Waste and everyday environmentalism in modern Britain

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from the publisher via the DOI in this recordFollowing recent work among social historians and geographers on the concept of ‘everyday life’, I argue that current historical uses of the term are problematic, at least for environmental historians, in that they lack a sufficiently disciplined or coherent conceptual basis. Henri Lefebvre’s approach to the everyday offers one productive way of rethinking the significance of the environment for social history. Through an empirical study of the politics of urban waste disposal in twentieth-century Britain, I deploy some of the key categories of Lefebvre’s ‘critique of everyday life’ to rethinking the social history of environmentalism. In particular, I seek to explore what Alex Loftus has called an ‘everyday environmentalism’. I argue that the concept of ‘everyday environmentalism’, with its attention to dialectics, antinomy and contradiction, can transform the ways in which we study the social history of the human relation to nature, which has too often been viewed through reified notions of environmental change. The paper concludes that the history of environmental politics should focus far more on environmentalism as a concrete social phenomenon emerging from lived experience.Some of the research for this article was supported by the Wellcome Trust under Grant 091819/Z/10/Z

English - the torch of life: reflections on the Newbolt Report from an ITE perspective

This article reflects on how English as a school subject was positioned in the seminal paper “The Teaching of English in England”, otherwise known as The Newbolt Report, and its relationship with current government policy in England. Nearly a century after the Report’s publication, questions regarding the content and purpose of English as a subject that arise from Newbolt are used as a lens to consider the challenges presented in the initial training year to Secondary English teachers