bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Community Engaged Research
Authors: Carvalho Claudia Pato
Published: May 2018

WITH THIS PAPER, WE WISH TO SHARE THE EXPERIENCE OF AN ARTS-BASED ACTION RESEARCH INTERVENTION IN THE SOFIA STREET, IN COIMBRA (PORTUGAL), A CITY STREET THAT WAS INSCRIBED AS AN UNESCO WORLD HERITAGE SITE IN 2013. THIS INTERVENTION IS PART OF THE BIGGER ACTION-RESEARCH PROJECT NAMED ARTERIA (2018-2020), WHERE WE WISH TO EXPLORE THE POSSIBLE CONNECTIONS BETWEEN THE ARTISTIC PRACTICE AND THE FIELD OF SOCIAL SCIENCE. IN THIS PAPER, WE DESCRIBE HOW THE FIELD RESEARCH, WHICH TOOK PLACE IN THIS STREET (THE PREPARATION OF COMMUNITY WORKSHOPS AND THEIR IMPLEMENTATION), OFFERS A PROCESS OF METHODOLOGICAL EXPLORATION ON HOW SOCIAL SCIENCE METHODOLOGIES MAY BE ARTICULATED WITH THE PROCESSES OF ARTISTIC CREATION. WE SHOW HOW THIS CAN BE DONE BY DEVELOPING INNOVATIVE APPROACHES TO CULTURAL PARTICIPATION THROUGH THE PROCESS OF IMMATERIAL CO-CREATION OF KNOWLEDGE. AT THE SAME TIME, WE SHARE REFLECTIONS ON HOW THE ARTISTIC INTERVENTION MAY HAVE AN IMPACT ON THE SOCIAL AND CULTURAL TRANSFORMATION OF SOFIA STREET.
Introducing small state survival as a historical phenomenon
Authors: Maass Matthias
Published: May 2018

Chapter 1 describes the overall project, the study of small state survival. It points out the immediate policy relevance and the niche in existing scholarship that is targeted. Generally speaking, the how and why of small state survival remains critically important but also only partially understood.
A further examination of existing scholarship places this study in context. It identifies where it links up with previous efforts and how the current debates will be challenged and advanced.
Having thus placed the study in the scholarly context, it presents its analytical framework. Overall, the investigation proceeds within the broad theoretical paradigm of Realism, enhanced with insights from the English School.
The chapter ends with annotated road map of the following chapters.
The story of small state survival: past, present, and future
Authors: Maass Matthias
Published: May 2018

In the previous chapters, it has been demonstrated how over more than 3 ½ centuries, the fate of small states has depended first of all on the states system. This chapter concludes the investigation with the key finding, that small state survival and proliferation are largely system-dependent phenomena.
It is pointed out that the small state’s dependency and its structural irrelevance in a world of power are critical to properly understanding the issue of small state survival. On the one hand, small states are units that don’t matter much to the system. On the other hand, small states’ survival is to a good degree predetermined by the particular system in which they exist, but which they cannot shape.
This strange, eventful history
Authors: Shaughnessy Robert
Published: May 2018

This chapter offers an overview of the book’s contents and a summary of its main arguments and findings, and also presents an outline of the performance history of As You Like It from the eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century. It considers in particular the play’s relationship to the history of English pastoral.
Play, parts and players
Authors: Shaughnessy Robert
Published: May 2018

Through close reading of the text of As You Like It, this chapter traces the early performance and publication history of the play, focusing in particular on the significance of the part system and its implications for the role of Rosalind. It places the play in the contexts of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men’s repertoire and of Shakespeare’s radically innovatory and high-risk playwriting practice. It also examines the use of rhetorical tools in the players’ parts.
Materials of performance: denim and silk
Authors: Shaughnessy Robert
Published: May 2018

This chapter continues and concludes the story of As You Like It at Stratford-upon-Avon, focusing on two major productions, Buzz Goodbody’s in 1973, and Adrian Noble’s in 1985, and then providing a summary of the play’s performance history until 2013. Goodbody’s production is discussed in terms of its relation both to feminism and popular performance; Noble’s in relation to the phenomenon of Director’s Shakespeare.
Between France and Germany
Authors: Shaughnessy Robert
Published: May 2018

This chapter examines the play’s fortunes beyond the English-speaking theatre, focusing on two landmark productions: Jacques Copeau’s for l’Atelier, Paris, in 1934, and Peter Stein’s for the Schaubühne Berlin, in 1977. In both cases the discussion focuses on the visionary direction of two of Europe’s leading twentieth-century theatre directors, the cultural and political contexts of their productions, and the ramifications of translating Shakespeare’s text into, respectively, French and German.
At all points like a man
Authors: Shaughnessy Robert
Published: May 2018

