Books
Exploring the social, cultural and political implications of deindustrialisation in twentieth-cen... more Exploring the social, cultural and political implications of deindustrialisation in twentieth-century Scotland
Examines deindustrialisation as long-running, phased and politicised process
Draws on documentary source material from a range of industrial sectors, as well as transcripts from over 20 exclusive interviews with industry professionals
Relates Scottish Home Rule to long-running debates about economic security and working class welfare
Analyses longer history of deindustrialisation, with emergence of assembly goods manufacturing alongside shrinkage of established sectors such as shipbuilding
Deindustrialisation is the central feature of Scotland’s economic, social and political history since the 1950s, when employment levels peaked in the established sectors of coal, shipbuilding, metals and textiles, along with the railways and docks. This book moves analysis beyond outmoded tropes of economic decline and industrial catastrophe, and instead examines the political economy of deindustrialisation with a sharp eye on cultural and social dimensions that were not uniformly negative, as often assumed.
Viewing the long-term process of deindustrialisation through a moral economy framework, the book carefully reconstructs the impact of economic change on social class, gender relations and political allegiances, including a reawakened sense of Scottish national identity. In doing so, it reveals deindustrialisation as a more complex process than the customary body count of closures and job losses suggests, and demonstrates that socioeconomic change did not just happen, but was influenced by political agency.
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In the wake of an unparalleled housing crisis at the end of World War II, Glasgow Corporation reh... more In the wake of an unparalleled housing crisis at the end of World War II, Glasgow Corporation rehoused the hundreds of thousands of private tenants who were living in overcrowded and unsanitary conditions in unimproved Victorian slums. Adopting the designs, the materials and the technologies of modernity they built into the sky, developing high rise estates on vacant sites within the city and on its periphery. This book uniquely focuses on the peoples’ experience of this modern approach to housing, drawing on oral histories and archival materials to reflect on the long-term narrative and significance of high rise homes in the cityscape. It positions them as places of identity formation, intimacy and well-being. With discussions on interior design and consumption, gender roles, children, the elderly, privacy, isolation, social networks and nuisance, Glasgow examines the connections between architectural design, planning decisions and housing experience to offer some timely and prescient observations on the success and failure of this very modern housing solution at a moment when high flats are simultaneously denigrated in the social housing sector while being built afresh in the private sector. Glasgow is aimed at an academic readership, including postgraduate students, scholars and researchers. It will be of interest to social, cultural and urban historians particularly interested in the United Kingdom.
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"Up until the First World War a number of staple exports formed the core of Britain’s industrial ... more "Up until the First World War a number of staple exports formed the core of Britain’s industrial economy, employing a large workforce and developing the towns and cities associated with them. While the nineteenth century saw the rapid expansion of these export industries, the twentieth century was marked by their extensive decline.
Jute was one industry that experienced such a contraction. As the export of processed jute declined, both the employers and the government faced the problem of managing this descent. Located almost entirely in and around Dundee, jute provides a valuable case study of a local industry but also an important insight into Britain’s managed economy. By looking at jute as the forerunner of decline this study assesses the successes and failures of these efforts. It also addresses broader arguments about the political economy of twentieth-century Britain.
Review:
http://eh.net/book_reviews/decline-jute-managing-industrial-decline"
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03071022.2012.696848
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Peer Reviewed Articles
Labour History Review, 2021
In January 1983 the US-owned multinational Timex, a prominent employer in Dundee since 1946, anno... more In January 1983 the US-owned multinational Timex, a prominent employer in Dundee since 1946, announced it would cease production of mechanical wristwatches in the city. Substantial redundancies would accompany closure of the Milton of Craigie production unit where 2,000 mainly male skilled engineers and toolmakers were employed. About 2,000 mainly female assembly-line workers would be retained at another factory in the city, at Camperdown, as Timex completed its diversification into subcontracting work in electronics. With this announcement Timex violated the workforce’s moral economy. Significant changes were only permissible where negotiated with union representatives and where the security of those affected was preserved. Capital was leaving Dundee, despite the firm’s receipt of many grants from national and local government. On 8 April Milton workers resisted compulsory redundancy by occupying their plant. Timex was not stopped from ending watchmaking, but compulsory redundancies were averted and a union voice was preserved. Those who wished were transferred to Camperdown. The occupation was a crucial episode in Dundee’s deindustrialization, but has been obscured in popular memory by the bitter dispute accompanying the firm’s final departure from the city in 1993.
