four examples of bookplates printed in Edwardian Britain (1901–1914) to demonstrate how the adoption of an ethnohistorical approach to social semiotics can vastly strengthen multimodal analysis. It argues that situating choices of image, colour, typography and materiality in archival research and the broader sociohistorical context of the Edwardian period can help to uncover the external motivations for a bookplate's structure. The case study reveals that bookplate designs were primarily influenced by the social status and wealth of owners, as well as the specific, well-established norms of the bookplate genre. It also highlights the significance of connecting semiotic choices to the traditions of Edwardian society and the ways in which meanings can shift over time. The findings demonstrate the importance of grounding hypotheses concerning the function and form of artefacts in concrete historical documents, in addition to the vast potential of this methodology for exploring other texts within a particular historical period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The idea of a “broken society” is advanced by Conservative politicians in the UK as emblematic of social and moral decay. With many echoes of long-standing claims of societal and moral breakdown, the narrative centres on “irresponsibility” and “disorderly” behaviours in disadvantaged working-class communities and asserts that welfare dependency is the underlying condition which produces “social breakdown”. Social housing estates and the populations therein, in particular, are represented as problematic and vulnerable on a number of different levels, especially in the frequently interlinked notion of “welfare ghetto”. In this paper, we adopt an interdisciplinary approach, utilizing Loïc Wacquant’s recent work on “territorial stigmatisation” and his thesis on the “ghetto”, to critique these narratives; and we explore the work these notions perform to legitimize increasingly pervasive state interventions to regulate and control working-class lives and communities. The classed assumptions underpinning these discourses are revealed in this context. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article discusses two sets of policy documents produced in the UK which form part of the ‘equality and diversity agenda' as it was articulated by the Labour government and which led to formulation of the 2006 and 2010 Equality Acts. These documents are critically examined in order to identify the underlying definitions and discourses of equality and diversity that they deploy. What definitions of ‘equality’ and ‘diversity’ provide the legitimating discursive structure within which debates about human rights, inequality and discrimination take place? What does this tell us about the understanding of the relationship of sameness and difference to equality, and the relationship between different differences in government equality talk? I argue that, in both cases, gestures towards recognizing the central importance of difference and towards a more intersectional approach to those differences are ultimately subverted by the liberal terms within which these challenges are understood. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper expands the existing literature on ethnicity and economic activity in Britain by studying the impact of religion and class. It argues that while the class location of the different South-Asian groups is important in determining their labour market outcomes, it does not operate independently from ethnicity; rather it is highly influenced by ethnicity in the process of determining the labour market participation of these groups. We use data obtained from the 2001 UK Census on Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi men and women aged between twenty and twenty nine. Our findings confirm that class structure of the South-Asian groups is highly ethnicized, in that the ethno-religious background and class are interwoven to the extent that the separation between them is not easy, if not impossible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While there is a growing body of research which explores the dramatic changes of higher education, following recent policies of widening participation and 'internationalisation', to date much of the research has focused on discrete 'non-traditional' groups. Based on qualitative data gathered from international and widening participation students, we explore the crossovers and parallels of their experiences, which is not to say that both groups are the very same. Indeed, it is the resistance to a 'fixing' positioning that this paper charts, negotiating points of sameness and difference. We suggest that there is failure to consider widening participation and internationalisation as two, intersecting, agendas, (re)producing class and race. Theoretically, such an approach offers an insight into contemporary class analysis in the context of mobility and racism, to comprehend how social divisions are complexly lived, where middle-class 'international' students may risk losing (and gaining) privilege, in (dis)similar ways to their working-class 'home' counterparts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores forms and functions of the rhetoric of national character in 18th-century British literature. British writers mobilised the rhetoric of national character not only to define themselves collectively against others, but also to influence political controversies at home; in particular the class- and gender-based struggle for political rights in the emerging