This chapter discusses two landmark all-male productions: the National Theatre’s in 1967, and Cheek by Jowl’s in 1991 (revived in 1995). The discussion takes account of how the casting of men in the female roles radically energized the gender dynamics of the productions, implicating them directly in the sexual politics of their own times, in the first instance in the context of the UK’s recent decriminalisation of homosexuality, and in the second in the wake of resurgent homophobia. The chapter also emphasises the significance of self-conscious performativity in these productions.
Studying practitioners’ practices
Authors: Futák-Campbell Beatrix
Published: May 2018

Practice theory is a diverse and constantly evolving body of ideas regarding the nature of social action, transcending a variety of disciplines in the social sciences. This chapter traces the evolution of the practice turn, from the seminal work in The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory (Schatzki et al, 2001) to a more recent application in the field of International Relations (Pouliot, 2010; Adler and Pouliot 2011) and EU studies (Adler-Niessen, 2016). This chapter illustrates the different debates and discussions that have guided the path of practice theory towards an application within IR and EU scholarship. It particularly emphasises the importance of Raymond D. Duvall and Arjun Chowdhury’s contribution to the field, which highlights the emergence of two distinct approaches that the practice turn facilitates, namely the focus on behaviour/conduct on one hand and the discursive/linguistic on the other. While the former seems to have found greater support in the discipline of IR, this chapter argues that the ontological foundations upon which the practice turn rests allude to the utility and even necessity for a discursive practice approach. The book serves as a contribution to the linguistic approaches within the practice turn.
Studying social action in interaction
Authors: Futák-Campbell Beatrix
Published: May 2018

Some parts of the discursive literature in IR overlap with the scholarship that focuses on foreign policy practices. This is not surprising given the specific intentions by the scholars behind the practice turn to create an interparadigmatic research programme and promote methodological pluralism (Adler and Pouliot 2011:3). Nevertheless, there seems to be a division developing in the practice turn between those who focus on the language practitioners use by building on scholarship inspired by Michel Foucault, and those who focus on practitioners’ political actions, that is ‘what practitioners do’, in line with Pierre Bourdieu’s work. This book argues that it is instrumental to combine both. However, focusing on the linguistic resources used by practitioners and on the way they construct their social actions allows us to understand and explain specific foreign policy decisions or their practice. In order to do so, a new framework called Discursive International Relations (DIR) is put forward. DIR shares the same philosophical roots as some constructivist and most poststructuralist discursive approaches applied in IR, but it also combines features of discursive psychology (Edwards and Potter 1992), conversation analysis (Davies and Harré 1990; Sacks 1992) and ethnomethodology (Garfinkel 1967, Lynch et al 1983) in order to combine discourse and practice.
Conclusion
Authors: Futák-Campbell Beatrix
Published: May 2018

This book sought to gain insight into how EU practitioners consider the policy for which they have direct responsibility. By first summarising its findings, I reflect on the theoretical, methodological, and practical implications of this study and studying EU practitioners in general.

I examined data drawn from research interviews with EU practitioners who work on EU foreign policy vis-à-vis Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova. Following a poststructuralist theoretical and methodology position within the practice turn, and having an open research question, allowed me to focus on the data and the topics that EU practitioners raised. I analysed these interactions through the application of DPM. DPM enabled me to draw attention to the discursive patterns that practitioners employ when they discuss EU foreign policy in the eastern neighbourhood, what they accomplish with them, how they manage their personal accountability or agency through them, and what implications these formulations have for the practitioners’ practices. This led to a focus on the ways that practitioners manage identity, normative, moral, and collective interest concerns. These four concepts are crucial for IR theory, and also for understanding EU foreign policy. Although each concept was addressed in a separate chapter, I demonstrated points of interdependency throughout the analysis. Their parallel existence is key for this study and for poststructuralist practice theory. It builds on previous constructive works that linked identity and interests, but expanded it to normative and even moral concerns faced by practitioners when developing a specific foreign policy. Drawing this inference was only possible owing to the openness and refusal to take anything for granted advocated by poststructuralists; thus, the focus lies on the topics made relevant by practitioners, and how their accounts build up specific constructions of our world, rather testing for specific categories or for the truth value of their account....
John McGahern: landscape and the lost republic
Authors: Allen Nicholas
Published: May 2018

John McGahern was sensitive to the political shape of the communities he imagined in his fiction. These communities were scarred by the violence of historical events, the significance of which remained in recent memory. McGahern often chose the family as the social unit by which to gauge the effect of public events on the individual consciousness, and this rendered mass events, like the War of Independence and Civil War, as conflicts between people who could not escape their aftermath, even generations later. This chapter considers how for McGahern, as well as for the generation before him, the idea of the republic represented not only national separation from a larger power, but was the troubled symbol of a society that was divided uncomfortably between loyalty to community and to the state.
Hand-rails to the past: McGahern and the memory of the Irish revolution
Authors: Foster R. F. (Roy)
Published: May 2018

