Sir William Macpherson's conclusion - following his public inquiry into the racist murder of the black teenager Stephen Lawrence in 1993 - that the Metropolitan Police was 'institutionally racist', was a seminal moment for policing in Britain. The publication of the Macpherson report in 1999 has been rightly regarded as a victory for the Stephen Lawrence Family Campaign (SLFC), whose activities had been crucial in building pressure on the newly-elected Labour Government to hold a public inquiry into the Metropolitan Police's murder investigation. However, to focus solely on the Lawrence case, and the SLFC, is to obscure the existence of a longer struggle waged by black Londoners to expose the racism that had affected their experience of policing since the Second World War. This thesis explores the development of grassroots political activism within London's Afro-Caribbean community around the issue of policing from 1945 to 1993. Using material from local community archives, this thesis represents the first attempt at documenting the history of race and policing in London from the perspective of the capital's Afro-Caribbean population. Moreover, by taking the end of the Second World War as its starting point, it also breaks new ground in charting the way Afro-Caribbean people in London organised politically in opposition to racist policing prior to the murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993. Ever since people of Afro-Caribbean descent began to settle in London in increasing numbers in the aftermath of the Second World War, they have continually expressed concern about the way they were policed. While opposition to policing initially emerged in a highly unorganised form, this was fundamentally altered by the arrival of the British black power movement in the late 1960s. Despite its short existence, black power's emphasis upon independent black grassroots political activism outlived the movement and became a feature of the way black Londoners' challenged racist policing during the 1970s and 1980s. Therefore, this thesis contends that the grassroots political campaign that developed around the case of Stephen Lawrence cannot be viewed in isolation from the historical efforts of black people in London to expose racism within the Metropolitan Police.

This dissertation analyses the visual representations of the Lower Thames in the years between about 1880 and 1901 to understand the ways in which they reconstructed and projected modern life in London in and through visual forms. Focusing on works which were accessible in the broad middle-class sphere through exhibitions and publications, it sets out to show how non-modernist works of art articulated capitalist modernity in powerful terms. In translating a working port into representations such as exhibition pictures and newspaper illustrations, artists exploited the naturalist aesthetic. They highlighted the dirty, modern, chaotic and even dangerous river, while playing with the distance between that depicted working-class site and the middle-class audience of their work. Examining their subject and means of representation, the dissertation shows how the late Victorian representations of the Port of London illuminated the values of technology, labour, capital and the Empire.

No description available.

This thesis maps and re-maps literary London through an engagement with selected novels by Diana Evans, Bernardine Evaristo and Andrea Levy. The thesis builds on the work of very strong strands of black British women's writing, an area of writing that remains committed to the necessity of having to defend it. I argue that the literature of this group of contemporary women writers re-orientates trajectories of black British writing to focus on emerging distinctive London identities in the twenty-first century. The thesis charts a shift in black British women's writing which rewrites familiar postcolonial tensions around nationhood, displacement and unbelonging to articulate a rootedness in London. Evans', Evaristo's and Levy's sense of belonging stems from the city in which they were all born and raised, their 'London-ness' rendering a new form of selfhood which informs who they are and what they write. The study is motivated by an agenda to critique black British women's writing outside of the historical paradigmatic racial and gendered identities through which it has traditionally been read. I wish to attend to women's writing in a way which disturbs the canon of contemporary British fiction, reconfiguring predominately male narratives of London life to present an alternative view of the city. The study assesses Evans', Evaristo's and Levy's contributions to and reappraisal of long traditions of women writing novels of family and home. The novels I engage with are localised within a particular London postcode, foregrounding the importance of microcosmic conceptions of home and domestic spaces to constructions of belonging in a multifaceted, complex urban environment such as London. The role of family is central to the authors' narratives and the thesis explores familial women's relationships which are both nuanced and complicated. The trope of sisterhood is deployed across the texts and raises profound questions concerning ideological constructions of belonging and home. The thesis grounds itself intellectually at the nexus of debates in the fields of feminist discourse, postcolonial theory and contemporary urban theory, implementing them within a more fluid critical framework capable of reading the literature by this group of writers outside rigid categorising partitions. To not attend to questions of race and gender within their works would be to distort the thematic framework underpinning the novels. Nevertheless, I wish to re-inflect the ways in which we critique London writing to encourage the emergence of a new language which allows us think about it as organically diverse, rather than consciously or systematically 'multicultural'.