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Labor History, 2020
This article examines the relationship between long-running deindustrialisation and skilled male ... more This article examines the relationship between long-running deindustrialisation and skilled male employment culture in the West of Scotland. The age of deindustrialisation is a valuable designation: the contraction of industrial production and employment in the United Kingdom was gradual rather than sudden, managed carefully in the 1960s and 1970s and then recklessly in the 1980s. In Scotland there was an important transition in the 1960s from established to younger industrial sectors. In the sphere of employment culture this tested the Clydesider skilled male identity, which was constructed and reproduced in workplaces and industrial communities. The resilience of this identity is tracked through oral history examination of workers employed at the Fairfields shipyard in Govan, Glasgow, and the Linwood car plant, ten miles west in Renfrewshire. The Clydesider identity was derived from shipyard employment culture. It privileged earnings, workplace voice and relative autonomy from managerial supervision. Workers at Linwood used the Clydesider identity to advance their influence on the shop floor, contesting the frustrations of assembly goods manufacturing and asserting skill and autonomy. The article shows how manual workers on the Clyde adjusted to and made sense of deindustrialisation in the 1960s and 1970s in moral economy terms. The protracted and incomplete ‘half-life’ of deindustrialisation contained positive as well as negative effects.
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Twentieth-Century British History, 2019
Scotland’s political divergence from England is a key theme in late twentieth century British his... more Scotland’s political divergence from England is a key theme in late twentieth century British history. Typically seen in terms of the post-1979 Thatcher effect, this in fact developed over a longer timeframe, rooted in industrial changes revealed by analysis of the Linwood car plant in Renfrewshire. Conservatism and Unionism was an eminent political force in Scotland in the 1940s and 1950s. But in all general elections from 1959 onwards the vote share of Conservative and Unionist candidates was lower in Scotland than in England. From the late 1960s onwards there were also ambitions for constitutional change. This article breaks new conceptual and empirical ground by relating these important markers of political divergence to popular understanding among Scottish workers of deindustrialization. A Thompsonian moral economy framework is deployed. Expectations were elevated by industrial restructuring from the 1950s, with workers exchanging jobs in the staples for a better future in assembly goods. Labour governments earned a reputation in Scotland as better managers of this process than Conservative governments. The 1979 general election showed that Labourism was growing in popularity in Scotland just as its appeal faded in England. At Linwood moral economy expectations were compromised, chiefly by intermittent redundancy and recurrent threat of closure, which was averted in 1975 by Labour government intervention. When the plant was shut in 1981 criticisms of UK political-constitutional structures and Conservativism were intensified.
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Twentieth Century British History, 2018
Narratives of deindustrialization, urban decline and failing public housing and the negative outc... more Narratives of deindustrialization, urban decline and failing public housing and the negative outcomes associated with these processes dominate accounts of post-war Scotland, bolstering the interpretation of Scottish exceptionalism in a British context. Within these accounts working people appear as victims of powerful and long-term external forces suffering sustained and ongoing deleterious vulnerabilities in terms of employment, health, and housing. This article challenges this picture by focusing on the first Scottish new town which made space for working people’s aspiration and new models of the self manifested in new lifestyles and social relations. Drawing on archival data and oral history interviews, we identify how elective relocation fostered and enabled new forms of identity predicated upon new housing, new social relations, and lifestyle opportunities focused on the family and home and elective social networks no longer determined by traditional class and gender expectations. These findings permit an intervention in the historical debates on post-war housing and social change which go beyond the materialistic experience to deeper and affective dimensions of the new town self.
