A festive publication

An illustration from The Present

You are never too young to debate questions of politics. That is the view of Dr Peter Hayes, Senior Lecturer in Politics.  He has just published a book called The Present, which introduces young readers to contested political issues through a story concerning Father Christmas.

“Father Christmas is magic but his Christmas gift giving involves him in a number of serious real-world issues,” Peter explains. “These issues include the working conditions of people making Christmas presents; the regimentation and surveillance that underpins our modern consumerist society; the increasingly hard border between those within the industrial core and those outside it, and the contribution of consumerism to global warming.  All of these international political issues lie behind the annual appearance of Father Christmas.”

The Present does not try to answer what we should do about all this, but it does raise questions, and encourages children and their family and friends to think about, discuss and perhaps argue over these matters.

The Present is available from online book retailers. Watch a video about the book here.

Listening to the Neanderthals

Dr Susan Mandala has published an article in the journal Discourse, Context & Media. In ''Listening' to the Neanderthals in William Golding’s The Inheritors: A sociopragmatic approach to fictional dialogue', Susan employs theory of mind and intentionality as analytical tools in order to ‘listen’ more closely to the Neanderthals in Golding’s 1955 novel. Paying particular attention to these characters as they express their religious beliefs, engage in storytelling, and work through interpersonal conflicts, she argues that readers are invited to infer that the Neanderthal characters are themselves inferring beings, and further demonstrate that this interpretation has implications not only for how individuals approach the novel, but for the way The Inheritors as a cultural text can be understood to participate in discursively mediating our relationship with the figure of the Neanderthal.

When minorities say no

School of Culture PhD student Wjoud Almadani will be speaking at the first seminar in a series designed to showcase the work of PhD students across the university (details above). Everyone is welcome!

History research seminar

New Perspectives on the Great War, 6 December 2017, 4.30pm, Reg Vardy RV213

Ann-Marie Foster (Northumbria University): Family and Individual Remembrance as a Way of Breaching the Divide

During the First World War, 750,000 British soldiers perished. As Adrian Gregory has argued, this means that roughly 10 per cent of the British population lost a close relative. Disasters provide a useful theoretical framework for examining experiences of loss in the Great War. Much like the loss of a Pal’s battalion, an explosion in a colliery could decimate a mining community. Miners often lost close friends and relatives, and newly created widows grieved using largely the same artefacts and ephemera as those who lost a loved one in war. Similarly, for those directly involved in the disaster, men who volunteered for rescue parties would have had to confront the mutilated remains of their companions, if the disaster was such that bodies could be recovered at all. This paper therefore explores individual and family reactions to sudden death at the turn of the century. Through examining these similarly devastating events, a more nuanced understanding of mourning in the early twentieth century can be gained.


Andre Keil (University of Sunderland): In Defence of British Freedom? The Struggle for Civil Liberties and the British State during the First World War

The First World War witnessed a significant expansion of the powers of the British state. Legislation, such as the Defence of the Realm Act, provided the authorities with unprecedented powers to regulate and control almost every aspect of everyday life in the country. This emergency regime during the war has often been described as a 'constitutional dictatorship'. However, these developments did also trigger the emergence of the first civil liberties groups in Britain. This paper will trace the history of the National Council for Civil Liberties during the war and will explain how its campaigns shaped the early civil liberties and human rights movement.