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Mile End Institute

Rethinking Contemporary British Political History

7 September 2015

Time: 10:00am
Venue: Mile End Campus, Queen Mary University of London

Panel 1 - Ideas and the Left

Chair and Commentator: Michael Kenny (QMUL)

Phil Child (Exeter) “Community spirit is one of the conditions of democracy”: Labour, community sociology and housing policy 1945-70

Christopher Hill (Birmingham): Histories of the New Left and New Left Historiography: A Reappraisal

Alex Campsie (Cambridge): The New Left, the “New Times” and the politics of social change in late twentieth-century Britain

Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite (UCL): The Labour Party, social change, gender and class, 1978-1997

 

Panel 2: Non-Governmental Activism and the State

Chair and Commentator: Nicholas Crowson (Birmingham)

Andrew Jones (Birmingham): Governing Disasters: Humanitarian NGOs and the State in Britain, 1968-85

Jennifer Crane (Warwick): 'Survivors . . . must be at the heart of this process': Small voluntary organisations and late twentieth-century policy-making

Ruth Davidson (KCL): The Campaign for Child Benefit: The Child Poverty Action Group, 1965-2015

 

Panel 3: The Politics of Race

Chair and Commentator: David Feldman (Birkbeck)

Matthew Francis (Birmingham) ‘Labour Says He’s Black, Tories Say He’s British’?: BAME Voters and Party Politics since 1945

Rob Waters (QMUL and Birkbeck) “History is moving very fast these days”: the temporalities of black radical politics in the long 1970s

 

Panel 4: Britain, Empire and the World

Chair and Commentator: Saul Dubow (QMUL)

Charlotte Riley (Southampton): A moral crusade or nothing: The Labour Party and Overseas Aid and Development

Poppy Cullen (Durham): ‘We are monitoring carefully the activities of other Whitehall Departments’: British Post-Colonial Foreign Policy towards Kenya

 

Panel 5: Organised Interests, Consensus and the State

Chair and Commentator: Pat Thane (KCL)

Peter Sloman (Cambridge): Beveridge’s rival: Juliet Rhys-Williams’ campaign for basic income, 1942-55, and the politics of the post-war settlement

Paul Sims (QMUL): ‘Compensation for calamity’: National Parks and the question of consensus in post-war British politics

Aled Davies (Bristol): The City of London and the Politics of ‘Invisibles’, 1957-1979

Amy Edwards (Birmingham): ‘Manufacturing Capitalists’: The Wider Share Ownership Council and the problem of Popular Capitalism, 1958-1992

Panel 6: Britain and Europe

Chair and Commentator: James Ellison (QMUL)

Matthew Broad (Reading): Anglo-Danish relations and the making of Labour European policy, 1958–72

Mathias Haeussler (Cambridge): Awkward Partners? Helmut Schmidt and Anglo-German Relations, 1974-82

 

Panel 7: Protest, Activism and the Politics of Solidarity

Chair and commentator: Lucy Robinson (Sussex)

Jodi Burkett (Portsmouth): Revolutionary vanguard or agent provocateur?: Students and the Far Left on English University campuses c.1970-1990

Chris Moores (Birmingham): Solidarity for Chile, New Social Movements and the Evolution of Human Rights in the UK

Diarmaid Kelliher (Glasgow): Cultures of solidarity: London and the 1984-5 miners' strike

 

Panel 7: Feminism and the Politics of Gender

Chair and Commentator: Lucy Delap (Cambridge)

Natalie Thomlinson (Wolverhampton): Popular discourses of feminism and gender equality in Britain after 1945

Sarah Crook (QMUL): Feeling Liberation: Feminism’s ‘Second Wave’ and the Political Nature of Emotional Experience

 

Panel 8: Political Language

Chair and Commentator: Jon Lawrence (Cambridge)

Ettore Costa (La Sapienza, Rome): Labourism and the English language: measuring the peculiarity and influence of the language of the Labour Party with computational linguistic analysis, 1947-1956

James Freeman (Bristol): Quantitative Rhetorical Cultures: A route to reintegrating British Political History

Emily Robinson (Sussex): From Progressive Rock to the Progressive Alliance: exploring political and cultural language in post-war Britain

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