This chapter looks at the way McGahern represents the memory of the Irish revolution in Amongst Women, That They May Face the Rising Sun, and in his autobiographical writings. The disillusioned and often bitter reflections of his protagonists partly reflect his own family’s experience, but also echo a strong reaction among writers and ex-activists in the 1920s and 1930s, whose responses and regrets are traced through the writings of people such as P.S. O’Hegarty, Desmond Ryan, Ernie O’Malley and Bulmer Hobson, as well as private letters and reflections. It is suggested that McGahern is in a sense channelling a powerful theme in the history of independent Ireland, that of living with the memory of violence by means of evasion and suppression, and that this lends his fiction a historical dimension which has not been fully appreciated.
‘What was it all for?’1 John McGahern’s critique of Irish republican nationalism: an ethical reading
Authors: Ross Ciaran
Published: May 2018

John McGahern’s work reflects profound scepticism concerning 1916 and the legacy of the Irish War of Independence, as well as a subversive attitude towards the original spirit of revolution. The early novels – The Barracks, and Amongst Women, with their post-revolutionary figures represented by characters like Reegan and Moran, might be said to be still in the throes of the founding revolutionary event, while in That They May Face the Rising Sun, McGahern’s last novel, the critique of republicanism focuses on the ‘new’ modern day republican activist, depicted by the character of Jimmy Joe McKiernan. Using Levinas, who defines ethics as critique, the primacy of ethics being the experience of the encounter with the Other, this chapter examines the tensions surrounding McKiernan’s place in the local community where political violence is seen to be both tolerated and condemned.
John McGahern’s ‘Oldfashioned’ and Anglo-Irish culture
Authors: Clare David
Published: May 2018

In the short story ‘Oldfashioned’, McGahern repeats many of the tropes found in twentieth-century literary works about the Anglo-Irish. What makes this story unique, however, is that McGahern’s treatment of the Anglo-Irish is closer to that of writers from Anglo-Irish Anglican backgrounds than it is to writers from his own Catholic Nationalist background. Whereas twentieth-century Catholic Nationalist writers often subtly mock the Anglo-Irish for being out-of-touch, snobbish, and psychologically compromised by their ‘Britishness’, McGahern suggests that Anglo-Irish Anglicans are often gracious, aesthetically-minded, intellectual, and less gossipy and venally materialistic than Irish Catholics. This chapter argues that, in this, McGahern demonstrates openness to all traditions on the island and a freedom from the narrow-gauge republican perspective common to his father’s generation.
Learning to love the world: the educational vision of John McGahern1
Authors: Williams Kevin
Published: May 2018

Policy documents on education tend to envisage the activity of learning in terms of the acquisition of skills. Yet, this notion implies that individuals are composed of discrete accomplishments detached from the core of their personalities, and in some way this does violence to the unity of the human person and to the integrity of education as a practice. Properly speaking, education is identity constitutive. From the point of view of philosophy of education, this chapter considers the ways in which McGahern articulates how the experience of learning came to shape his sensibility and his very identity. The discussion focuses on Memoir, essays from the collection Love of the World and interviews, to show how these reveal richly textured insights into the nature of education, and that what we learn comes to constitute the core of our personalities, and thus forms part of our very identities.
Love and sex: McGahern’s personal and detached reflections
Authors: Inglis Tom
Published: May 2018

While social scientists provide description and explanation of the institutions, discourses and long-term processes of social change that structure culture, McGahern gives his readers a sense of what it was like to live in Catholic Ireland in the latter half of the twentieth century. He reveals the ways in which people were constrained by their culture but also the ways that they constructed themselves and negotiated cultural mores. His work delves into their ways of being and representing themselves, their strategies of action and performance of identity. The Pornographer provides key insights into the shift from rural to urban society and the decline in the importance of the Catholic Church in everyday life. This chapter explores how McGahern reveals what it was like to make love and have sex in Ireland during the shift from a Catholic culture of self-denial to a modern urban, cosmopolitan culture of self-fulfilment and self-indulgence. It also examines the gap between the critical reflection of the novelist and the lack of critical reflection and insight into this clash of cultures in his own life, as revealed in Memoir.
Writing violence: John McGahern and Flannery O’Connor
Authors: McGuinness Frank
Published: May 2018

This chapter looks in close detail at two stories, written by authors of very different background: ‘The Beginning of an Idea’ by John McGahern, a chronicler of mid to late 20th century rural Ireland, and ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’ by Flannery O’Connor, a chronicler of the American South. The chapter traces what correspondence there might arise between these writers from Catholic backgrounds, and the impact faith has on their comprehension of male violence - rape in the Mc Gahern story, and murder in O’Connor’s. The chapter emphasizes what, spiritually and socially, connects and disconnects both authors, and shows how the two stories, diverse in style and approach, but sharing an underlying sense of brutality, illustrate their respective authors’ interest in human inclination for violence and evil.
The lived narrative versus the learned narrative
Authors: MacIntyre Linden
Published: May 2018

