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

Support for UNRWA's survival

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) provides life-saving humanitarian aid for 5·4 million Palestine refugees now entering their eighth decade of statelessness and conflict. About a third of Palestine refugees still live in 58 recognised camps. UNRWA operates 702 schools and 144 health centres, some of which are affected by the ongoing humanitarian disasters in Syria and the Gaza Strip. It has dramatically reduced the prevalence of infectious diseases, mortality, and illiteracy. Its social services include rebuilding infrastructure and homes that have been destroyed by conflict and providing cash assistance and micro-finance loans for Palestinians whose rights are curtailed and who are denied the right of return to their homeland

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

Notes on Cultural Studies, History and Cosmopolitanism in UK

This paper briefly reviews aspects of the historical relationship between cultural studies and history in the UK university context and illustrates the specificity of cultural history approaches by drawing on the author's own work on cosmopolitanism

‘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)