Educating the labouring poor in nineteenth-century Suffolk

This article demonstrates the utility of a new source, prison registers, for the history of literacy and education in nineteenth-century England. It focuses on two sets of prison registers from the two county gaols in Suffolk, located at Ipswich and Bury St Edmunds, which contain personal information on 16,690 individuals over the period 1840 to 1878. First, the article examines the context in which personal information about prisoners was recorded and tests the data against benchmarks from other sources to prove its reliability. Second, the article employs two methods, statistical analysis and digital mapping, to study in depth the rich data on prisoners’ literacy and schooling. Finally, the article shows how the results of this analysis significantly revise our understanding of the prevalence of schooling among the labouring poor, the use of different types of schools, the role of the partially literate in the drive towards mass literacy, and the importance of life-long learning.     

Autonomy,spontaneity and creativity in research with children. A study of experience and participation,in central Italy and North West England

ABSTRACT

Research involving children, deemed to have difficulties with conventional means of communication, can perpetuate reductive forms of representation of children’s knowledges and experiences. This article focuses on the possibilities and opportunities that visual and creative methods can offer to researching with children. Children advance their views in and through spontaneous and concrete forms of participation. Autonomy in aesthetic acts is central to this methodology; to explore practices that produce and reproduce presuppositions deriving from societal attitudes affecting research with children, their agency and self-presentation. This cross-cultural study was conducted in Central Italy and North West England: children contributed their perspectives and experiences through participation in a series of creative encounters resulting in aesthetic and embodied outcomes of sociological and educational significance. The study contributes to the debate on children’s autonomy and the value and quality of participation through artistic practice. Examples from the corpus of data, which includes a series of artefacts and over 900 photographs from each geo-cultural context, are presented. The study shows that it is possible to harmonise power imbalances in spaces of creative freedom, in research and education, where children’s choices and agency are respected.     

12—15 世纪英国交换经济发展原因探

英国中世纪曾长期被认为是以庄园为基础的自给自足经济. 随着对庄园账簿资料的挖掘和对庄园管理的深入探讨, 自给自足只是中世纪经济发展的一个阶段. 12—15世纪, 领主和农民普遍卷入了广泛的市场交易, 交换经济取得迅速发展. 究其原因, 主要有四个方面: 一是分工获得了较快发展, 非农产业从农业中分离, 为交换经济发展提供了前提; 二是形成了完整的货币体系, 为交换提供了便利的中介工具; 三是市场和集市的广泛建立, 马代替牛成为了主要运输工具, 减少了交易的距离和时间, 降低了交易成本, 是交换经济发展的助推剂; 四是政治经济发展的需求是交换经济持续发展的动力源泉.     

近代早期城市的能源贸易与能源消费问题——以英格兰海煤为中心

中世纪至近代早期,海煤逐渐发展成为英格兰重要的贸易商品。贸易交换的增加,带动了英格兰的海煤消费。因此有学者认为,英格兰近代早期的城市污染与海煤的贸易和使用有密切关系。通过梳理英格兰海煤的贸易轨迹,得知近代早期英格兰海煤的贸易特点:以纽卡斯尔和布里斯托尔为典型的出口港口,以伦敦为典型的进口港口。近代早期英格兰的城市污染,尽管有消费海煤带来的影响,但二者之间并不存在明显的直接相关。海煤在英格兰近代化的历程中发挥重要的积极作用。     

18世纪英国关于犬类税的争论

在近代英国,针对过多犬类对于公共健康、财产安全、狩猎法维护与济贫等造成的问题,民众与政府在犬类管理上经历一个由屠杀到征税的过程。对犬类征税旨在限制其数量,但是也引发了持续整个18世纪的争论。在国家权力限度、狩猎法改革、公共道德改革等方面的争论反映出养犬长期成为英国社会问题的归因指向。直到18世纪下半期,动物主体权利的主张开始出现,犬类地位上升,养犬才由多余成为必需。1796年《犬类税法》的通过以立法的形式肯定了这种变化,从而保障了英国普通民众养犬的权利。     

Increasing inter‐generational social mobility: is educational expansion the answer?

Reforms which increase the stock of education in a society have long been held by policy‐makers as key to improving rates of intergenerational social mobility. Yet, despite the intuitive plausibility of this idea, the empirical evidence in support of an effect of educational expansion on social fluidity is both indirect and weak. In this paper we use the raising of the minimum school leaving age from 15 to 16 years in England and Wales in 1972 to estimate the effect of educational participation and qualification attainment on rates of intergenerational social class mobility. Because, in expectation, children born immediately before and after the policy was implemented are statistically exchangeable, the difference in the amount of education they received may be treated as exogenously determined. The exogenous nature of the additional education gain means that differences in rates of social mobility between cohorts affected by the reform can be treated as having been caused by the additional education. The data for the analysis come from the ONS Longitudinal Study, which links individual records from successive decennial censuses between 1971 and 2001. Our findings show that, although the reform resulted in an increase in educational attainment in the population as a whole and a weakening of the association between attainment and class origin, there was no reliably discernible increase in the rate of intergenerational social mobility.     

试析英国割占中国香港的外交政策及其特点

文章主要阐述了英国割占香港这一对华政策及其特点,首先,从中国割占一块领土(香港)本身是英国长时期对华外交的既定政策和目标。其次,英国处心积虑三次割占香港是其在华占领一地外交政策的具体实施。再次,英国割占香港的外交手段随着各个时期的具体条件和环境变化发生着相应的调整和变化。最后,在割占香港的过程中,为与其他国家争夺在华权益,英国传统的“均势外交”起着独特而重要的作用。     

Unequal Regionalism: Regional Planning in China and England

This paper responds to the revival of regionalism in the past two decades by showing that such a re-emergence is unequal. Comparing the practice of regional planning in China and England, this paper has demonstrated that the party-state in China and the liberal-democratic state in England have responded differently to this revival and developed different framework for regional administration and planning. These variations have not only elaborated planners' concern about planning practice in a ‘context of difference’ from social dimension to geographical variations, but also echoed geographers' affirmation that global trends take on different characters in local setting.     

Disablism in the lives of people living with a chronic illness in England and Portugal

This article is based on research about the daily lives of people living with chronic illnesses in England and Portugal. Through the first-person narratives of participants, I argue that the lives of people living with debilitating chronic illnesses are affected by disablism, discrimination and exclusion. These aspects affect them in several important realms of life such as lack of or poor social support, difficulties in obtaining reasonable adjustments or the inability to obtain any kind of state support at all. These aspects are also widespread and compound and greatly influence their lives, beyond or in addition to the physical experience of the illness itself. I conclude that it is fundamental to change these structural and policy aspects and that people should have access to what I have termed a paradigm of sustained well-being, despite the illness.     

Freedom within bars: maximum security prisoners’ negotiations of identity through rap

This paper examines the construction of prisoners’ identity through rap in England’s high security prisons. While hip hop studies has often addressed rap’s connection to the social practices of criminalized youths, prison rap cultures have received scant attention. This paper draws on a series of rap workshops and interviews with prisoners to investigate the experiences of black prisoners in high security prisons and how identities are produced and negotiated through rap. Rap is associated with the production of a range of identities and identifications, enabling prisoners to accommodate themselves to the conditions of their incarceration and to challenge aspects of the criminal justice system that they experience as unfair or illegitimate.