British nation. To analyse the forms and functions of images of national character, this paper develops a framework for a cultural and historical imagology. This framework integrates a social constructivist view of national character and national identity with discursive, rhetorical, and cultural approaches to literature. Emphasis is placed on the role that narrative devices and intermedial strategies play for constructions of national character. It is concluded that 'national character' not only consists of the attributes typically predicated to a specific nation; rather it is also a formal and even aesthetic construct, which relies on processes of intermedial translation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Class struggle is the means by which workers can pursue the goal of their liberation from the exploitation of capital. Trade Unions lead many of the battles that are part of the general struggle and, through those battles, help to improve the material conditions of the workers but, at the same time, they create class consciousness. The denial of the existence of class struggle is part of governments' anti-union strategy. This paper aims to isolate instances of class struggle denial in the anti-union discourse of the British Governments from 1978 to 2007. The research is characterised by a post-disciplinary approach which helps to put the historical and economic facets of the problem in the right perspective. The actual analysis of the texts taken into consideration is carried out through a pragma-dialectic approach to argumentation theory and by applying the analytical tools provided by systemic-functional linguistics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Currently, public notions of community, work and family are enmeshing with concepts of citizenship to reconstruct various contexts and foundations for welfare reform in the UK. More specifically, paid work has become central to notions of ‘good’ citizenship, ‘good’ parenting and ‘strong’ communities within debates about welfare reform. This has the effect of re-defining parenting as a non-working activity. Consequently, single mothers who claim welfare benefits are in danger of being positioned as ‘partial’ citizens and their daily practices of citizenship which lie outside of those recognised by the state, rendered invisible. Conversely, in this paper, I will exemplify the ways in which the members of a national single parent organisation are constructing their own relationships between community, work and family and through this process are engaging in building citizenship practices (in local, national and international arenas). Conceptos de comunidad, trabajo y familia enlazan con conceptos de ciudadania para (re)construir varios contextos y fundamentos de reformas de asistencia social en el Reino Unido. Específicaments, en los debates de reformas de asistencia social, el trabajo pagado se ha puesto al centro de nociones de ‘buena’ ciudadanía, ‘buena’ crianza de los hijos y comunidades ‘fuertes’. Ha ofrecido como resultado la redefinición de la crianza de los hijos como actividad no laboral. Por consiguiente, las madres solteras que reclaman prestaciones sociales corren el peligro de verse posicionadas como ciudadanas ‘parciales’, y de hacerse invisible sus prácticas diarias de ciudadanía, que quedan fuera de las reconocidas por el estado. A la inversa, en este artículo, enfocado en los socios de una organización nacional de padres solteros, ejemplificaré como recontruyen sus propias relaciones entre comunidad, trabajo y familia, y como, por medio de este proceso, se ocupan de contruir prácticas de ciudadanía (a nivel local, nacional e internacional). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We contribute to the literature on social reproduction and the International Political Economy of the everyday. We focus on how the global economy rests on domestic foundations not just including state institutions but micro-social structures such as households and families. We employ data from the UK Millennium Cohort Study exploring the way different types of household (using proxies for social class) parent – as one aspect of their social reproduction strategies. We argue that under conditions of increased global competitiveness, the UK state has successfully embedded a politics of competitiveness at the household scale. Households of all types are aspirational for their children and invest parental time in helping their children with educational activities. However, parents in middle-class occupations, with higher levels of qualifications and higher income have advantageous informational, cultural and financial resources and use these in a variety of ways to support their social reproduction strategies. The result is that agential responses to competitiveness result in 'compound inequalities'. We theorise this by demonstrating variegation across different household social reproduction strategies and the violence of social reproduction, even where this is unintended. We speculate that compound inequality may be causing a breakdown in the stable reproduction of society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the collaboration between the society portraitist E. O. Hoppé and the novelist J. D. Beresford that resulted in the publication of Taken from Life (1922), a book combining both photographic and literary typologies of the metropolitan lower classes. Here, Taken from Life is situated within its authors' respective careers and considered within the broader discourses of class differentiation and Social Darwinism