This thesis unfolds from the observation that, in the years immediately following the defeat of Germany in May 1945, the radio was the best-preserved and most popular medium of mass communication. It explores the implications of the radio's dominance as a medium that both crosses and helps to define the boundaries of nation and region, as well as 'public' and 'private' space during a time when the upheavals of war and occupation were restructuring both the physical space of Germany as well as its political and symbolic spaces. It examines the practices of everyday broadcasting from the Allied-controlled radio stations in the western zones of occupied Germany to show how within the radio programmes, the diverse experiences of radio listeners were able to from part of a larger narrative of 'Germanness' at a time when Germany did not exist. Chapters explore the embedding of the radio within the every mental landscape of Germany, as well as within the private space of the home. It is argued that, in maintaining the relationships between the outside public world and the safe world of the home, the radio not only represented a means of remembering a collective German past, but also one of the primary places for the negotiation of new German identities in the present. Further chapters explore the ambiguities in the visions of these spaces produced by the radio. The production of private space is examined through a discussion of women's programming, showing the way that such programmes structured the debate surrounding women's position in society around their use of the scarce resource of time. A close examination how radio programming addressed the wider space of Germany shows how by imbuing the everyday visions of the broadcast region with the symbols of Heimat, radio programmes created a vision of Germany that at once embraced modernity and gave the impressions of maintaining a link with a usable past.

From its establishment in 1966 until its closure in 1999 the Glaswegian fashion design and manufacturing company, ‘Marion Donaldson’, was one of the most successful independent fashion businesses in the United Kingdom. The longevity enjoyed by the company coincided with a period of intense social, political, and economic upheaval in the United Kingdom, the effects of which contributed to the decline and eventual deterioration of the domestic fashion industry by the end of the century. This thesis takes ‘Marion Donaldson’ as its central case study, and uses the history of the company as a lens through which to investigate how the British fashion industry operated in practice, and how individual businesses in that industry collaborated, adapted to change, and coped with the industry’s decline. Structured around what were the four key sectors of the domestic fashion industry – design, manufacturing, sales, and retailing – this thesis demonstrates the importance of small businesses, collaboration, and balance to the industry as it battled decline. By focusing on a Glasgow example, it adds to the existing scholarship on British fashion and business in the post-war period, and goes some way to offering a corrective to those studies that have focused only on London-centric histories. The history of women’s fashion in the twentieth century has been dominated by metropolitan studies of elite clothing, while the history of mass-produced women’s wear and its associated industries have been overlooked. This thesis redresses the balance in this respect through analysis of evidence from the ‘Marion Donaldson’ Collection and the oral testimony of Marion and David Donaldson, owners of the company. In addition to oral history, the thesis builds on current methodology used in dress and textile history, economic history and the history of business and enterprise culture, and applies it to the wider context of the British fashion industry using a combination of surviving artefacts and traditional documentary sources.

Scholars of Irish migration in twentieth-century Britain have tended to present migrants' experiences through two opposing stories about 'assimilation' and the struggle to preserve an 'Irish ethnic identity' in the face of official attempts at repression. Based on in-depth analysis of oral history interviews conducted by the author between 2009 and 2011, with eight Irish migrants who settled in England between 1945-69, this thesis suggests that individual migrant experiences resist simple incorporation within this dichotomy. It does so through exploration of the diverse ways the psychic and the social intersect in the production of migrant subjectivities within specific contexts. The thesis argues that such subjectivities were not coherently constituted or unified through a single discourse on 'identity', but that there were always multiple, often contradictory, possibilities available for self-construction within the different spaces migrants inhabited, in both the past and present. Through investigation of the distinct ways different respondents constructed themselves in relation to four sites of memory, namely leaving Ireland, pre-marriage years in the post-war British city, the construction industry, and 'The Troubles', the thesis shows how migrants negotiated and drew upon a diverse range of subject-positions in order to constitute themselves within their personal accounts of settlement. This inter-subjective process was conditioned by the possibilities and constraints of the various local, communal, and institutional discourses which mediated the lived realities of migration to Britain and which were available in the present for self-construction. But it was affected too by the active if usually unconscious workings of memory. How migrants interacted with available discourses was never predetermined but was shaped by on-going dialogues between public and private, past and present, there and here. Within each narrative these dialogues formed parts of individually specific strategies of 'composure' through which subjects, with varying degrees of success, sought to render their experiences into a coherent, integrated whole. The thesis argues that Irish migrant 'identity' in post-1945 England was never the finished product of a linear process of 'assimilation' or simple determinants like national origin, class, or religion. It is more usefully approached as a variable set of dialogic processes, as part of which migrants made investments in a diverse range of discourses in a bid to formulate self-affirming understandings of the migration experience.

