Taught By:
Benjamin Jones
Associate Professor in Modern British History
History Department
School of History and Art History
University of East Anglia
Read profile here.
Motivation to Teach Social Action:
One of my research interests lies in the overlapping areas of housing and antiracist activism in the UK and I have taught social movements at UG and PG level over a number of years (e.g. Civil Rights in Northern Ireland, the WLM and gay liberation movements, anti-racist action in the 1980s, tenants rights groups and anti-gentrification campaigns). As a social historian with an interest in cultural studies I've long thought of scholarship/teaching & politics as linked and I would be really interested in thinking about adapting and developing some these themes in order to teach activism.
Course Description:
The 1980s has finally entered the radar of historians. As they make their mark on a terrain once reserved for political scientists and sociologists, scholarship on Britain in the Eighties is undergoing a marked transformation. For too long, accounts of 1980s Britain was overdetermined by Margaret Thatcher, the Thatcher governments or, at best, Thatcherism. Using a diverse set of historical accounts and archival sources this module will make clear that we must look beyond Thatcherism to truly understand the unmaking of the social democratic experiment and the new, neoliberal order that emerged in its wake.
Introducing you to a wide range of sources – from film and song to state, community and personal archives – this module will track how a 1980s politics of individualism - long seen as a product of the Thatcherite revolution - has deep ideological roots in British political and cultural life. We will track transformations in the political economy: the restructuring of state power, the “revolution” in the City, the reshaping of geographical divisions and inequalities as well as the emergence of ‘multiculturalism’, diverse political and individual identities, changes in homeownership and the gendered division of labour. By placing Britain’s experience of deindustrialisation, decolonisation and its gender and sexual revolutions in deeper historical and comparative contexts, we can better understand the emergence – and durability – of Britain’s neoliberal order. In this way across the module we will not only extend our gaze back to the 1960s, but also draw it forward to the end of the century.
Critically, we will approach ‘politics’ broadly in this module, considering for instance everyday conservatism, the politics of the home, social aspiration and mobility, as well as communities of radical activism – on the left and right. The 1980s has been written as a story of the political defeat of the Left, with the destruction of mining communities and, with that, the destruction of the political voice of an industrial working class as the decade’s defining story. But this metanarrative misses the fracturing and diversification of resistance at this time; defeat tells only one (albeit important) story. We will introduce students to the political subjectivities of those who continued to transform Britain’s cultural and political life from the margins: black feminists, Irish republicans, LGBT activists, New Travellers, ravers, Black and Asian youth, punks and radical environmentalists. Ultimately this module will show how neoliberalism was embraced, but also contested and resisted in high politics, in the streets, in homes, intimate relationships and personal identities