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Sociological Research Online, 2018
Historically, it has often been easy for those in power, whether in local or national government,... more Historically, it has often been easy for those in power, whether in local or national government, to try and ignore the concerns of those that lived in the housing stock they owned and managed. This was especially true in the context of increasing stigmatisation and ‘residualisation’ of council housing from the 1970s. There are obvious continuities evident in the neglect which led to the fire at Grenfell tower last year. The justified anger and activism both before and following the loss of life at Grenfell has historical precedents throughout the UK. This article takes a case study approach to analyse the campaigns undertaken by community groups in Glasgow from the 1970s and beyond to highlight the council’s blatant attempts to blame the residents for its failures. This was not a new strategy for Glasgow’s municipal authorities, which had been struggling with some of the highest levels of overcrowding in the UK for decades. Persistent narratives which stigmatised residents in the city’s inner city and peripheral housing estates helped the authorities to try and minimise or dismiss demands for housing improvements. This article highlights how activists in the Gorbals and Castlemilk fought back by drawing public attention to the conditions in which they were living. There are lessons to be learned from their methods and tactics, a heritage currently being drawn upon by housing activists in Glasgow today.
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Scottish Labour History, 2018
In 1971 Ferguslie Park in Paisley was designated a beneficiary of the Labour government’s 1969 Co... more In 1971 Ferguslie Park in Paisley was designated a beneficiary of the Labour government’s 1969 Community Development Project (CDP). This initiative, one of the first of many interventions in ‘deprived’ communities in the UK after the ‘rediscovery’ of poverty in the 1960s, was motivated by attempts to solve the apparently intractable problems of high unemployment, material want and poor housing conditions through an ethos of ‘self-help’. The emphasis was on local solutions led by the residents. This article considers how residents attempted to overcome the ‘marginalisation’ of their community through the establishment of a co-operative workshop with the aim of addressing the high level of unemployment prevalent in Ferguslie Park. This local initiative highlights the main tension apparent in the CDP as a whole: the need for structural change at a national level, including a radical rethinking of policy objectives, especially in relation to the post-1945 state commitment to full employment, as opposed to ‘tinkering at a local level’ and making individuals and communities responsible for creating their own employment in small scale local projects.
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Hazley, B., Wright, V., Abrams, L. and Kearns, A.
In recent years, the social research of Pearl... more Hazley, B., Wright, V., Abrams, L. and Kearns, A.
In recent years, the social research of Pearl Jephcott has been subject to scholarly reappraisal on the grounds that it displays an early commitment to the unmediated reporting of ‘the authentic voice of her participants’. This article investigates the extent to which this claim holds for Jephcott’s seminal 1971 study Homes in High Flats. It suggests that, although Homes in High Flats sought to investigate ‘people and their homes rather than housing in the usual sense’, the study’s ability to realise this aim was complicated by the social distance obtaining between researcher and researched. Based on re-analysis of the study’s archived research materials, the article explores how this distance mediated the researchers’ interpretation and re-presentation of the tenant’s voice, deepening understanding of the epistemological premises of Jephcott’s work.
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Housing research rarely takes a long-term view of the impacts of short-term housing changes. Thus... more Housing research rarely takes a long-term view of the impacts of short-term housing changes. Thus, in studies of post-war relocation, narratives of ‘loss of community’ and ‘dislocation’ have dominated the debate for decades. This paper combines a ‘re-study’ methodology with oral histories to re-examine the experience of relocation into high-rise flats in Glasgow in the 1960s and 1970s. We find that both the immediate and longer term outcomes of relocation varied greatly; while some people failed to settle and felt a loss of social relations, many others did not. People had agency, some chose to get away from tenement life and others chose to move on subsequently as aspirations changed. Furthermore, relocation to high-rise was not always the life-defining event or moment it is often depicted to be. Outcomes from relocation are mediated by many other events and experiences, questioning its role as an explanatory paradigm in housing studies.
