Is London open? Mediating and ordering cosmopolitanism in crisis

This article analyses cosmopolitan imagination and ambivalent morality at times of urban crisis. It focuses on #LondonIsOpen – the city’s media campaign in response to the nation’s Brexit vote. In this case, cosmopolitanism’s discursive tools – especially the ideals of the Open city and hospitality – are mobilised to summon a range of actors in defence of the city. The article analyses the mediation of cosmopolitanism in a campaign film and in Londoners’ online and offline responses to it. These responses reveal #LondonIsOpen as a compelling example of cosmopolitan imagination, but also of cosmopolitanism’s moral fragility in the neoliberal city. As shown, urban dwellers overwhelmingly embrace the cosmopolitan value of openness. Yet, their visions are divided between neoliberal cosmopolitanism and vernacular cosmopolitanism. By analysing the moral space of mediated cosmopolitanism, I argue that, unlike the nation, representational struggles in the city increasingly take place within, rather than against, cosmopolitanis

The independent group looks at London's west end

In the early 1950s, British culture was dominated by welfare-state visions of urban reconstruction. These projections of a stable civic society were premised on a particular way of looking at and reading the metropolitan environment. At odds with this project, the Independent Group's discussions and collaborative work developed an alternative urban semiology, which found the city to be already rich in visual resources for fashioning a more profound form of social democracy. Soon, this critical engagement would develop in different directions, represented here by Lawrence Alloway's commentary on Piccadilly Circus in his essay 'City Notes' and the London footage inserted by John McHale into his film for the Smithsons' Berlin Hauptstadt project (both 1959). By the end of the 1950s, members of the erstwhile Independent Group had produced two contrasting critical accounts of how the metropolitan centre should be looked at, which challenged the strictures of post-war reconstruction in distinct and conflicting ways. © The Author(s), 2013

Towards a Criminology of the Domestic

Criminology has paid insufficient attention to the ‘domestic’ arena, as a locale that is being reconfigured through technological and social developments in ways that require us to reconsider offending and victimisation. This article addresses this lacuna. We take up Campbell's (2016) challenge that criminology needs to develop more sophisticated models of place and space, particularly in relation to changing patterns of consumption and leisure activity and the opportunities to offend in relation to these from within the domestic arena

The inner lives of early modern travel

This article assesses the role of memory, interiority, and intergenerational relations in the framing of early modern experiences and narratives of travel. It adopts as its focus three generations of the Clerk family of Penicuik, Scotland, whose travels through Europe from the mid-seventeenth century onward proved formative in the creation of varied ‘cosmopolitan’ stances within the family. While such widely studied practices as the ‘Grand Tour’ have drawn on discourses of encounter and cultural engagement within the broader narratives of the ‘long’ eighteenth century, this article reveals a family made deeply anxious by the consequences of travel, both during and after the act. Using diaries, manuscript correspondence, memoirs, and material objects, this article reveals the many ways in which travel was fashioned before, during, and long after it was undertaken. By shifting focus away from the act of travel itself and towards its subsequent afterlives, it explores the ways in which these individuals internalized what they experienced in the course of travel, how they reconciled it with the familiar, quotidian world to which they returned, and how the ‘cosmopolitan’ worldviews they brought home were made to inform the generations that followed

An intimate and imperial feminism: Meliscent Shephard and the regulation of prostitution in colonial India

This paper seeks to construct an antinostalgic portrait of an imperial feminist. As the representative of the Association for Moral and Social Hygiene (AMSH) in India between 1928 and 1947, Meliscent Shephard was an embodiment not only of the feminist urge to challenge patriarchal gender relations, but also of the imperialist urge to classify and fathom the world through a series of racist typologies. Despite an earlier belief that blame for the exploitation of prostitutes lay with the colonial state and economy, she later fell back on explanations based on notions of Indian society and religion. Operating in a period of heightened anticolonial nationalism, these latter views thwarted any hope of her forging successful connections with emergent Indian social reform groups. This failure to cultivate intimate relations with Indian colleagues marks a failure at the level of national and racial politics. Shephard did, however, cultivate an intimate relationship with correspondents at the AMSH in London, while her experiences of the sexual geographies of Indian cities provided a form of intimate interaction that would inspire her mission to close down tolerated brothels. As such, this paper marks an empirical engagement with the intimate frontiers at which the affective grid of colonial politics was marked out

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