This thesis is based upon eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in London undertaken between January 2006 and July 2007. It explores the discourses and practices which (re)produce notions of gender, race, ethnicity and class among young people born or raised in London to migrants from Arab states. Instead of taking the existence of an Arab community' in London as self-evident, this thesis looks critically at the idea of Arab-ness in London and the ways in which it is signified, reiterated and recited. Taking the theorising of performative gender as a starting point I explore the possibilities of a sequential reading of ‘gender' and ‘race' and the practices and discourses which produce that which they name ‘Arab woman,' Arab man,' ‘British- Arab'. By looking at discourses, practices and political context, ‘ethnicity' and ‘race' appear to be less about an inner fixity or even multiple identities, instead they can be significantly attributed to a discursive and corporeal project of survival and social intelligibility between structures of subjection which create imperatives to enact and reproduce notions of ‘race' and ‘gender'. In this sense it is no longer satisfactory to see ethnicity as something that one possesses – but something that one does and embodies imperfectly, constantly adding, reinforcing and disrupting its presumed structure. Looking at what it means “to do” Arab-ness in London provides opportunities to look at the underlying normative and psychical structures that inform the doing of ethnicity in a particular setting. The shift from foundationalist and “epistemological account[s] of identity to [those] which locate[s] the problematic within practices of signification permits an analysis that takes the epistemological mode itself as one possible and contingent signifying practice” (Butler 1990: 184). Through the Shisha cafe, ‘Arabic nights', images and narratives I explore the discursive and corporeal acts that signify Arab-ness in London at a particular historical moment.

This qualitative study investigates subjective experiences of social mobility amongst parents whose children attend the same London state primary school, at a historical moment when the Conservative-led Coalition government claims social mobility as the principal goal of its social policies. I argue that the government's understanding of social mobility is founded on a neoliberal discourse that holds individuals responsible for their own life trajectories. This individualist view aligns with individualization theory's emphasises on reflexive selves, understood as disembedded from class groups. By examining how participants' experiences are shaped by class processes I interrogate this dominant perspective, and consider alternative conceptions of social mobilities that expand the existing discourse. I take a case-study approach that utilises a range of qualitative methods, enabling crossclass comparisons as well as examining parents' intersectional identities. I draw embodied and emotional geographies into the analysis, including everyday distinctionmaking and face-to-face interactions. I relate subjective experiences to class structures across a range of social fields, inter-weaving material and cultural analyses to examine the impacts of economic and political processes on lived experiences. The thesis demonstrates how class processes significantly impact on social mobility experiences, and thus argues that the individualist social mobility discourse is flawed. However, whilst the individualist model denies the role of class structures, I argue that it constructs class identities by attaching stigma and status to individuals, who are held responsible for their own social trajectories. This narrative is implicated in processes of dominance and hegemony, and works to justify the current welfare cuts. I also argue, however, that by attending to participants' experiences and using a class analysis it is possible to reframe social mobility within an equality agenda based on the redistribution of resources. This study therefore makes a significant academic contribution because it expands the understanding of how class impacts on social mobility experiences, it explicitly addresses the individualist discourse of social mobility, and it suggests an alternative more equitable model.

Tese de mestrado. Mestrado integrado em Engenharia Civil - Especialização em Vias de Comunicação. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 2012

No description available.

À l'époque élisabéthaine, l'apprentissage marquait le début d'un long parcours professionnel. Après avoir terminé sa formation, un jeune artisan obtenait sa liberté et devenait membre à part entière de la corporation qui l'avait engagé. Ce statut de freeman lui conférait de fait la citoyenneté londonienne et l'obligeait à exercer ses droits et ses devoirs civiques. Tout apprenti pouvait donc ambitionner de devenir à son tour maître et propriétaire d'un atelier. Sa progression sociale dépendait de sa capacité à se plier au jugement de son maître et à patienter jusqu'à l'obtention de sa salutaire liberté. De nombreux dramaturges élisabéthains ont transposé l'apprentissage sur scène et ont fait de l'apprenti un personnage de répertoire tour à tour veule et héroïque, fustigeant ses excès ou encensant ses exploits. Dans la représentation qu'elles donnent de l'apprentissage, les comédies citadines ont fidèlement décrit la vie de la Cité et de ses corporations. / In Elizabethan times, apprenticeship marked the beginning of a long professional journey. After completing his training, the young craftsman was granted his freedom and became a full member of the livery company that had hired him. This status of freeman gave him London's citizenship and compelled him to exert his civic rights and duties. Every apprenticeřs ambition was to become in his turn a master and a householder. His upward mobility depended on his ability to comply with his master's judgment until he obtained his freedom. Many Elizabethan playwrights staged the training of apprentices, thus making the apprentice a stock character, criticising his excesses and praising his high deeds. Through the representation of apprenticeship, city comedies have faithfully described the life of the City and that of its livery companies.

<p>The fact that five invasions have taken place in Great Britain, which all made a big impact on the country, makes the history of place-names particularly interesting. The aim of this essay is therefore to compare place-names in the Manchester area and the London area, and try to find the origin of the names. An additional aim is to find out which foreign invasion, if any, has coloured the areas the most.</p>