Diets, hunger and living standards during the British industrial revolution

Throughout the twentieth century, historians debated what happened to the living standards of ordinary men, women, and children during the British industrial revolution. But where this historical question once attracted attention from across the methodological spectrum, the past two decades have seen cultural and qualitative approaches eclipsed by statistical accounts written by economic historians. In this article, I will argue that the marginalisation of social and cultural approaches to historical living standards has been to the detriment of our understanding. Through an analysis of two discrete sources of evidence – nineteenth-century budget data and working-class autobiography – this article sheds new light on the diets and living standards of the labouring poor. It rejects the optimism/pessimism dichotomy that continues to frame quantitative analyses and presents a more nuanced account that examines how experiences varied according to region, gender and age. The article concludes that it is not only that it is possible to incorporate cultural change into our analyses of living standards, but that it is necessary to do so in order to grasp this period in all its complexity

The Emotions of Motherhood: Love, Culture, and Poverty in Victorian Britain

Is maternal love biologically determined and independent of class and culture, or is it fluid and changeable, shaped by the social context within which individuals find themselves? Recent work on the history of emotions has encouraged us to regard not simply the outward cultural configurations of human emotion as mutable and changeable, but also the actual emotions themselves. Yet so deeply rooted is the Western belief that mothers’ love for their children is natural and innate that scholars have struggled to envisage parental love in the past as differing significantly from that in the present. Looking at working-class mothers in Victorian Britain, this article argues that the very different norms and values surrounding motherhood in this historical context did indeed create a different range of emotional experiences. It also, however, seeks to deepen our understanding of why emotions take the precise forms they do. By shifting focus away from the social elites who form the mainstay of most emotions history, this article offers new insights into the ways in which societies construct and experience their emotional norms

'We build our own homes': Practices of power and participation in a community land trust development

This thesis narrates the first three years of a 50 unit housing project carried out by Bristol Community Land Trust in partnership with a Housing Association. Working in close collaboration with prospective residents and to a lesser extent, other non-resident stakeholders involved in the project, this thesis provides insight into the participants' aspirations and motivations for being involved. Additionally, it documents the challenges and obstacles Bristol Community Land Trust faced in trying to bring the project to fruition and reflects on the spaces made for prospective residents to meaningfully participate in the development process. This research is located within an urban English context, which is concerned with the shortage of affordable housing, and seeks to explore alternatives to increased individualisation and privatisation, arguably promoted in conventional models of housing delivery. This research is not only concerned with finding ways to deliver more affordable housing provisions, but is located in conversations on how communities can participate and collaborate in the development of these provisions. As a starting point, this research highlights the growing popularity of community land trusts and in particular, the increasingly common partnerships that are forming between community land trusts and Housing Associations. Whilst acknowledging that these partnerships are believed to be positive in enabling projects to move through the development process with greater ease (Moore, 2016), this research starts from a position of caution, asking what, if anything, is lost through collaborations between community and non-community organisations, and how prospective residents experience the development process under these partnerships. This research set out to examine whether Bristol Community Land Trust met prospective residents' aspirations of community-led housing. A participatory approach was employed to encourage research participants to adopt more of a co-researcher role, and to call into question who are the experts and who can participate in producing knowledge. The research sought to contribute to the case study group as well as to academia. The methodological approach used in this research was supported by the use of theories of power and community power to frame the analysis of findings. The stories captured as part of this research are entwined with broader observations on the practices of bringing a community land trust project to fruition. This research captures how the nature and form of Bristol Community Land Trust led to struggles in enacting aspirations of community access and participation. Power played an important role in shaping the experiences of members from different stakeholder groups, whilst institutional and external pressures compounded issues of top-down governance. However, this research also points to ways that Bristol Community Land Trust stands to challenge who accesses community-led housing and to act as a driver of high-quality, shared equity and social rented housing, which is influenced by local community members and future residents, and is designed to foster high levels of social cohesion

Recovery of endurance running capacity: effect of carbohydrate-protein mixtures

Including protein in a carbohydrate solution may accelerate both the rate of glycogen storage and the restoration of exercise capacity following prolonged activity. Two studies were undertaken with nine active men in study A and seven in study B. All participants performed 2 trials, each involving a 90 min run at 70% VO2max followed by a 4 h recovery. During recovery, either a 9.3% carbohydrate solution (CHO) or the same solution plus 1.5% protein (CHO-PRO) was ingested every 30 min in volumes providing either 1.2 g CHO · kg-1 · h-1 (study A) or 0.8 g CHO · kg-1 · h-1 (study B). Exercise capacity was then assessed by run time to exhaustion at 85% VO2max. Ingestion of CHO-PRO elicited greater insulinemic responses than CHO (P less than or equal to 0.05) but with no differences in run times to exhaustion. Within the context of this experimental design, CHO and CHO-PRO restored running capacity with equal effect

Out on Campus

This podcast is the result of an ethnography assignment for Anthropology 103. A transcript is available. For their project the student interviewed LGBTQ students from a community college and a four-year college to find out how their school choices impacted their lives and to check whether students were aware of campus resources available to them. A transcript is availabl

Single-cell transcriptomics : a high-resolution avenue for plant functional genomics

Plant function is the result of the concerted action of single cells in different tissues. Advances in RNA-seq technologies and tissue processing allow us now to capture transcriptional changes at single-cell resolution. The incredible potential of single-cell RNA-seq lies in the novel ability to study and exploit regulatory processes in complex tissues based on the behaviour of single cells. Importantly, the independence from reporter lines allows the analysis of any given tissue in any plant. While there are challenges associated with the handling and analysis of complex datasets, the opportunities are unique to generate knowledge of tissue functions in unprecedented detail and to facilitate the application of such information by mapping cellular functions and interactions in a plant cell atlas. [Abstract copyright: Copyright © 2019 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.

“Things I can remember about my life”: Autobiography and fatherhood in Victorian Britain

It is now nearly forty years since John Burnett, David Vincent, and David Mayall compiled their invaluable and much-used three-volume finding aid, The Autobiography of the Working Class: An Annotated, Critical Bibliography (1984-1989), and established working-class autobiography as an important documentary source for exploring the lives of the working poor. Life writing now forms the basis of historical research into areas such as the emotions and domestic life that had hardly been imagined at the time that the annotated bibliography was produced. Yet as research into working-class autobiography has extended into new domains of enquiry, there has been less innovation in methodology. Historians typically use autobiographical material to pursue deep-reading strategies and unpack the meaning, experience, and identity of individual writers rather than generalize about working-class life more broadly. In this article I offer an alternative strategy: to take the autobiographical corpus and read it at scale in order to better understand fatherhood in Victorian Britain. Through a combination of intensive and extensive reading, I demonstrate that many working-class men failed to live up to expectations as breadwinners, and I explore the ramifications of that failure for the women and children with whom they lived

Community-led housing and health: a comprehensive literature review

This report examines existing literature on the relationship between community-led housing (CLH) and health and wellbeing, with a particular focus on identifying what evidence is available and where future research may further strengthen this knowledge base. CLH has gained attention at both citizen and government scale in recent years (Fromm, 2012; Tummers, 2016). As shortages in affordable housing for sale and rent have become acutely apparent, alternative approachesto housing delivery have received greater recognition (Cerulli and Field, 2011). The studies included in this review create a strong foundation of evidence on the relationship between CLH and health and wellbeing