John McGahern, in his fiction and memoir, follows an ancient bardic tradition exemplified in our time by the poets Seamus Heaney and Sorley MacLean. This chapter takes a more personal approach to make connections between the author’s childhood in a small place on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, and the early years of John McGahern, Seamus Heaney and Sorley MacLean, a Scottish poet. The chapter examines the author’s own formation as a journalist and novelist – a journey greatly influenced by McGahern and by the strong Irish and Scottish tradition of Breton Island - alongside that of the three writers. It explores the relationship between growing up on an island and a sense of isolation and inferiority that might go with it, and the impact that this kind of life might have had on McGahern’s, Heaney’s and MacSorley’s work and personality.
Afterword
Authors: Kiberd Declan
Published: May 2018

The energy of life is a desire for form – and the forms of art can soothe a pain simply by describing it very well. The aching heart may, as W. B. Yeats said, conceive a changeless work of art, and thus know something of eternal life. But most religions imagine – despite the cliché of angels strumming lyres – that a perfectly attuned being would be silent. ‘One of the consolations of Heaven, if we ever find ourselves there’, said John McGahern, ‘will be that there will be no writers in it. There will be no need to write.’...
Introduction: tackling the urban through ethnography
Authors: Lewis Camilla , Symons Jessica
Published: May 2018

In 2006, a magnificent oak table with fine Indian ink drawings sat in an artist’s studio in Manchester in the north-west of England. Three metres in length, it displayed a relational network diagram of key decision makers in the city. The art piece, called The Thin Veneer of Democracy...
Inclusion without incorporation: re-imagining Manchester through a new politics of environment
Authors: Knox Hannah
Published: May 2018

We know from recent work in urban studies that the role of local government in administering cities has changed significantly in recent years. The provision of local public services has gradually been moving out of local government control, becoming the responsibility of networks of charities, volunteers and private organisations, which now have to work in partnership with local authorities to deliver metropolitan public services. This chapter explores the effects of this shift in urban governance on political practice by exploring ethnographically the experience of governing a city under such changing conditions. The analysis takes as its focus environmental policymaking and approaches this set of practices from an ethnographic and anthropological perspective. Building on this ethnography the chapter illustrates how the work of doing politics in Manchester hinges on a tension between a desire for inclusion in decision-making and a parallel resistance to incorporation into specific political networks and regimes.
Under the surface of the village: public and private negotiations of urban space in Manchester
Authors: Atkins Michael
Published: May 2018

Combining narratives of success and community with imagery and maps characterises and regulates Manchester’s Gay Village as a distinct, bordered, hedonistic and particularly tolerant place. This chapter describes the use of collaboratively produced graphic stories, created using combinations of drawings, text, photographs and found images. These 'ethno-graphics' describe lived experiences of men seeking sex in public and engaging in exchanges of intimacy, money, goods and services that challenge the master narratives of that are openly recognised and spoken about in the village.
Urban futures and competing trajectories for Manchester city centre
Authors: Pieri Elisa
Published: May 2018

This chapter focuses on Manchester city centre to argue that exploring the futures that different stakeholders envisage for the city centre reveals tensions that are otherwise glossed over. Critically engaging with urban futures as they are mobilised by institutional stakeholders, and eliciting those that other actors envisage, highlights whose interests are currently being prioritised and whose are traded off. Engaging in an analysis of these urban futures reveals not only important tensions connected to future developments and imagined uses of the city centre, but also opens up to scrutiny the present experiences and uses of the city centre, and the competing interests that a range of actors currently have.
‘Don’t call the police on me, I won’t call them on you’: self-policing as ethical development in North Manchester
Authors: Smith Katherine
Published: May 2018

This chapter explores self-policing of urban violence in Harpurhey, Manchester. Arguing that ethical decision-making is practiced regularly in the process of policing the actions and behaviours of others. The author addresses the questions of, what does self-policing in the city actually look like? How does one determine what one ‘ought’ to do in the face of illegal or unethical actions in this part of the city? It concludes by arguing that the act of judgment of the behaviours and actions of others, and the assessment of where, when and whether or not to draw upon the services of the state to fulfill the role of policing, suggest that self-policing is not simply an outcome of neoliberal ideologies of self-management, but is an ethical engagement with the quotidian aspects of everyday life on this Manchester social housing estate.
Afterword: the tension in making and realising a city
Authors: Symons Jessica
Published: May 2018

A city is realised through the accumulative efforts of everyone who engages with it. It comes into being and is transformed instantly. Following Deleuze on events, cities are the ‘becoming of becoming’ – forever in their realisation; never realised (Badiou 2007: 38; Deleuze and Guattari 1987...
Introduction
Authors: Malik Sarita , Newton Darrell M.
Published: May 2018

