A source of historical evidence whose value has attracted greater attention in recent years is the newspaper cartoon, which Alan Fowler draws on in his essay on the Lancashire writer and comic performer, Sam Fitton, a popular cartoonist on the Cotton Factory Times, the weekly newspaper of Lancashire cotton operatives, published between 1907 and 1917. Fitton’s work has been largely overlooked by historians and Fowler makes a valuable contribution to the biographical scholarship on British cartoonists, using Fitton’s cartoons on the home front to explore a neglected aspect of World War One history, the conditions and preoccupations of Lancashire cotton workers. Fowler places these within the broader context of the Lancashire cotton industry with which Fitton, himself a cotton worker, was very familiar, and draws attention to the richness of these cartoons as a regional source whose evocation of a sense of belonging and place among its Lancashire readers was very different from the civic pride exemplified by the local history societies and public statuary of the Victorian period, on which Kidd and Wyke focus.

This chapter examines how the same complex dynamics that shape FOI formulation continue after the passage of legislation. This chapter looks across the country cases, beginning with the UK, to see how FOI interacts with its wider environment and new ideas around openness (Posen 2013). It examines thematically the role of various, sometimes competing and contradictory, influences on the legislation post-implementation: including high profile scandal Lock-in of FOI legislation with the gradual ‘normalising’ of openness systems within bureaucracies over time, assisted by the integration of independent appeal bodies, helping to entrench FOI within systems as an ‘everyday’ activity (Hazell and Worthy 2010: Kimball 2012). It looks at attempts to strengthen FOI and attempts to weaken FOI. The chapter ends by mapping out the complex dynamics and pattern of post –implementation FOI. It examining what groups (government factions, users, media) and what events, both real and symbolic, (crisis, electoral victory, reform programmes) can help trigger the different dynamics and how they can change (Hillebrandt, Curtin and Meijer 2012).

This chapter takes on overview of FOI. Freedom of Information (FOI) laws are difficult to resist in opposition but hard to escape from once in power. A commitment to an FOI law sends out strong messages of radicalism, change and empowerment that new governments find difficult to resist. However, when politicians regret their promises, as they often quickly do, the same symbolism makes the reforms difficult to escape from. It examines the history of the radical idea of openness, how it developed into the mainstream idea it is today and how it amounts to a battle between the symbol of the law and concrete opposition of institutions.

The introduction succinctly describes the process of claiming asylum in the UK. It then offers a streamlined explanation of the methodology: the corpus, the tools of critical and French discourse analysis used, and the notion of the social problem. The central concepts of the manuscript’s argument are critically defined (queerness, sexual citizenship, nationhood, hospitality), in order to ask a series of questions about asylum, such as: how does it produce subjectivities, not only for asylum seekers, but also for British liberal queers? How do asylum debates hinge on the relationship in contemporary public discourse of queerness with normativity and liberalism?

This chapter begins with an ethnographic account of the high profile student conflicts around free speech and racism which unfolded across UK campuses in 2008-9 in response to ‘Operation Cast Lead’. The discussion focuses on the unsettling quality of these events in order to introduce a number of key elements in the framing of this study. First, the chapter highlights how campus struggles around Palestine-Israel are not only constituted through competing discourses in the abstract but are also the locus of intense feelings, contradictory desires and visceral interpersonal encounters. Second, is argued that these raging campus conflicts over Palestine-Israel involve the destabilisation of established spatial boundaries under conditions of globalisation and so can be helpfully connected to Nancy Fraser’s theory of ‘abnormal justice’. Third, by highlighting how this case is also the focus of disputed historical claims, the chapter introduces helpful resonances with aesthetic notions of the tragic. The chapter concludes by introducing some key interlocutors - Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell and Veena Das - who will help with a key task of this book: to develop an ethnographic imagination attentive to movements between the discursive / embodied and public / personal dimensions of democratic life.