active in Britain in the 1920s. The author argues that Taken from Life is permeated by a superficially benign, but ultimately paternalistic ‘class tourism’, a form of voyeurism that derives from its uneasy combination of sociological speculation with both anecdote and fiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article demonstrates how food contributed to the Europeanisation of British culture between 1960 and 1975, the period leading up to the 1975 Referendum on membership of the European Community. The analysis identifies the meanings and values associated with Europe in cooking columns in two British broadsheet newspapers, TheTimes and the Observer, and examines how people were encouraged to make identifications with Europe. However, the article demonstrates how the meanings associated with Europe were not monolithic and were inflected by class and gender. In particular, continental culinary practices were associated with the tastes and dispositions of emergent new middle-class formations. More generally, the analysis demonstrates how these representations of European food offered middle-class people ways to experiment with feeling European in their everyday lives. In a Brexit context in which much research has asked why British people rejected Europe, the article seeks to contribute to a parallel history of how so many other British people came to identify as European through engagements with popular culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women were excluded from both branches of the legal profession before the Sex Discrimination (Removal) Act 1919. Whilst campaigning for women's entry to the law was also part of wider efforts to make the law more accessible. Before and after the 1919 Act, middle-class women were able to offer legal support to working-class women, through feminist and trade unionist networks and the professions that were open to them—factory inspection and social work. By examining key women's organisations between the 1890s and 1930s, we trace the development of work to both educate women and girls on their legal rights and to directly tackle problems and breaches of the law. We argue that, by looking at the legal activism of women in the factory inspectorate, social work, trade union and women's organisations, fresh insight into the development and 'mainstreaming' of working-class claims on citizenship in the early twentieth century can be found. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Whitehall studies of British civil servants, running from 1968 until the present day, are some of the most influential in twentieth century public health. Believing that the stratification that they observed among civil servants was replicated in wider society through the class system, the Whitehall researchers argued that inequality was a powerful force in society, literally embodied by incidence of disease. But as politicians and sociologists questioned the continuing relevance of class, this article explores how these studies reflected and were in conversation with prevailing social attitudes about inequality in end-of-century Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a context of sustained political attempts to reduce immigration and increase expulsions from the UK, mixed-immigration status relationships between citizens and precarious foreign nationals have arisen as key sites where the boundaries of national belonging are contested. These families are presented as inherently problematic: complicating the citizen/migrant binary and supposedly pitting family life against national immigration objectives. Drawing on the accounts of British female partners of 'deportable' men, the article examines the impact of immigration enforcement on the lives and senses of security and membership of the citizens close to the migrants targeted. It argues that the women discovered longstanding gendered and classed barriers to operationalising their citizenship privileges, which led to reconfigurations of their relationships with their government and understandings of the institution of citizenship. Their accounts illustrate how immigration controls produce and discipline citizens, as well as migrants, exposing the internal hierarchies and conditionalities of citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the Jewish and Catholic experience of acceptance, rejection and discrimination in late nineteenth-century Britain through the lens of the celebrations of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee in the summer of 1897. Arguing that the Anglo-Jewish and English Catholic hierarchical discourses created at the time of the Jubilee reveal the continuing profound insecurities felt by the minority leaderships, the article will dissect the various 'stories' created around the events of the Jubilee, particularly in London. It will consider in turn how narratives were created stressing Victoria's personal role of liberator; how a premium was placed by the hierarchies on the different demographic strands of the minority communities behaving in aropriate 'English' class roles; and how this narrative was complicated – first by Irish nationalism and migrant Jewish radicalism, and secondly by the prejudices of the wider British establishment. Ultimately it will contend that the events of the Jubilee revealed a continued exclusion of Jewish and Catholic groups from the British ruling class, and that anti-Catholic sectarianism and antisemitism was not solely a matter of economic discrimination and physical violence against working-class communities, but also