Tehila Sasson and Radhika Natarajan are both graduate students studying British history at the University of California, Berkeley. Although we came to the program with very different interests, we have both settled on postwar topics for our dissertation research.
Tehila works on non-governmental politics in post-war Britain. She is interested in the relationship between the welfare state and voluntary groups and the ways in which ethical concerns around issues such as homelessness, child poverty and living standards were transformed into political action. In her dissertation, she plans to examine how national and international non-governmental groups developed new forms of expertise and campaigned for their causes through mass media and, more specifically, through films and television. She hopes to show how the voluntary impulses in society shaped a new understanding of the political, in which the ethics of welfare was not a monolithic system but a hyper local one that extended beyond the boundaries of the parliamentary system.
Radhika writes about the remaking of community in postwar Britain. She considers the ways anxiety over the break up of community was displaced into hopes and fears for the integration of Commonwealth migrants into local social services. Through the story of the welfare state's engagement with colonial and Commonwealth migrants, she considers the post-imperial legacies of social intervention, ethnic identification, and communal conflict. She shows how multi-culturalism emerged as a solution to the dissolution of community in the postwar era and the ways multi-culturalism recapitulated the problematic relationships between imperial governance and colonial subjects.
Our training has covered the long history of Britain and the Empire, especially since the Glorious Revolution. We both have felt a bit lost thinking about the postwar era, not only because of the ways histories of earlier eras do not take into account post-1945 developments, but also because recent writing about the post-war period is not necessarily in a single field of conversation. We hope this conference will be an opportunity to discuss what is shared between all of this work on the postwar. We look forward to talking postwar with you in Berkeley!
Tehila works on non-governmental politics in post-war Britain. She is interested in the relationship between the welfare state and voluntary groups and the ways in which ethical concerns around issues such as homelessness, child poverty and living standards were transformed into political action. In her dissertation, she plans to examine how national and international non-governmental groups developed new forms of expertise and campaigned for their causes through mass media and, more specifically, through films and television. She hopes to show how the voluntary impulses in society shaped a new understanding of the political, in which the ethics of welfare was not a monolithic system but a hyper local one that extended beyond the boundaries of the parliamentary system.
Radhika writes about the remaking of community in postwar Britain. She considers the ways anxiety over the break up of community was displaced into hopes and fears for the integration of Commonwealth migrants into local social services. Through the story of the welfare state's engagement with colonial and Commonwealth migrants, she considers the post-imperial legacies of social intervention, ethnic identification, and communal conflict. She shows how multi-culturalism emerged as a solution to the dissolution of community in the postwar era and the ways multi-culturalism recapitulated the problematic relationships between imperial governance and colonial subjects.
Our training has covered the long history of Britain and the Empire, especially since the Glorious Revolution. We both have felt a bit lost thinking about the postwar era, not only because of the ways histories of earlier eras do not take into account post-1945 developments, but also because recent writing about the post-war period is not necessarily in a single field of conversation. We hope this conference will be an opportunity to discuss what is shared between all of this work on the postwar. We look forward to talking postwar with you in Berkeley!
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UNTITLED PHOTOGRAPH
Unknown Photographer, nd
Unknown Photographer, nd
(The Grunwick Strike happened in Willesden, Northwest London between 1976 and 1978)