This chapter is dedicated to the analysis of the state management of refugees. It looks at credibility as a central part of the biopolitics of LGBT asylum, and argues that as a mode of veridiction, credibility is based on a series of sexual ontologies, affects and modes of projection that (re)produce as ‛true’ certain forms of liberal queerness. It suggests that the recognition apparatus not only has the function of excluding (or not) claimants, but also of strengthening the hegemony of liberal queerness as a universal way of being queer in the world. Looking at the debates and criticisms around credibility, the chapter then shows how (1) the assessment of credibility involves a neoliberal discipline of self-presentation that assumes autonomy and self-governance on the part of asylum seekers. It also examines how (2) in the debates around how to best recognise truthful claimants, the state and its critics are engaged in a collective work of gradual improvement of the biopolitical machinery of asylum.

This chapter outlines the early history of the Amalgamated Musicians’ Union (AMU) and the work of its first General Secretary, Joseph Bevir (“Joe”) Williams. It illustrates the types of work undertaken by musicians in the last nineteenth and early twentieth century. Debates about whether musicians’ collective interests are best served by a trade union or a professional association are outlined. The key issues facing the Union in its early days are discussed including competition from military bands and European immigrant musicians, recruitment, strikes, the Union’s penchant for litigation, its efforts to communicate with members and its political lobbying and campaigning. The effect of the First World War on the AMU and musical employment is also outlineds.

The author reconsiders the commonly held notion that Jacques Tati’s Mon Oncle (1958) adumbrates a negative ‘critique’ of modern suburbia as a space of alienation. The functions given to architectural forms or elements of landscaping on the one hand can be distinguished from the comic uses of these forms onscreen on the other, for instance to satirise bourgeois habits or to reaffirm the prerogatives of childlike creative engagement with the built environment. The director strikes a balance between the mockery of conspicuous consumption and the enchantment of an unruly, unpredictable object world. Attention is paid the narrative of post-war French suburban development, the thunderous reception of Mon Oncle, and the peculiar approach that Tati and chief decorator Jacques Lagrange took to set design and the Arpel villa in particular, which overtly parodies interwar French high modernism. The villa’s stark opposition to the eponymous character’s ramshackle rooming house in suburban St. Maur allows Tati to elicit a specific audience response to shared values of spontaneity and disorder that modernizing tendencies in post-war France were in the process of destroying.

This chapter broadens out the focus from Irish sociology to examine Irish scientific research. Its central theme is the way in which resources provided or jointly controlled by US actors underpinned the development of a modern scientific research infrastructure within the state in the period after the Second World War. The scientific fields principally affected by these financial injections were applied research related to agriculture, industry and economics. Money flowed into these fields from two major sources: the Grant Counterpart Fund, which was a legacy of Ireland’s participation in the Marshall Plan, and private US foundations. In other fields, such as management and `human sciences’, significant resource transfers took place in kind as much as in cash through productivity and technical assistance programmes. The infrastructure developments that clustered in the late 1950s and the early 1960s interacted with older scientific institutional configurations laid down under the Union with Britain and subjected to emaciating neglect after the advent of political independence.

On 10 June 1968, in front of the Wonder battery factories in Saint-Ouen, an outraged young woman refuses to return to work despite the trade union’s vote to end the strike. Filmed by an anonymous camera operator, the altercation gives rise to the fabled ten-minute direct film Reprise du travail aux usines Wonder. Tracking down this same woman twenty-five years later, French documentarian Hervé Le Roux makes another film, the aptly titled Reprise (1995), which charts the evolution since 1968 of the working class in the former ‘red belt’ around Paris. His investigation, which results from a negotiation between a place, its inhabitants and a film crew, aims to reconstruct, trace by trace, the relevant places and their social makeup. Arguing for Reprise as a film de banlieue in the strongest possible sense, the author shows how Le Roux weaves working-class left activism back into the site in Saint-Ouen, letting himself be swept along in his depiction by neighbourhood dynamics and popular memory. Rather than trying to revive a more or less faded ‘red suburb’, the film works with the place as it is, providing stark contrast in tone and purpose to its virtual screen contemporary, La Haine (Mathieu Kassovitz, 1995).