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This paper looks at the planning and provision of outdoor play spaces for children over a seventy... more This paper looks at the planning and provision of outdoor play spaces for children over a seventy-year period since the Second World War. Using Glasgow as a case study, the paper examines whether and how research on families and children living in flats has been used to inform national and local planning policies in this area, and in turn how well policy is converted into practice and provision on the ground. The paper considers these issues in four time periods: the period of post-war reconstruction from the late 1940s to the early 1970s, when large amounts of social housing was built; the period of decline and residualization of social housing in the 1970s and 1980s; the 1990s and 2000s when several attempts were made to regenerate social housing estates; and the last five years, during which time the Scottish Government has developed a number of policies concerning children’s health and physical activity. Planning policy in Glasgow appears to have been ineffective across several decades. Issues such as a weak link between research and policy recommendations, unresolved tensions between a number of policy options, and a lack of political priority afforded to the needs to children are identified as contributory factors.
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This paper will explore the reduced role of women in the jute industry in Dundee in the post-war ... more This paper will explore the reduced role of women in the jute industry in Dundee in the post-war years. This industry experienced high levels of female participation in the years before 1945, as was the case in many of Britain's textile industries. This was instrumental in the city's characterisation as a 'women's work town'. Following the war however the dominance of the jute industry in Dundee was under threat. Competition from Indian producers as well as from substitutes for jute was intensifying, but perhaps more problematic was increased pessimism concerning the future of the industry within the city itself. Dundee City Council, supported by the Board of Trade and the government more generally, actively campaigned for subsidies to attract new industries to the area and therefore diversify Dundee's industrial base. The success of this policy ensured that the jute industry faced increased competition in terms of retaining its female labour force. As a consequence of this labour shortage, and the jute employers response to it in the 1960s and 1970s, Dundee's jute industry was no longer characterised by high female participation.
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Women's History Review
"This article examines evidence of active political engagement by women in Edinburgh and Glasgow ... more "This article examines evidence of active political engagement by women in Edinburgh and Glasgow in the inter-war years of the twentieth century. While discussing the wider context of women's political activities in this period, in terms of party politics and the range of women's organisations in existence, it focuses in particular on Women Citizens’ Associations, Societies for Equal Citizenship and Co-operative Women's Guild branches. Comparing interventions by such women's organisations in the two cities around the selected themes of political representation, housing, ‘moral and social hygiene’, and contraception, the article demonstrates that women's organisations participated in public debates and campaigns to advance what they perceived as women's interests. Temporary alliances around issues such as the regulation of prostitution and provision of contraceptive advice brought together a range of women's organisations, but class differences in perspectives became increasingly apparent in this period, particularly in Glasgow. The issues addressed by women's organisations covered the spectrum of ‘equal rights’ and ‘welfare feminism’, although they did not necessarily identify as feminist. Common to all organisations, however, was a commitment to active citizenship, with women becoming a recognised part of local political networks in this period, although they remained poorly represented in parliament.
"
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This paper examines the development of the 1963 court case brought by the Board of Trade's Restri... more This paper examines the development of the 1963 court case brought by the Board of Trade's Restrictive Trading Agreements Office against jute manufacturers, in order to examine the impact of the newly introduced competition policy for government–business relationships. Government's active enforcement of competition marked an important change in the direction of industrial policy in the UK and the jute industry was one of the cases to be examined.