subtler forms of prejudice against more prosperous Jews and Catholics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The building of arcades in London's West End in the nineteenth century was a distinctive phase in the emergence of the pleasure district. This article explores the three most important arcades: the Royal Opera Arcade, the Burlington Arcade and the Lowther Arcade. It decodes the forms of consumerism, pleasure and identity that the arcades made possible. The arcades were designed for different kinds of public and different classes but were sites of emulation and display. The article draws attention to an under-studied form of retail, the fancy repository: shops that offered knick-knacks and toys and which fed the market for cheap consumerism, including that of children. The study explores the psychic charge that arcades possessed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article makes the case for a more robust mobilities approach to student geographies in the UK, in order to problematise the enduring binary of [im]mobility (‘going away’ vs. ‘staying local’) and to challenge the presumed linearity of educational (and mobility) transitions in higher education. Through a discussion of two UK-based studies, we make the case for considering the complex and multi-layered everyday mobilities of students who commute to illuminate a broader range of mobility practices that shape students’ experiences and identities, and which are embedded in multiple and intersecting embodiments of class, gender, age and ethnicity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The UK has extremely high levels of socio-economic inequality, which are predicted to rise over the next five years. Traditionally, equality law was seen as inappropriate to address socio-economic inequality but in the last decade, a growing number of equality duties have been introduced to address this persistent form of inequality. There is, however, little research on the principles that underpin these duties. This article seeks to address this gap through the use of data from interviews conducted with primary school personnel implementing the pupil premium. The article explores understandings of socio-economic inequality by individuals in schools; policy conflicts; the wider context of action to address socio-economic inequality; different decision-making processes; and accountability mechanisms. On the basis of the findings of this study, broad principles are outlined to inform the design, implementation and enforcement of socio-economic equality duties in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses the politics of time to explore the making of the industrial middle class. It argues that anxieties about the decline of industry and the future of liberalism at the end of the nineteenth century fuelled a small explosion in life writing, prosopography and popular history. Accounts combined anecdotes about everyday life and reminiscences of the great civic age in a network of texts that attempted to recreate the associational life of the industrial middle class and present it as the foundation of national progress. However, slips in time between retrospection, nostalgia, memory and history reveal the complexity of late-Victorian anti-industrialism and the tensions in liberalism between a political culture that was inclusive and open and a social world that was not. The article combines a deep reading of the autobiography of the cotton magnate and liberal politician Samuel Smith alongside popular local history and collective biography. In so doing it shows how life stories were consciously composed as history, intent on shaping the provincial middle class as a historical force at a time of uncertainty about the future of industry and of liberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Virdee's book adds enormously to our understanding of two interconnected processes: the ways in which racism and nationalism in England/Britain became totally intertwined and embedded in working-class views of the world, and how at certain key moments those racially cast out from that depressing maelstrom may become the champions of an anti-racist internationalism. I am fractionally less negative than the author about the seemingly total hold of racism/nationalism on the whole working class, and less certain about racialized ‘outing’ as the key to the DNA of universalist anti-racists. Using the Garibaldi mobilizations of 1862–64, I suggest he may have underestimated the potential and reasons for ‘insider’ working-class resistance to racism/nationalism, and suggest greater caution in arguing an association between ‘racialized outsiders’ and internationalist views. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Despite being called ‘Indian restaurants’, the family-run curry houses that are characteristic of high streets in Britain are primarily run by Bangladeshi and Pakistani migrants. This article links the evolution of these restaurants in Britain to colonial history, migration after Independence and contemporary political changes. It analyses the popularity of curry houses alongside the continuing racism meted out to the wait staff and patrons by white Britons in the context of colonial history, migration patterns and the changing industrial fortunes of India and Britain in the post-World War II era. The emergence of wealthy and highly-credentialed Indians and British-born Asians has led to the rise of upmarket eateries and to a sharp bifurcation in diasporic communities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]