The Gendering of the British Working Class

How have feminist historians transformed the account of class formation and consciousness articulated in Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class? Deborah Valenze’s The First Industrial Woman, Anna Clark’s The Struggle for the Breeches, Sonya Rose’s Limited Livelihoods, and Ellen Ross’s Love and Toil place the gendering of the British working class at the center of the process and explain the peculiar limitations of the working-class movement. The essay also places these books in the theoretical tradition of socialist feminism and considers them as responses to Joan Scott’s call for a poststructuralist approach to gender, class and power.     

Geographies of Responsibility

Abstract Issues of space, place and politics run deep. There is a long history of the entanglement of the conceptualisation of space and place with the framing of political positions. The injunction to think space relationally is a very general one and, as this collection indicates, can lead in many directions. The particular avenue to be explored in this paper concerns the relationship between identity and responsibility, and the potential geographies of both.     

Geographies of relatedness

This paper explores the analytic purchase and substantive concerns of what I am calling geographies of relatedness . Drawing on recent work in feminist anthropology which has reconsidered kinship as classificatory system and practice, and highlighting the attentiveness to sites, scales and contexts within this work, I suggest ways in which a focus on relatedness may shape approaches to established and emerging matters of concern in human geography. I consider first the foundational status but flexible meaning of 'blood' in kinship thinking, and the ways the flexibility of kinship can be curtailed and its foundational status reinstated in relation to the nation and the state. Second, I consider the geographies of relatedness that are constituted through and practised in the process of establishing degrees of biological connection, delimiting difference, mapping human 'diversity' and defining personal, collective and human origins at different scales and with different effects. A focus on geographies of relatedness, I argue, highlights the ways blood ties or similarly naturalized connections move between and connect categories of relatedness with different sizes, extents and configurations across space, as well as different temporalities. It suggests an alertness to new global mappings of human relatedness and difference and combines a critical attention to ideas of the 'nature' of human reproduction as foundational, original or primal in the natural order of the social, to ideas of 'place of origin': personal, national, ethnic, racialized, universal in their familiar and emergent forms.     

Neoliberalising Education: New Geographies of Private Tuition,Class Privilege,and Minority Ethnic Advancement

Geographic research on neoliberalism has explored the restructuring of educational landscapes wrought through marketisation of preschool, school and higher-education provision and considered the responsibilisation of parents and children for educational outcomes. This study develops understanding of the contingent emergence of neoliberal educational reform, and its progressive and regressive impacts, through an examination of the burgeoning private tuition market in England and Wales. The paper outlines the contours of the previously hidden supplementary education industry, demonstrating that it reinforces regional and classed inequalities, while opening possibilities for ethnic minority advancement. Conceptually, the paper advances debate about socio-spatial specificity in neoliberal change, showing that the intersection of policy, free markets and consumer behaviour reshapes the educational landscape in ways that extend beyond state intention and control. Through these processes, contingent market forms are produced that offer social mobility for some, but ensure the social reproduction of enduring regimes of power.     

Decolonizing Geographies of Whiteness

Engagement with the study of whiteness is slow within the discipline of geography despite repeated calls for it to be placed on the research agenda, and regardless of a strong heritage of critical “race” and postcolonial scholarship. This paper considers this reticence, and the problems inherent in Whiteness Studies more generally. It then offers examples from inner Sydney, Australia, that avoid some of the more pressing shortcomings of studying whiteness. By prizing open the essentializing bounds of hegemonic ethnicity, this paper identifies whiteness as context‐specific, processural and contestable.