Feminism, culture and the intellectual process.

This submission to the University of London for a PhD by publication is\ud composed of ten articles published in journals and edited collections\ud between 1980 and 1990. The work covers a wide span chronologically and\ud thematically and for the purpose of this presentation has been divided\ud into four sections. The articles in Section I examine the history and\ud implications of key debates within feminism and were published between 1980\ud and 1983. An additional piece of the same period, which covers some of the\ud same ground but was written and published in Spanish, is included in the\ud Appendix. The articles in Section II were published between 1982 and 1984\ud and focus on gender in youth work and schooling. The first piece is an\ud ethnographic study of young women in north London who attended a girls\ud project. The second is a historical analysis of gender difference in youth\ud service provision and the third explores the symbolic meaning of the urban\ud and the domestic in the education of girls. Section III contains two\ud pieces on child sexual abuse. The first, published in 1984, looks at\ud questions of power and policy in the context of a school; the second,\ud published four years later, focuses on the politics of representation. The\ud three articles in Section IV, published since 1987, confirm this movement\ud into cultural analysis and investigate theorisations of consumerism,\ud advertising and identity. The ten articles are linked to each other by the\ud introduction which traces the historical, biographical and conceptual\ud context in which the work was produced and provides a framework in which\ud the intellectual process itself becomes an object of study. The commentary,\ud which explores in greater detail aspects of the production and reception of\ud each piece and highlights key themes, provides an additional connecting\ud thread

Garotas de loja, história social e teoria social [Shop Girls, Social History and Social Theory]

Shop workers, most of them women, have made up a significant proportion of Britain’s labour force since the 1850s but we still know relatively little about their history. This article argues that there has been a systematic neglect of one of the largest sectors of female employment by historians and investigates why this might be. It suggests that this neglect is connected to framings of work that have overlooked the service sector as a whole as well as to a continuing unease with the consumer society’s transformation of social life. One element of that transformation was the rise of new forms of aesthetic, emotional and sexualised labour. Certain kinds of ‘shop girls’ embodied these in spectacular fashion. As a result, they became enduring icons of mass consumption, simultaneously dismissed as passive cultural dupes or punished as powerful agents of cultural destruction. This article interweaves the social history of everyday shop workers with shifting representations of the ‘shop girl’, from Victorian music hall parodies, through modernist social theory, to the bizarre bombing of the Biba boutique in London by the Angry Brigade on May Day 1971. It concludes that progressive historians have much to gain by reclaiming these workers and the service economy that they helped create

‘1968’ and the Women’s Liberation Movement in Britain

This is the contribution "‘1968’ and the Women’s Liberation Movement in Britain" to Moving the Social 64 (2020)

Effects of methylphenidate on the ERP amplitude in youth with ADHD: A double-blind placebo-controlled cross-over EEG study.

Methylphenidate (MPH) is a first line drug for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), yet the neuronal mechanisms underlying the condition and the treatment are still not fully understood. Previous EEG studies on the effect of MPH in ADHD found changes in evoked response potential (ERP) components that were inconsistent between studies. These inconsistencies highlight the need for a well-designed study which includes multiple baseline sessions and controls for possible fatigue, learning effects and between-days variability. To this end, we employ a double-blind placebo-controlled cross-over study and explore the effect of MPH on the ERP response of subjects with ADHD during a Go/No-Go cognitive task. Our ERP analysis revealed significant differences in ADHD subjects between the placebo and MPH conditions in the frontal-parietal region at 250ms-400ms post stimulus (P3). Additionally, a decrease in the late 650ms-800ms ERP component (LC) is observed in frontal electrodes of ADHD subjects compared to controls. The standard deviation of response time of ADHD subjects was significantly smaller in the MPH condition compared to placebo and correlated with the increased P3 ERP response in the frontoparietal electrodes. We suggest that mental fatigue plays a role in the decrease of the P3 response in the placebo condition compared to pre-placebo, a phenomenon that is significant in ADHD subjects but not in controls, and which is interestingly rectified by MPH