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Depopulation was an important issue affecting the lives of the inhabitants of rural Scotland in t... more Depopulation was an important issue affecting the lives of the inhabitants of rural Scotland in the inter-war years and throughout the twentieth century. Yet this has been a neglected area in the emergent historiography of rural Britain. Indeed, Scotland is rarely represented in studies of rural Britain in the twentieth century. Rural areas are similarly marginalized in the historiography of twentieth-century Scotland. By considering the role of women in addressing the problem of rural depopulation, specifically the Scottish Women's Rural Institutes, this article will therefore make a unique contribution to the historiography of rural Britain in terms of its gendered and geographical focus. The Scottish Women's Rural Institutes contributed to debates concerning the effects of depopulation on rural areas through its demands for improved housing. In its cooperation with government agencies in Scotland, and by giving evidence to relevant government commissions, the Scottish Women's Rural Institutes and its members were able to influence decision making relating to the provision and standard of housing in rural areas. By doing so this organization was able to satisfy its aim of attempting to improve the housing inhabited by its members and, related to this, prevent further rural depopulation.
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History of Education, Jan 1, 2009
Following the enfranchisement of women in 1918 women’s organisations throughout Britain reconside... more Following the enfranchisement of women in 1918 women’s organisations throughout Britain reconsidered and revised their aims for the future. In many cases this involved educating their members, and women in general, on how to use their new influence in society. Such ‘education for citizenship’, which also drove attempts to raise the political consciousness of women, was a defining feature of the educational programmes of a range of women’s organisations in interwar Scotland. This paper focuses on the activities of two societies: the Glasgow Society for Equal Citizenship and Edinburgh Women Citizens Association. These organisations strongly promoted ‘active citizenship’ as the next step for the feminist movement. Consequently, both worked intensively to ensure that the women of Glasgow and Edinburgh, respectively, knew how to use their votes in order to best achieve further reforms. This article examines the educational strategies used by both organisations.
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Chapter in Edited Collection
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Clark, J. and Wright, V.
In: Clark, J. and Wise, N. (eds.) Urban Renewal, Community and Particip... more Clark, J. and Wright, V.
In: Clark, J. and Wise, N. (eds.) Urban Renewal, Community and Participation: Theory, Policy and Practice. Series: The Urban book series. Springer International Publishing, pp. 45-70. ISBN 9783319723105 (doi:10.1007/978-3-319-72311-2_3)
The Gorbals area of Glasgow, Scotland, is widely regarded as a successful example of urban regeneration. However, this neighbourhood, like many similar working-class urban areas, has been subjected to repeated cycles of renewal. This chapter seeks to explore the history of a ‘successful’ regeneration, looking both spatially and socially at what has happened in Glasgow’s Gorbals over the long term. In the past, ‘regeneration’ was often a process enacted on behalf of residents by planners, architects and municipal authorities. We posit a multi-method approach, tracking changing policy ambitions, physical change, and exploring the resulting physical and social environments in order to investigate the complex inter-relations between space, place, community and time. The authors argue for the centrality of the narratives of those who have lived in the area both in the past and today in any assessment of relative ‘success’.
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Hughes, A. and Wright, V.
In: Gray, N. (ed.) Rent and its Discontents: A Century of Housing St... more Hughes, A. and Wright, V.
In: Gray, N. (ed.) Rent and its Discontents: A Century of Housing Struggle. Series: Transforming capitalism. Rowan & Littlefield International: London. ISBN 9781786605740 (In Press)
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Books
Examines deindustrialisation as long-running, phased and politicised process
Draws on documentary source material from a range of industrial sectors, as well as transcripts from over 20 exclusive interviews with industry professionals
Relates Scottish Home Rule to long-running debates about economic security and working class welfare
Analyses longer history of deindustrialisation, with emergence of assembly goods manufacturing alongside shrinkage of established sectors such as shipbuilding
Deindustrialisation is the central feature of Scotland’s economic, social and political history since the 1950s, when employment levels peaked in the established sectors of coal, shipbuilding, metals and textiles, along with the railways and docks. This book moves analysis beyond outmoded tropes of economic decline and industrial catastrophe, and instead examines the political economy of deindustrialisation with a sharp eye on cultural and social dimensions that were not uniformly negative, as often assumed.