This thesis responds to a growing appreciation for the richness and ambiguity of mid-century architectural culture in Britain. Initially focussing on the enthusiasm for a science-based approach among architects and town planners, the thesis identifies – in the diverse debates of the Second World War and immediate post-war years – an architecture that achieves significantly more than an abstract, inhuman, or totalising utopianism. Instead, it will expose affinities between the enthusiastic pursuit of objective solutions in architecture and planning and the drastically compromised realities, both of the historic city in ruins, and of certain episodes in the history of architecture that enjoyed popularity after the war. The first chapter introduces the problem of utopianism, a concept that has often accompanied critical studies of modern architecture. An appraisal of the utopian tradition highlights the frequent vagueness and ahistoricism of the term, leaving room for an appreciation of utopian speculation as dynamically historical, with the potential to decisively enact change. The second chapter identifies these characteristics in the mid-century enthusiasm for scientific planning, an approach that used quantifiable methods of research in order to legitimise an emerging town planning profession, which had gained added impetus from the transformative social impact of the Second World War. Underpinned by the civic and regional survey, this approach advanced the potential of technocratic management to ‘solve’ the problems of social organisation and physical planning. However, an analysis of specific attempts to speculatively develop the necessary planning machinery indicates a far richer range of concerns. The third chapter shows that the experience of wartime bombing dramatically changed the aspect of Britain’s towns and cities, with the resulting ruins presenting a visceral challenge to the idealising promise of science. But this seeming conflict obscures the relationship between ruination and reconstruction. For the anxiety and exhilaration of destruction was, in fact, embedded in the practice of rebuilding, both in the memories of the builders and of the public at large. Furthermore, an examination of contemporary architectural writing on the subject of wartime ruins displays an attempt to aestheticise and appropriate the ruin’s effects, while simultaneously maintaining an outward attitude of detachment. The final chapter develops this discussion, moving from the ruins of the historic city to investigate the mid-century adoption of architectural history as a justification for design. It will show that while scientific research seemed to promise objective solutions, the study of history received a similar authority after the war. Consequently, the historian could assume a status analogous to that of the planning expert: a fact evidenced by the activities of Rudolf Wittkower and Nikolaus Pevsner. Just as the utopian potential of science was conditioned by its contingency, this chapter will demonstrate that the appeal to history would also inevitably be limited to partial solutions.