Even in the midst of contemporary political and cultural transformations, Public Service Broadcasting (PSB) remains an important part of everyday practice (public debate, private domestic rituals and market trends), of national order (how the national community is imagined, organised and addressed) and, ultimately, of public interest. This introductory chapter sets the context for the collection, a time when various shifts and conjunctures are impacting on and shaping how ‘race’ and racial difference are being perceived. It outlines how rapidly changing media contexts and environments are coinciding with the kinds of racial representations that are being constructed within PSB.
Reframing the 1950s: race and representation in recent British television
Authors: Burton James
Published: May 2018

This chapter interrogates a small but interesting group of programmes broadcast in the last few years that engage with the domestic realities of London in the 1950s and present a corrective to established notions of the nation at that time. The purpose is to critically examine the representation of race and immigration in these narratives that are ostensibly about gender politics. Since heritage programming has traditionally ‘excluded a significant Black narrative presence,’ even when its aims have been progressive, it is important to map the ways in which these programmes re-present race and construct the immigrant ‘Other.’ All three programmes – The Hour (2011–12), The Bletchley Circle (2012–14) and the phenomenally popular Call the Midwife (2012–) – are primarily created by women, written by women, feature women in most of the lead roles, and forcefully reassert the place of women in British history. Although each show conjures a longing for the era that they represent, their function is framed as something beyond the notion of nostalgia, as being ‘essentially inauthentic, ahistorical, sentimentalizing, regressive and exploitative’ – characterizing much of the acritical debate around heritage screen fictions.
The iconic ghetto on British television: Black representation and Top Boy
Authors: Andrews Kehinde
Published: May 2018

The chapter explores the importance of the concept of the iconic ghetto, examining its discursive importance in reproducing racism. It has particular resonance given that the majority of black people live in concentrated areas of urban centres and therefore how they are represented to the broader society through the media has major consequences. The essay develops a critical discourse analysis of Top Boy to understand how the iconic ghetto is reproduced throughout the show. From this analysis, the basis of the iconic ghetto that was portrayed throughout the show becomes apparent and is captured in the number of themes explored including the proliferation of poverty, crime and violence agency, a lack of female and agency and ultimately blaming the black communities for the problems the show exaggerates.
Anarchists as individuals: a micro-structural analysis
Authors: Williams Dana M.
Published: May 2018

The goal of this chapter is to explore the micro-level characteristics of anarchists. How do anarchists today identify socially and politically? What is the class composition of anarchist movements? In recent decades, some observers have claimed that anarchist movements have changed to focus less on economic issues and are more divorced from the working class. Through the analysis of survey responses, this chapter demonstrates that the union membership of anarchists is related to subjective working-class status, age, residence, economic anarchist ideology, anarchist movement participation, and activist identity. While not conclusive or uncomplicated, these findings call into question the claims that all modern movements (including anarchism) are postmaterialist, and emphasize collective cultural identity to the neglect of economic identity and class.
Anarchists of the world, unite! A meso-structural analysis
Authors: Williams Dana M.
Published: May 2018

The global anarchist movement, while an international phenomenon, is not even distributed through the world. This chapter adopts a meso-structural approach to analyze the variety and distribution of anarchist organizational forms throughout the world. I utilize the Anarchist Yellow Pages (AYP), an international directory of anarchist groupings, which listed over two thousand organizations in 2005. This chapter explores the types of these anarchist organizations and their geographic clustering throughout the world, with special emphasis on 21 countries that had at least 20 such organizations. The concentrations of anarchist organizations found in the AYP suggest that the movement tends to be strongly European-centered. North Americans are disproportionately involved in various media organizations; Spain, France, and Sweden have strong syndicalist tendencies; Italy and Germany tend to have a high percentage of physical spaces like social centers and info shops. Finally, the presence of rights and “democracy” in different countries may, in part, explain where the global anarchist movement is concentrated.
Social capital in anarchist movements
Authors: Williams Dana M.
Published: May 2018

Implicit in the study of social movements is the fact that movements require many people collectively participating together in some fashion to succeed. Social capital—the valuable social connections individuals have with others—is one way of approximating people's relationships to each other. Movements both require social capital in order to form and succeed, but movements also create social capital while organizing. This chapter explores the ideas from major social capital theorists, including James Coleman, Pierre Bourdieu, and Robert Putnam, and considers the value of social capital (which is infrequently utilized in movement analysis) for anarchist movements. Important attributes of social capital, such as trust, information channels, norms, and others receive particular focus. A closer inspection suggests that the dense networks of anarchist association serve as a bulwark against state repression, but also alienates the movement from wider audiences, unless efforts are not made to popularize discursive frames and organizing methods. The World Values Survey is used to explore the extent to which anarchist-inclined people—who trust in others, but lack confidence in government—throughout the world are more apt to protest and advocate revolution.
Introduction: once more, with feeling
Authors: Mussell Simon
Published: May 2018

