Skidding (November 26, 1931)

Program for Skidding (November 26, 1931)

‘That’s where my perception of it all was shattered’:Oral histories and moral geographies of food sector workers in an English city region

AbstractGeographers and oral historians continue to have much to learn from each other. The subfield of labour geography in particular can enrich its understanding of workers’ lived experiences, both in employment and beyond the workplace, through greater use of interpretative, collaborative oral history methodologies. Attentive to the temporal specificity and inter-subjectivity of people’s narratives, oral history reveals how workers’ moral geographies emerge and change. This article documents the spatio-temporalities and institutions of food sector employment in Peterborough, England, a city-region from which urban-based workers are bussed out daily to rural jobs. The analysis draws on four extended case studies of people who migrated to the UK and worked in the sector in the 2000s, building on recent research that has highlighted harsh employment conditions in the food production, packing and processing sector. It complements this work by viewing narrative itself as an agentic act and listening to how research participants crafted their life stories. These stories revealed diverse, complex and context-specific moral geographies, with participants variously placing value on small acts of rebellion or refusal, dignity and the time to speak with others at work. The article advocates greater engagement by labour geographers with the subjective experiences of workers, and with individual as well as collective agency

Dry River

Sara Greystone’s career as a public defender is spiraling after a disastrous court case, and now her husband’s IT career is also in jeopardy. A move to California is supposed to get them both back on their feet, but the state is in the midst of a crippling economic downturn—and then Sara’s mother falls seriously ill. In the face of migration, illness, unemployment, and the tantalising possibility of infidelity, Sara has to work out who she is and what she really wants.Spanning 1997 to 2012, Dry River echoes Wallace Stegner’s classic Angle of Repose, moving across place and time to chart the slow collapse of a marriage alongside a declining US economy

“The aesthetic of the gap” : the limits of storytelling in the work of Jennifer Egan

A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010) is distinctively marked by the use of gaps and lacunae within the narrative’s construction, directing the reader’s focus to the unnarrated. This article examines the resultant silences and storytelling that emerges from them in the novel, with a consideration of Egan’s earlier works, The Invisible Circus (1995), Look at Me (2001), The Keep (2006), and “Black Box” (2012). Egan’s use of prolepsis, analepsis, and the juxtaposition of story time to narrative time in A Visit from the Goon Squad creates an aesthetic of the gap, which finds a new way to dramatize the impossibility of a total narrative. The novel breaks with traditional narrative structures, illustrating “Spiral Time” to evince questions of limitation and possibility within the work