Hi,
This cfp may be of interest,
Dave
The Making of the English Working Class at Fifty: Space, Agency and
History From Below.
Convenors: David Featherstone, Neil Gray and Paul Griffin, School of
Geographical and Earth Sciences, University of Glasgow.
Sponsored by the Historical Geography Research Group and the Political
Geography Research Group.
For the RGS-IBG Conference 2013.
50 years on from its original publication E.P. Thompson’s Making of the
English Working Class continues to inspire and to provoke critical
debate and reflection. A foundational text of what has come to be known
as ‘history from below’, the book has impacted on contexts far beyond
the West-Riding of Yorkshire or the back rooms of London pubs that were
the key sites of the book. It has been a pivotal text, even if primarily
through critical dialogue, within intellectual traditions as diverse as
History Workshop in South Africa and Subaltern Studies.
The Making has, of course, been subject to numerous critiques and
engagements notably by feminist and post-colonial critics (Clark, 1995,
Hall, 1992). The cultural nationalism that informed Thompson’s work have
been robustly contested by Paul Gilroy (1987, 1993). Forms of
Thompsonian inspired social history have been productively taken in more
transnational dimensions by Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker. In
geography its reception was subject to significant debate, especially in
relation to Derek Gregory’s critique of Thompson’s account of the
relations between class and space. Engagement with Thompson’s work,
however, has been oddly absent from recent debates on workers’ agency in
labour geography. His commitment to asserting and recovering diverse
forms of agency in shaping class formation, however, resonates with many
critical geographical projects.
This session seeks to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the publication
of Making. It seeks to use this as an opportunity for critical
reflections on Thompson’s text and to consider the relations between
geographical work and ‘history from below’. The session invites both
critical commentaries and empirically informed papers. These might
consider:
• The imaginations of space and place in the Making of English Working Class
• The transnational impact of the Making of the English Working Class
• The contested geographies of the new left
• Critical engagements with Thompson’s use of the terms experience and
agency.
• The political contexts that shaped The Making of the English Working
Class
• The relations between Thompson, Subaltern Histories and attempts to
think history from below spatially.
Abstracts of up to 250 words should be sent to Dave Featherstone
([log in to unmask]) by February 8th.
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