The introduction sets out the book’s aims and objectives in relation to the predominant legacies of political philosophy. The author shows how rationalist principles have formed the backbone of Western philosophical thought, invariably in opposition to affect, emotion, feeling, and passion, since the latter are seen to be detrimental to or obstructive of the procedural functionality of reason. In contrast to this, taking Dialectic of Enlightenment as a starting point, it is suggested that early critical theory provides an important corrective to the excesses of formalized, rationalist, and anti-emotional modes of argumentation. The point is that reason in and of itself is not sufficient as a foundation for political theory.
Feeling blue: melancholic dispositions and conscious unhappiness
Authors: Mussell Simon
Published: May 2018

Chapter 2 begins by looking at how medical and cultural histories of melancholy and unhappiness have traditionally defined and diagnosed such feelings as negative, unhealthy, and undesirable, even while recognizing their potentially enabling features. Freud’s essay of 1917 is seen to mark a definitive moment when melancholia becomes fully pathologized. In response to this, the chapter turns to the work of Walter Benjamin, who attempts to mine new readings of melancholic experience (and criticism) that show the latter to be profoundly social, political, and productive. This places his work at odds with the prevailing consensus, which characterizes melancholia as a personal psychological failing that is stifling, passive, and anti-social. The chapter closes with a section on ‘conscious unhappiness’. Revisiting Theodor Adorno’s work, this section affirms the importance and interconnectedness of affective and political refusal. Rather than seeking to avoid or relieve dysphoric feelings through psychic adjustment, conscious unhappiness amplifies unmet needs, giving voice to the suffering that arises from a social world in need of wholesale transformation. As part of its revolutionary critique of capitalist social relations, critical theory refuses to privatize the notion of happiness and in so doing aligns itself with the (negative) truth-content of unhappiness – the bad that cannot be made good.
A feeling for things: objects, affects, mimesis
Authors: Mussell Simon
Published: May 2018

Chapter 3 looks at how an affective politics underpins critical theory’s engagement with the world of objects. The chapter begins by outlining the recent upsurge in theoretical writing on objects/things, especially within the much-hyped field of ‘object-oriented ontology’ or ‘speculative realism’. After drawing attention to the major social and political deficiencies of these contemporary approaches to objects, the chapter offers an account of early critical theory that draws out a more philosophically viable and socio-politically engaged orientation toward the object world. To make the case, the author recovers elements of Siegfried Kracauer’s materialist film theory, before exploring two complementary concepts from Adorno’s work, namely, the preponderance of the object, and mimesis. Offering a staunch critique of Habermas’s rejection of mimesis, the chapter considers critical theory’s emphasis on a political and affective aesthetics as playing a crucial part in how one conceptualizes and experiences objects. As a result, a key distinction is drawn between today’s avowedly post-critical, non-humanist ontologists on one side, and the critical proto-humanism that motivates the early Frankfurt School on the other.
Expectant emotion and the politics of hope
Authors: Mussell Simon
Published: May 2018

Chapter 4 explores the affective politics of hope. It begins by surveying the ways in which historical events and their narrativization have (re)produced certain ideological positions and affective dispositions. The post-Cold War triumphalism of many on the right, accompanied by claims of the ‘end of history’, are seen to have created a sense of fearlessness, righteousness, and unfettered optimism. At the same time, much of the left have internalized the position of honourable defeat, licking its political wounds, and bemoaning the insurmountable nature of capital as vehemently as any of the latter’s most faithful handmaidens. The end of history is also said to signal the end of utopia, as all speculation as to possible alternatives to capitalism is condemned as unrealistic, idealistic, and unreasonable. The author notes how political realism has become the dominant paradigm, banishing utopian impulses and diminishing political hopes to the most myopic of visions. After plotting the familiar narrative of decline, and showing how an affective structure (and affecting narrative) can constrain a certain brand of politics while enabling others to flourish, the remainder of the chapter analyses the critical potential of hope as a political affect, especially as expressed in the work of Baruch Spinoza and Ernst Bloch.
Introduction: new histories of Labour and the left in the 1980s
Authors: Davis Jonathan , McWilliam Rohan
Published: May 2018

In 1980, notwithstanding the defeat of the Labour government the year before, the political left in its various forms remained a major presence in British life. Local government, the media, trade unions, pressure groups, the arts and academia: all were often dominated by left-of-centre voices that created networks of opposition to the recently elected Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher. Since the reforming Labour government of 1945, the liberal left had some reason to believe that it had shaped the orthodoxies of modern Britain with the welfare state, Keynesian economic policy and the liberal reforms that abolished censorship and challenged gender and racial discrimination. It was still possible, in 1980, for some to believe that a socialist future beckoned....
Retrieving or re-imagining the past? The case of ‘Old Labour’, 1979–94
Authors: Shaw Eric
Published: May 2018