By turns elegiac and polemical, Maurice Pialat’s twenty-minute essay film L’Amour existe (1960) encompasses at once an individual life, the history of France from the pre-war period through WWII and the Trente Glorieuses, and the visual representation of the banlieue from Impressionist painting to poetic realism. The ineluctable push of time is embodied in the forward motion of trains, buses, bicycles and people, as well as in slow tracking or panning shots that survey the impoverished landscapes of greater Paris from dawn to dusk and into the night. The author underscores the formative qualities of an intimate, unseen and lost space in which suburban beauty lays hidden, and where, in keeping with Pialat’s chosen title, ‘love exists’. Behind the overwhelming forces of poverty, routine and modernization that its richly layered commentary denounces, L’Amour existe points to what these forces have silenced, what could have been revealed but remained invisible and unsaid. The critical faculty of the movie camera to reveal hidden realities in the apparently bleakest of worlds is reaffirmed.

It has been argued that civic pride declined after its heyday in the Victorian period but Peter Shapely contests this view, illustrating how in Manchester, a combination of civic pride, social reform and policy rooted in the Victorian period were re-defined over the twentieth-century, albeit retaining a ‘boosterish’ emphasis on the city’s image and reputation, particularly in the 1960s. Postwar planners aimed to construct their own version of a modern cityscape in Manchester delivered through a programme of ambitious building projects whose civic ambitions would have been familiar to their Victorian predecessors. When these aspirations faltered during Manchester’s industrial decline between the mid-1970s and late-1980s, civic pride was maintained by the ambitions of the local press, politicians and prominent figures and eventually harnessed to new regeneration projects, as Manchester’s image was re-invented through high-profile re-development schemes and festivals based on sport and the arts. There were, as Shapely argues, continuities in how governing elites and institutions defined the contours of Manchester’s civic pride and reputation, a cultural hegemony that persisted across two centuries. This was, however, distinct from the sense of civic pride which many ordinary local residents experienced with different kinds of local attachment and identity.

Martin Hewitt’s chapter on the history of the provident dispensary movement, initiated in the 1870s by the social reformer, Dr John Watts asks why provident dispensaries, unlike the Hospital Funds movement, have been largely neglected in the scholarship of medical philanthropy although, as Hewitt argues, those in Manchester were central to national debates over hospital reform and served as a model for similar initiatives in other parts of the country. The establishment of provident dispensaries in the city encapsulated many of the challenges which impeded the development of medical provision for the working-classes, as in the tensions which Hewitt illustrates in relation to the professional status and expectations of medical men, concerned about the movement’s threats to their fees and status. Watt’s scheme of provident dispensaries, which aimed to promote ‘a general scheme of medical insurance’, was ahead of its time, symptomatic, Hewitt argues, of the pitfalls which faced those committed to the establishment of a comprehensive system of healthcare in the late-Victorian period.

Idyllic or pastoral representations of the suburban milieu were not uncommon in the 1930s, yet even the most idealized sites explored by filmmakers were not unproblematic. The escape promised city-dwellers was temporary, and the possibility of establishing a productive micro-society free of the ills of urban centre and provincial village was limited by the vestiges of class structure and cultural allegiances. This chapter highlights social barriers to the construction of egalitarian human communities in two works by Julien Duvivier, the silent adaptation Au Bonheur des Dames (after Émile Zola, 1930) and the poetic realist La Belle Équipe (1936). Where the former title employs a bucolic waterside setting to underscore the perpetuation of class tensions that characterise urban life, the Popular Front-era La Belle Équipe allegorises the building of community through the workers’ construction of a suburban dance hall. It is less the protagonists’ failure or success that interests the author, than the metaphorization of community via architecture, and how emplotment and editing serve this utopic purpose.