The self and self-help: women pursuing autonomy in post-war Britain

In the history of post-war womanhood in Britain, women's self-help organisations are credited with little significance save for ‘helping mothers to do their work more happily’. This paper suggests that the do-it-yourself impetus of the 1960s and 1970s should be regarded as integral to understanding how millions of women negotiated a route towards personal growth and autonomy. Organisations like the National Housewives’ Register, the National Childbirth Trust and the Pre-School Playgroups Association emerged from the grass roots in response to the conundrum faced by women who experienced dissatisfaction and frustration in their domestic role. I argue that these organisations offered thousands of women the opportunity for self-development, self-confidence and independence and that far from being insufficiently critical of dominant models of care, women's self-help operating at the level of the everyday was to be one of the foundations of what would become, by the 1970s, the widespread feminist transformation of women's lives

Dr Barnardo's Homes (Dr Barnardo's/Barnardo's Scotland) 1930s-1990s: Report for the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry

No abstract available

Executive Summary: Quarrier's, Aberlour and Barnardo's Reports: Report for the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry

No abstract available

Dr Barnardo's Homes (Dr Barnardo's/Barnardo's Scotland) 1930s-1990s: Report for the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry

No abstract available

Listening to people speak: the value of oral histories of working people

No abstract available

Heroes of their own life stories: narrating the female self in the feminist age

This article proposes a triple legacy of the expressive culture of the 1960s and 70s. Late twentieth century feminism, discourses of gender equality and the advent of modern confessional culture liberated women’s women’s voices, producing self-realising narratives and a shift in women’s facility to produce authentic ‘reflexive projects of the self’. Drawing on oral history interviews with women born in the 1940s in the United Kingdom, Australia and North America, a new concept for a distinct genre of women’s oral history narrative is advanced– the feminography – in which we hear women owning their voices and the stories those voices tell

Planning for play: seventy years of ineffective public policy? The example of Glasgow, Scotland

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

'People and their homes rather than housing in the usual sense'? Locating the tenant's voice in Homes in High Flats

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

Aspiration, Agency, and the Production of New Selves in a Scottish New Town, c.1947–c.2016

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

Functional Analysis of Cytosolic Hsp70 Nucleotide Exchange Factor Networks in Yeast

The Hsp70 class of molecular chaperones play critical roles in protein homeostasis via an ATP-dependent folding cycle. Cytosolic Hsp70s in the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Ssa and Ssb, interact with up to three distinct nucleotide exchange factors (NEFs) homologous to human counterparts; Sse1/Sse2/HSP110, Fes1/HspBP1, and Snl1/Bag1. In an effort to understand the differential functional contributions of the cytosolic NEFs to protein homeostasis (“proteostasis”), I carried out comparative genetic, biochemical and cell biological analyses. For these studies, I developed protocols to monitor protein disaggregation and reactivation in a near real-time coupled assay that revealed the importance of aggregate dynamics in the solubilization of proteins for their refolding. This coupled experimental approach, represents an important step toward developing tools necessary to monitor in vivo mechanisms of proteostasis. This work determined that the Hsp110, Sse1, is the primary NEF contributing to most Hsp70 functions and also uncovered a unique role for Fes1 in Ssa-mediated regulation of the cytosolic heat shock response, while revealing no significant contributions from Snl1 and Sse2. These findings suggest that NEFs do have overlapping functions, but their distinct associations with the Hsp70s as well as unique structural components could contribute to differential roles in proteostasis. Additionally, this study uncovered that relative levels of Snl1 and Sse1 are important for optimal growth. To probe this relationship, I exploited the Snl1 overexpression toxicity phenotype exhibited in the absence of Sse1 to examine which unique characteristics of Snl1 are important for its function. I discovered that Snl1 localization to the ER membrane is required for toxicity and that Sse1-mediated alleviation of this phenotype is Ssb-dependent. These results demonstrate a network of interactions that supports a hypothesis where Snl1 plays a role in translation regulation. This investigation was conducted to gain a better understanding of NEF roles within the Hsp70 chaperone network. Understanding these dynamics is critical to obtain successful treatments that can reverse the debilitating effects of neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases. Pharmacological targeting of molecular chaperones and their co-factors, such as the NEFs, is an attractive therapeutic goal that may contribute to improving human health, most notably in the aging population