Viewing the long-term process of deindustrialisation through a moral economy framework, the book carefully reconstructs the impact of economic change on social class, gender relations and political allegiances, including a reawakened sense of Scottish national identity. In doing so, it reveals deindustrialisation as a more complex process than the customary body count of closures and job losses suggests, and demonstrates that socioeconomic change did not just happen, but was influenced by political agency.
Jute was one industry that experienced such a contraction. As the export of processed jute declined, both the employers and the government faced the problem of managing this descent. Located almost entirely in and around Dundee, jute provides a valuable case study of a local industry but also an important insight into Britain’s managed economy. By looking at jute as the forerunner of decline this study assesses the successes and failures of these efforts. It also addresses broader arguments about the political economy of twentieth-century Britain.
Review:
http://eh.net/book_reviews/decline-jute-managing-industrial-decline"
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03071022.2012.696848
Peer Reviewed Articles
In recent years, the social research of Pearl Jephcott has been subject to scholarly reappraisal on the grounds that it displays an early commitment to the unmediated reporting of ‘the authentic voice of her participants’. This article investigates the extent to which this claim holds for Jephcott’s seminal 1971 study Homes in High Flats. It suggests that, although Homes in High Flats sought to investigate ‘people and their homes rather than housing in the usual sense’, the study’s ability to realise this aim was complicated by the social distance obtaining between researcher and researched. Based on re-analysis of the study’s archived research materials, the article explores how this distance mediated the researchers’ interpretation and re-presentation of the tenant’s voice, deepening understanding of the epistemological premises of Jephcott’s work.
"
Chapter in Edited Collection
In: Clark, J. and Wise, N. (eds.) Urban Renewal, Community and Participation: Theory, Policy and Practice. Series: The Urban book series. Springer International Publishing, pp. 45-70. ISBN 9783319723105 (doi:10.1007/978-3-319-72311-2_3)
The Gorbals area of Glasgow, Scotland, is widely regarded as a successful example of urban regeneration. However, this neighbourhood, like many similar working-class urban areas, has been subjected to repeated cycles of renewal. This chapter seeks to explore the history of a ‘successful’ regeneration, looking both spatially and socially at what has happened in Glasgow’s Gorbals over the long term. In the past, ‘regeneration’ was often a process enacted on behalf of residents by planners, architects and municipal authorities. We posit a multi-method approach, tracking changing policy ambitions, physical change, and exploring the resulting physical and social environments in order to investigate the complex inter-relations between space, place, community and time. The authors argue for the centrality of the narratives of those who have lived in the area both in the past and today in any assessment of relative ‘success’.
In: Gray, N. (ed.) Rent and its Discontents: A Century of Housing Struggle. Series: Transforming capitalism. Rowan & Littlefield International: London. ISBN 9781786605740 (In Press)
Examines deindustrialisation as long-running, phased and politicised process
Draws on documentary source material from a range of industrial sectors, as well as transcripts from over 20 exclusive interviews with industry professionals
Relates Scottish Home Rule to long-running debates about economic security and working class welfare
Analyses longer history of deindustrialisation, with emergence of assembly goods manufacturing alongside shrinkage of established sectors such as shipbuilding
Deindustrialisation is the central feature of Scotland’s economic, social and political history since the 1950s, when employment levels peaked in the established sectors of coal, shipbuilding, metals and textiles, along with the railways and docks. This book moves analysis beyond outmoded tropes of economic decline and industrial catastrophe, and instead examines the political economy of deindustrialisation with a sharp eye on cultural and social dimensions that were not uniformly negative, as often assumed.
Viewing the long-term process of deindustrialisation through a moral economy framework, the book carefully reconstructs the impact of economic change on social class, gender relations and political allegiances, including a reawakened sense of Scottish national identity. In doing so, it reveals deindustrialisation as a more complex process than the customary body count of closures and job losses suggests, and demonstrates that socioeconomic change did not just happen, but was influenced by political agency.