This chapter explores the concept of ‘Old Labour’. It contends that rather than affording a description of Labour’s ideology, programme and character prior to Tony Blair’s election as leader in 1994, it constituted a particular politically-driven representation of the party’s past and one which often corresponded poorly to the historical record. It was essentially a rhetorical device coined by the circle around Tony Blair designed both to discredit their opponents and to highlight the novelty and modernity of their ‘New Labour’ project. In this it achieved a large measure of success to the extent that, in the words of the Independent, the language of ‘Old Labour’ became ‘an effortless part of our vocabulary’ (22 July 1995), in this way advancing New Labour’s strategic purposes.
The international context: end of an era
Authors: Callaghan John
Published: May 2018

A pattern was visible across Western Europe in the 1980s; the policies and objectives favoured by the Left in the 1970s – a list which often included industrial democracy, greater economic equality, hostility to NATO and the European Economic Community as well as plans for more state ownership and economic planning – were being renounced. By the middle of the decade the word ‘globalisation’ had entered business literature. The theories associated with it in the 1990s had already begun to emerge – the diminished potency of states in national economic management, the closer integration of the world economy, the greater mobility of capital, the greater power of anonymous market forces, the impact of cheaper and faster communications, the growing strength of forces of convergence, and the redundancy of old socialist ideas. This chapter examines how these international developments were interpreted by the Left in Britain.
Introduction
Authors: Sykes Rachel
Published: May 2018

Marilynne Robinson’s epistolary novel Gilead (2004) opens in a moment of quiet. The text is a letter from the elderly Reverend John Ames to his six-year-old son, Robby, for whom Ames is writing a personal history and ‘begats’.1 Robinson’s prose slows when Ames’ final illness develops and it pauses when he pauses. Yet despite the primacy of the Reverend’s voice, the novel begins with Ames’ silence. ‘You reached up’, he writes at the end of the first page, addressing the young son sitting on his lap, ‘and put your fingers on my lips and gave me that look […] a kind of furious pride, very passionate and stern’ (...
‘9/11’ and the noise of contemporary fiction
Authors: Sykes Rachel
Published: May 2018

This chapter engages with the problem of ‘event’ as a noisy narrative device and discusses the opposition of quiet texts to narratives written in the aftermath of 11 September 2001, an event that heralded to many the beginning of a noisy century. Exploring the dynamic between loud and quiet modes of writing, this chapter argues that noise is often favoured in situations that seem to be unprecedented and that the residual association of quiet with silence is, then, an important factor in the former’s continued association with inaction.
‘The merits of Brother Worth’
Authors: Saunders Jack
Published: May 2018

Between 1968 and 1975, members of the Trotskyist Socialist Labour League, the International Socialists and the Militant Tendency held senior positions in factory union organisations at British Leyland factories in Birmingham, Solihull, and at Chrysler in Linwood and Coventry. This chapter consists of a detailed study of shop steward documents at Chrysler's engine factory in Stoke Aldermoor (Coventry), where the IS had a few dozen members, including Deputy Works Convenor John Worth. It looks at how politics affected IS members’ participation in everyday workplace life. Crucially, rather than looking at their contribution to shop-floor activism as an attempt to “import” ideas from outside the factory, I will show how radical militants were often politicised in ways that reflected feelings with wider resonance amongst their co-workers. The presence of an IS fraction within the plant contributed to the changing politics and social practices of the wider trade union movement within the factory, but was ultimately constrained by the constraints of working solely within the issues which the workforce defined as legitimately “industrial”.
Making miners militant?
Authors: Buckley Sheryl Bernadette
Published: May 2018

The Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) was a visible presence across many significant trade unions in the post-war period, largely due to its industrial strategy. The party envisaged that politicising the rank and file of important trade unions and also capturing the leadership of these unions would allow it to influence the Labour Party, as these unions held a significant number of votes at Labour's annual conference. This chapter analyses the success of this strategy in the National Union of Mineworkers, a union that became increasingly emblematic of the difficulties trade unions faced in the late twentieth century, particularly obvious through its 1984 strike. This chapter considers the relationship between Communists in the party and those in the union, exploring the extent to which the party's strategy translated into the union in practice, and understanding if there was any conflict between these two groups who occupied distinctly different roles. Unpicking the concept of 'wage militancy', the way through which the party felt politicisation of the union rank and file would best be achieved, the chapter frames this discussion within the broader context of the increasingly divided CPGB, the political and economic policies of Labour and Conservative governments, and the union's national strikes.
Networks of solidarity
Authors: Kelliher Diarmaid
Published: May 2018

Alongside the 1984-5 British miners’ strike developed a large and diverse support campaign. This chapter focuses on the role of London’s radical left in that movement, emphasising how activists constructed solidarity networks between the coalfields and the capital. Alongside the activity of members of the Communist Party and Trotskyist groups, it discusses feminist, black, and lesbian and gay support groups, highlighting how the miners’ industrial struggle resonated and was politicised in diverse ways. The chapter shows how radical left Labour members and local councils sought to blur the distinction between institutional and extra-parliamentary activism through their support for the strike. This complex support movement therefore challenged the boundaries of the radical left and class politics, reflecting a broader period of flux and realignment
The point is to change it
Authors: Fitzpatrick Michael
Published: May 2018