This study examines the development of police stop and search in Scotland from the post-war period onwards. The aim is to explain the remarkable scale of stop and search, the attendant lack of political or academic engagement prior to the formation of the single service in in April 2013, and to draw out the implications, both for policing and the public. The thesis takes a top-down perspective which seeks to explain the policing direction in terms of elite outlooks and decision-making over time. It is argued that search rates in contemporary Scotland can be explained in terms of an incremental shift in the way that the tactic has been conceptualized by political and policing elites. Specifically, it is argued that the post-war construct of stop and search as a reactive mechanism premised on investigation, detection and the disruption of crime, has been displaced by a proactive model, premised on intensive, risk-based stop and search activity. It is argued that this shift has partly attenuated the link between stop searches and suspicious behaviour by introducing non-detection as a measure of successful deterrence, alongside the traditional aim of detection. In short, it is argued that stop and search has been remodelled as a tactic that can be legitimated irrespective of the outcome. The thesis will show how this shift has progressively weighted the balance between crime control and individual freedom in favour of the state, and weakened the rights of the individual, with minimal regard for procedural protection and human rights. The thesis employs a wide range of data sources and methodologies to investigate the core argument, which is developed from three interrelated positions. First, taking a historical perspective, the thesis examines elite sensibilities and decision-making in relation to stop and search from the early 1950s, through to the early 2000s. Next, the thesis adopts an empirical position to investigate the use of stop and search between 2005 and 2010, and shows how search activity on the street reflected dominant outlooks higher up the ranks. Finally, the thesis adopts a normative perspective in order to assess the ethical implications of stop and search practice in Scotland, and to develop a series of informed recommendations for policy and practice.

This thesis analyses British Jewish identity between 1945 and 1960 through the medium of Jewish youth movements. It argues that youth movements are key sites for the formation and transmission of communal identities into subsequent generations. It entails institutional studies of three Jewish youth organisations: the Jewish Lads’ Brigade, the Victoria Boys’ and Girls’ Club, and the Maccabi Union and is divided accordingly, with chapters devoted to each. The thesis examines the preferred identities that each club sought to impose on their members, using these identities as case studies for the wider British Jewish community. Each chapter addresses issues of national identity, gender, sexuality, faith, ethnicity, Jewish heritage and culture, Zionism, popular music and youth behaviour in order to construct an image of the manner in which various sections of British Jewry perceived their sense of identity. The results of the thesis demonstrate that British Jewish identity was fragmented and heterogeneous, with various sections of the community interpreting the over-arching communal identity in a number of different and at times contested ways. These interpretations were liminal in nature, existing at the boundaries of a variety of sub-identities, and drew on themes that were specific to both British Jews and to wider non-Jewish society, demonstrating that British Jews saw no distinction between the ‘British’ and ‘Jewish’ aspects of their identities. Such interpretations were highly dynamic and continued to evolve in the face of developing circumstances, both within and outside of British Jewry. In exploring the differing communal identities on offer within British Jewry, the thesis also charts the emergence and priorities of a new communal elite and suggests that it is more precise to speak of multiple British Jewish identities and communities than of a single communal bloc.

<p>The thesis attempts to explore and analyze the characteristics of the writing of death in Cioran' s texts. Living in France smce 1937, the Romanian-born French writer E.M.Cioran has established a significant position for himself in contemporary French literature. He has been considered one of the greatest French stylists while his contribution to the development of the contemporary essay has o~en been compared to Beckett's contribution to the renewal of the theater in postwar France. The first part of the study is an inquiry into the sense of death that oriented Cioran' s aphoristic writings from beginning to end. I try to describe the crisis of metaphysics and language that influenced Cioran' s -writing, as well as the possible links between his essays and a particular Romanian feeling for death. On the other hand, I also connect Cioran' s writings with the sense of death that characterizes contemporary examinations of discourse in the period after 1960, in France. In the second part of the thesis I attempt to formulate a typological description and analysis of Cioran' s essential modes of expression, the essay and the aphorism. My intention is to examine the feeling of death as a generator of style through an analysis of Cioran' s fundamental texts. The thesis ultimately suggests that in Emil Cioran's work, the feeling of death represents a direct challenge to the legitimacy of literature. Is Cioran a great metaphysician of death? Or is his writing in revolt against the sterile rationalism of the metaphysical revolution that followed the Enlightenment? Should we, then, reconsider his thought and style as a post-modernist expression of the feeling of the end? The present study does not claim to answer these questions, but merely to suggest a few paths that could lead to a better understanding of the writing of an important contemporary French writer.</p> / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

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