Postcolonialism revisited
In: Writing Wales in English
In: CREW series of critical and scholarly studies
3 results
Sort by:
In: Writing Wales in English
In: CREW series of critical and scholarly studies
In: Disability history
Coalmining was a notoriously dangerous industry and many of its workers experienced injury and disease. However, the experiences of the many disabled people within Britain's most dangerous industry have gone largely unrecognised by historians. This book examines the British coal industry through the lens of disability, using an interdisciplinary approach to examine the lives of disabled miners and their families. The book considers the coal industry at a time when it was one of Britain's most important industries, and follows it through a period of growth up to the First World War, through strikes, depression and wartime, and into an era of decline. During this time, the statutory provision for disabled people changed considerably, most notably with the first programme of state compensation for workplace injury. And yet disabled people remained a constant presence in the industry as many disabled miners continued their jobs or took up 'light work'. The burgeoning coalfields literature used images of disability on a frequent basis and disabled characters were used to represent the human toll of the industry.A diverse range of sources are used to examine the economic, social, political and cultural impact of disability in the coal industry, looking beyond formal coal company and union records to include autobiographies, novels and oral testimony. It argues that, far from being excluded entirely from British industry, disability and disabled people were central to its development. The book will appeal to students and academics interested in disability history, disability studies, social and cultural history, and representations of disability in literature
In: Frontiers in sociology, Volume 9
ISSN: 2297-7775
Higher Education (HE) is, at best, struggling to rise to the challenges of the climate and ecological crises (CEC) and, at worst, actively contributing to them by perpetuating particular ways of knowing, relating, and acting. Calls for HE to radically transform its activities in response to the polycrises abound, yet questions about how this will be achieved are often overlooked. This article proposes that a lack of capacity to express and share emotions about the CEC in universities is at the heart of their relative climate silence and inertia. We build a theoretical and experimental justification for the importance of climate emotions in HE, drawing on our collective experience of the Climate Lab project (2021–2023), a series of in-person and online workshops that brought together scientists, engineers, and artists. We analyse the roles of grief, vulnerability, and creativity in the conversations that occurred, and explore these exchanges as potential pathways out of socially organised climate denial in neoliberal institutions. By drawing on the emerging field of "emotional methodologies," we make a case for the importance of emotionally reflexive practices for overcoming an institutionalised disconnect between feeling and knowing, especially in Western-disciplinary contexts. We suggest that if staff and students are afforded opportunities to connect with their emotions about the CEC, then institutional transformation is (a) more likely to happen and be meaningfully sustained and (b) less likely to fall into the same problematic patterns of knowledge and action that perpetuate these crises. This profound, sometimes uncomfortable, emotionally reflexive work is situated in the wider context of glimpsing decolonial futures for universities, which is an integral step towards climate and ecological justice.