Jute was one industry that experienced such a contraction. As the export of processed jute declined, both the employers and the government faced the problem of managing this descent. Located almost entirely in and around Dundee, jute provides a valuable case study of a local industry but also an important insight into Britain’s managed economy. By looking at jute as the forerunner of decline this study assesses the successes and failures of these efforts. It also addresses broader arguments about the political economy of twentieth-century Britain.
Review:
http://eh.net/book_reviews/decline-jute-managing-industrial-decline"
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03071022.2012.696848
In recent years, the social research of Pearl Jephcott has been subject to scholarly reappraisal on the grounds that it displays an early commitment to the unmediated reporting of ‘the authentic voice of her participants’. This article investigates the extent to which this claim holds for Jephcott’s seminal 1971 study Homes in High Flats. It suggests that, although Homes in High Flats sought to investigate ‘people and their homes rather than housing in the usual sense’, the study’s ability to realise this aim was complicated by the social distance obtaining between researcher and researched. Based on re-analysis of the study’s archived research materials, the article explores how this distance mediated the researchers’ interpretation and re-presentation of the tenant’s voice, deepening understanding of the epistemological premises of Jephcott’s work.
"
In: Clark, J. and Wise, N. (eds.) Urban Renewal, Community and Participation: Theory, Policy and Practice. Series: The Urban book series. Springer International Publishing, pp. 45-70. ISBN 9783319723105 (doi:10.1007/978-3-319-72311-2_3)
The Gorbals area of Glasgow, Scotland, is widely regarded as a successful example of urban regeneration. However, this neighbourhood, like many similar working-class urban areas, has been subjected to repeated cycles of renewal. This chapter seeks to explore the history of a ‘successful’ regeneration, looking both spatially and socially at what has happened in Glasgow’s Gorbals over the long term. In the past, ‘regeneration’ was often a process enacted on behalf of residents by planners, architects and municipal authorities. We posit a multi-method approach, tracking changing policy ambitions, physical change, and exploring the resulting physical and social environments in order to investigate the complex inter-relations between space, place, community and time. The authors argue for the centrality of the narratives of those who have lived in the area both in the past and today in any assessment of relative ‘success’.
In: Gray, N. (ed.) Rent and its Discontents: A Century of Housing Struggle. Series: Transforming capitalism. Rowan & Littlefield International: London. ISBN 9781786605740 (In Press)
This work explores the differing ways in which these organisations could be termed ‘feminist’, which involves questioning the way that feminism and feminist activism was defined in the interwar period. Each organisation had its own political concerns and demands, which highlight both differences and similarities between the organisations under consideration. However, all of these organisations were ultimately concerned with improving the lives of its members and empowering them. The attempts made by each organisation to achieve these aims are considered in relation to a working definition of feminism in order to determine the extent to which each organisation was ‘feminist’ in its activities.
In addition, this thesis also addresses the double marginalisation of Scottish women in the established historiography. Scottish women are overwhelmingly neglected in accounts of British feminism in the interwar years. Research has tended to focus on developments in the national feminist movement, as represented by national organisations and prominent English feminists. Within such work ‘British’ can often translate as ‘English’. Recent contributions to the historiography of interwar feminism have, with few exceptions, continued this trend, although such research perhaps more explicitly focuses on England. Women are also marginalised within the discipline of Scottish history, which largely neglects women’s experiences of, and contributions to, Scottish society. While there are exceptions, the extent of attempts to include women in the narrative of Scottish history in published research often amounts to case studies or chapters on ‘gender’, rather than systematic and comprehensive inclusion of the female experience.
This thesis therefore provides an in depth account of the diversity of interwar women’s organisations in Scotland, which builds upon recent studies of women’s political experiences in interwar Scotland, and also contributes to the wider historiography of interwar feminism. It also places women’s political experience in this period within the broader Scottish historiography, thereby including women in accounts of interwar political culture, as well as challenging the neglect of women in the historiography relating to interwar Scotland.