Experiences of Illegitimacy in England, 1660-1834

This thesis examines attitudes towards individuals who were born illegitimate in England between the Restoration in 1660 and the New Poor Law of 1834. It explores the impact of illegitimacy on individuals' experiences of family and social life, marriage and occupational opportunities, and sense of identity. This thesis demonstrates that illegitimacy did have a negative impact, but that this was not absolute. The stigma of illegitimacy operated along a spectrum, varying according to the type of parental relationship, the child's gender and, most importantly, the family's socio-economic status. Socio-economic status became more significant as an arbiter of attitudes towards the end of the period. This project uses a range of qualitative evidence - correspondence, life-writing, poor law records, novels, legal and religious tracts, and newspapers - to examine the impact of illegitimacy across the entire life-cycle, moving away from previous historiographical emphasis on unmarried parenthood, birth and infancy. This approach adds nuance to a field dominated by poor law and Foundling Hospital evidence, and prioritises material written by illegitimate individuals themselves. This thesis also has resonance for historical understanding of wider aspects of long-eighteenth-century society, such as the nature of parenthood, family, gender, or emotion, and the operation of systems of classification and 'othering'. This thesis demonstrates that definitions of parenthood and family were flexible enough to include illegitimate relationships. The effect of illegitimacy on marital and occupational opportunities indicates how systems of patronage and familial alliance operated in this period, as well as the importance of inheritance, birth or familial connection as measures of social status. Finally, it questions the assumption that condemnation of illicit sex led to community exclusion of the illegitimate child, and calls for more nuanced understandings of how historians measure and define shame and stigma

Feeding the middle classes :taste, classed identity and domestic food practices

PhD ThesisThis thesis develops the insight that ‘good’ taste is associated with middle-class lifestyles (Bourdieu 2010 [1984]) by examining the classed links between food and the performance of identities. I focus on middle-class food practices to explore social meanings relating to the ways in which food choices reproduce class distinction. Engaging in a critical dialogue with Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, capital, practice, and field, I trace the complex ways in which class and identity are connected to everyday practices of domestic food consumption and provisioning. Based on research with twenty-seven participants in the North East of England, I draw on data generated from mixed methods: semi-structured interviews, food biographies, participant photographs, and exploration of participant homes. In doing so, I produce original empirical findings which extend and complicate sociological debates about class. A central finding is that food practices are played out through classed ideas about individuality, diversity, and authenticity. The processes by which food comes to be domesticated emerged as significant: worthy of continual investment and active personal involvement. This entailed marking boundaries around the individuated self, especially in relation to, and working against, mass consumption. However, probing the minutiae of practices in the intimate space of the home highlighted that while distinction was enacted through social distance from the imagined mass consumer, participants collectively reproduced middle-class food choices and practices. They attached value to similar foods and modes of provisioning and displayed a strategic disposition to accrue and reproduce shared food knowledges. Few studies have explored the subtle ways in which middle-class domestic food practices act as classed social markers. In addressing this gap, I offer a new understanding of a hitherto undertheorized dimension of middle-class reproduction. Through my specific focus on middle-class participants and the middle-class habitus, these findings make visible the classed relationships around valued food practices, which otherwise are naturalised as intrinsically legitimate. By marking themselves as knowledgeable and active consumers, participant narratives reproduce a rhetoric of individual choice which can pathologise others as actively making the wrong food decisions. The findings help problematize these narratives by offering a nuanced critique of the social distinctions participants both rely on and reproduce

Content to consider: Exploring gender bias in colonial collections

[still need] “Truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are.” Friedrich Nietzsche, “On truth and lie in an extra-moral sense” (Nietzsche, 46) Digitisation of cultural heritage collections in and by libraries, archives and museums is never a neutral process. The decisions we make today about what to digitise from our collections are inextricably influenced by past decisions made about which items should even be included in our collections. These selection processes reflect and perpetuate the worldviews of those people making these decisions as well, as power balances, or imbalances, prevalent at that time. In much of Africa, and elsewhere, European colonialism exerted a profound influence over collecting institutions and continues to affect how they operate today. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that the selection process and decisions made by institutions were not inevitable and that, very often, collections are imbued with various biases. If we are to avoid replicating and reinforcing these normalised biases, we must first be aware of how and why value judgements were made. Using gender imbalance in collections as an example, I suggest that exposing and interrogating biases during the planning stage of a digitisation project can be a very rewarding process that not only reveals “gaps” in a collection, but creates spaces for other voices to be heard

God bring you safely to our arms again : Song

https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/mmb-vp/5511/thumbnail.jp

