26,123 research outputs found
Singing for my life : memory, nonviolence and the songs of Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp
No full textI am singing as I write this. For more than 30 years songs from Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp in the UK have been an important part of my personal memories of nonviolent political struggle. In this chapter I examine the articulations of my personal memories of Greenham Common Women’s Camp within and through the wider cultural and digital memories of what became one of the most internationally known peace camps in the 1980s against nuclear weapons towards the end of the Cold War. In particular, I examine how the cultural memories of nonviolent struggle are articulated through the songs that Greenham Common women created and shared that have since become further globalized through digital cultures. I explore the memories of the collective forms of cultural production embedded in the songs as well as the images and language of nonviolence present in some of the songs. I draw on a personal archive that I collected in 1987 as part of an honours thesis at the University of York (Reading, 1987) as well as the publicly available digital archives of the songs articulated through online websites, and the re-embodied memories of women reconnected through social networks that include Facebook and Youtube. I explore how the ‘connective memories’ (Hoskins, 2009) of Greenham Common’s Women’s Peace Songs are articulated through the combined dynamics of globalization and digitization conceptualized here and elsewhere in my work as ‘the globital memory field’ (Reading, 2011a)
Reading-related skills in earlier- and later-schooled children
No full textWe investigate the effects of age-related factors and formal instruction on the development of reading-related skills in children aged four and seven years. Age effects were determined by comparing two groups of children at the onset of formal schooling; one aged seven (later-schooled) and one aged four (earlier-schooled). Schooling effects were measured by comparing the later-schooled group with earlier-schooled age-matched controls. There were significant effects of age and schooling on phonological awareness and visual-verbal learning, and an effect of age, but not schooling, on vocabulary and short-term verbal memory. We conclude that age-related factors and reading instruction contribute to the development of phoneme awareness and that vocabulary and verbal memory improve with age
Introduction
No full textOur name is humankind, not humancruel. Yet, it is sometimes difficult to recognize our kindness with war memorials that dominate public spaces and a relentless culture of human atrocity and death depicted 24 hours a day on world news. Is it then that world cultures remember violence and trauma but not human resilience, struggle and agency? Or is it that the widespread memorialization of war exploits and heroism has been so dominant in the commemoration of valuable pasts as to completely submerge the cultural memories of struggle and agency in nonviolent contexts? Certainly the field of memory studies has given a great deal of emphasis to examining the cultural memories of war and atrocity whereas the cultural memories of nonviolent struggle remain little examined. Implicit in this foregrounding of violence and trauma is a concern with violence in the form of warfare on the one hand (with its ever-present potential for heroic action) and with victimhood and lack of agency on the other hand. This book foregrounds an alternative line of memory work, one in which the linkage between struggle and violence is disrupted and agency comes to be associated with the rejection of violence. This is not to deny the significance of memories of war and atrocity as these are culturally inscribed by both perpetrators and victims in various modes and sites of enactment. It is, however, an attempt to call scholarly attention to cultural arenas in which human agency and moral vision find their expression in nonviolent action that transforms social landscapes and remakes human histories
Richardson, Barbauld, and the construction of an early modern fan club
No full textMPhilMuch has been written about the life and long works of the eighteenth century epistolary novelist, Samuel Richardson, but the prospect of his position as the first celebrity novelist – responsible for courting his own fame as well as initiating his own fan club – has largely been ignored. The body of manuscripts housed at the National Art Library in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London provides the modern scholar with evidence of the skeletal beginnings of an early fan club. This thesis aims to show how these manuscripts were turned into a saleable commodity by the publisher and entrepreneur Richard Phillips, while under the guiding hand of another, slightly later, literary celebrity, Anna Laetitia Barbauld. In order to restore Richardson’s reputation amongst a new nineteenth century audience, Barbauld was required to construct her own idea of him as an eighteenth century celebrity author, and in doing so the insecurities of a self-professed, apparently diffident man, are revealed. Barbauld’s capacious, but heavily edited selection of letters is analyzed in this thesis, providing ample evidence that Richardson’s correspondents were more than just eager letter writers. By using Barbauld’s biography of Richardson this thesis aims to show how she manipulates the genre of life writing in her construction of him.
This thesis offers an alternative reading of how the Richardson manuscripts are viewed, redefining them as not simply a collection of letters, but as a collective entity, deliberately selected and archived as evidence of an early modern fan club, and its celebrity managing director
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