Like most organisations of the far left in Britain in the years after 1968, the RCP was small in size and marginal in influence. Starting out with only a few dozen supporters in the mid-1970s, membership peaked at around 200 before its demise in the mid-1990s. Though it emerged out of the left, in many ways it was not of the left and it developed in a struggle against it. In contrast with the spirit of amenable coexistence that prevailed among other factions, the RCP maintained a high level of polemical engagement with the left. Though other far left groups discreetly accepted the RCP’s characterisation of the official labour movement as ‘reformist’, the RCP pointed out that in practice these groups adapted to the reformism of the official movement, reinforcing rather than loosening its grip on militants and activists. The RCP aimed to promote an independent anti-capitalist outlook, thereby to give voice and effect to the interests of the working class and humanity as a whole. It engaged in workplace and trade union struggles and campaigns for women’s rights, and against racism and imperialism, seeking to develop and sustain a creative balance between activities around issues of exploitation and those of oppression.
Understanding the formation of the Communist Party of Britain
Authors: Parker Lawrence
Published: May 2018

This article deals with the foundation of the Communist Party of Britain (CPB), a 1988 split from the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), which was overseen by a group around Tony Chater, whom had earlier been involved with splitting the Morning Star newspaper away from the CPGB. The CPB was unsuccessful in uniting its preferred constituency, party trade unionists; and appears to have alienated many CPGB oppositionists due to its tactics and agitation for a split. It did manage to group together wider layers of people who had been oppositionists in the old CPGB as the 1990s wore on but, by the middle of the decade, this process had pushed initial leadership figures such as Mike Hicks, Mary Rosser and others into hostility towards those who were perceived to have been oppositional rivals in the 1980s. Thus, the divisions in the CPGB at the foundation of the CPB cast a long political shadow.
The hippie as tourist
Authors: Gemie Sharif , Ireland Brian
Published: May 2018

The chapter starts by considering some travel films produced by travellers: it notes how similar these travellers look to ordinary tourists. Differences between tourists and travellers are then considered: autonomy and authenticity seem to be the vital distinctions. By the 1970s, the majority of hippy trail travellers went to the East by coach: were they just tourists? Were the independent travellers, who went by car, train and by hitch-hiking so different? Certainly, the independent travellers frequently scorned the coach-passengers as tourists. We argue that the differences between independent travellers and coach-passengers was not as great as many assumed, and that—while there were some important similarities between travellers and tourists—the hippy trail travellers did create a distinctive form of travel of their own.
Representing the trail: Hideous Kinky and beyond
Authors: Gemie Sharif , Ireland Brian
Published: May 2018

This chapter surveys and analyses the various forms of representation of the hippy trail. It begins by considering some problems in the historical analysis of the trail. It then considers the film travelogues produced by the travellers themselves. Next, the weaknesses of Hollywood’s treatment of the trail are considered. Fictional treatments of the trail are analysed, noting the distinction between novels written by outside observers and novel written by travellers themselves. Finally, non-fictional, autobiographical accounts: a distinction is drawn between works published by commercial publishers, and those self-published by the travellers themselves. It is argued that this latter strand provides the fullest form of information about the trail.
‘Death be not proud’: drama’s solace
Authors: Bergeron David M.
Published: May 2018

The chapter begins with the official betrothal of Elizabeth and Frederick on 27 December. At last the period of mourning had ended, and the court could proceed with plans for the wedding. The nineteen plays, presented at court from Christmas to February, constitute a kind of ‘antidote’ or ‘solace’ to the grief that had gripped the court and nation. These performances create a bridge, a translation, that leads away from sorrow to the joy of Elizabeth’s wedding. The chapter discusses all the plays performed, including works by Dekker, Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Jonson. Shakespeare’s plays range across all dramatic genres. The King’s Men, Shakespeare’s acting company under the patronage of King James, performed most of the plays at court in this season.
Divorce, wedding, and murder
Authors: Bergeron David M.
Published: May 2018

This chapter focuses mainly on the Robert Carr-Frances Howard relationship, her divorce from the Earl of Essex, and subsequent marriage to Carr in an elaborate wedding on 26 December. This marriage solidified the political power of the Howard family. For the wedding, Thomas Campion wrote the first masque, and Jonson wrote two masques. The celebration extended into the City of London in early January with a procession to the Merchant Taylors’ Hall, which included a play, a banquet, a masque by Thomas Middleton, and other entertainments. On 6 January, the court witnessed the performance of Masque of Flowers, financed by Francis Bacon. Only Frances Howard and possibly Carr knew that Thomas Overbury, Carr’s friend, had been murdered in the Tower at her instigation. Not until 1615 did others learn of this plot.