Men’s health – the impact of stroke

Stroke is a leading cause of adult death and the most common cause of complex disability in the UK. This article discusses the incidence and impact of stroke, focusing on a range of issues from a male perspective, including stroke prevention, psychological needs, sexuality and return to work. There are some gender differences in modifiable risk factors for stroke, and women have better knowledge of stroke symptomatology. For men, the development of post-stroke depression is associated with greater physical disability. (c) Sherborne Gibbs Limite

Does funded research reflect the priorities of people living with type 1 diabetes? A secondary analysis of research questions

© Article author(s) (or their employer(s) unless otherwise stated in the text of the article) 2017. Objectives This study explored the divergence and convergence between funded research about type 1 diabetes and the research agenda of people living with the condition and their carers. Design, method, setting A secondary analysis was undertaken of existing data from two UK organisations who regularly work with patients and carers to identify research priorities. The research ideas of people with diabetes were identified in two ways: in 15 research question generation workshops involving approximately 100 patients and carers, and in a James Lind Alliance Type 1 Diabetes Priority Setting Partnership with approximately 580 patients, carers and clinicians (clinician question submissions were excluded from analysis). A total of 859 individual research questions were collected from patients and carers. Diabetes research funding activity was identified through extensive online searches which provided a total of 172 relevant research projects for analysis. Results The data were thematically analysed and areas of priority for research identified and compared between the patient and funded research agendas. The overall finding of this study is that there is substantial convergence between the two research agendas, alongside some important areas of divergence. The key areas of divergence were found in care delivery, injection issues, psychosocial impacts and women's health. We also demonstrate how an apparently convergent priority can host significant differences in emphasis between patientgenerated and funded research agendas. Conclusions We offer a comparison of a funded research agenda with one that has been derived directly from people with type 1 diabetes without initial framing by researchers. This provided a rare opportunity to explore the viewpoints of the end-users of research and compare them to realised research as determined by researchers and research organisations

CHARTING THE CHOPPY WATERS: NAVIGATING MARITIME DISPUTES IN THE SOUTH CHINA SEA

In January of 2022, the United States Department of State concluded in their Limits in the Seas study that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has asserted unlawful maritime claims in the majority of the South China Sea.1 n Limits in the Seas, the United States called on the PRC once again to “conform its maritime claims to international law and to cease its unlawful and coercive activities in the South China Sea.”2 While the legal basis for China’s claims is hotly contested, this article seeks to navigate such unlawful and coercive activities in the region by detailing the history, the claims, and the environmental impacts of the dispute, particularly on marine life and the livelihoods of people who depend on the South China Sea for their survival. Additionally, the article analyzes military conflicts in the region and examines a few of the treaties that have resulted from the decades of disputes. Overall, this article provides a comprehensive analysis of the region, highlighting the importance of resolving the dispute in a way that protects the rights of each of the claimants and preserves the fragile marine ecosystem in the region

Sociophonetic Variation and Change in a Post-Industrial, South Yorkshire Speech Community

This thesis presents an analysis of the relationship between phonological variation and perceptions of local identity in the dialect of Royston, an ex-mining community located on the border between the Metropolitan Borough of Barnsley in South Yorkshire, and the Metropolitan District of Wakefield in West Yorkshire. Previous studies of Yorkshire varieties (cf. Petyt 1985; Stoddart et al. 1999, Haddican et al. 2013) have established that long monophthongal forms of FACE and GOAT constitute a pan-Yorkshire phonological norm. Furthermore, there is also evidence to suggest that long monophthongal FACE and GOAT production represents a ‘principal northern shibboleth’ (Haddican et al. 2013: 373). However, metalinguistic commentary surrounding the dialect of Royston (cf. Burland 2017) claims that speakers in the township produce distinctive diphthongal variants of both FACE and GOAT (see Chapter 8, Section 8.3.4). This study analyses FACE and GOAT data from wordlist recordings collected from Royston, Barnsley and Wakefield speakers. Auditory and acoustic analysis supports metalinguistic claims providing evidence of dominant diphthongal Royston forms which differ from the majority monophthongal Barnsley and Wakefield variants, and from pan-Yorkshire monophthongal FACE and GOAT norms. The Royston wordlist data is then considered alongside ideological commentary, collected from ethnographic interviews with older and younger Royston speakers, in order to evaluate the social meanings which underpin this regionally distinctive FACE and GOAT production. The data is interpreted using dialect contact and language ideology frameworks, and the results question the inevitability of mutual convergence in situations of dialect contact by demonstrating how, and why, three successive generations of Royston speakers have resisted the widespread diffusion of pan-regional phonological norms