All around Lancashire red brick mills highlight the sky. Today the majority stand in disuse. Blackburn, where I’m from had around 50 working mills in the 1950s. What were these workers doing in these now obsolete, empty, strange chimney like structures? The answer is trickier than one might suppose. The...
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Dissidence and Domesticity
Studies on the economic divergence between the textile industries of India and Japan, particularly their cotton spinning and weaving industry, have largely focused on technology adoption and labour organization/institutions. In both these respects, the differential role that women came to play has received prominence. The broad themes (very briefly) are...
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Research in corona times
Covid-19 is shaking up our society. As we speak, our Prime Minister is seriously condemning the violence that has taken place in several parts of the Netherlands over the past night in response to the curfew that was installed on Saturday 23 January. Draconic measures, perhaps, and to a large...
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The art of weaving
“From the shore we can watch the tide going out, but, because there is no reference point, we don’t know how much height there is between high tide and low tide. In Jersey the peak can reach up to 12 meters”. I have come to meet Severine Amsing. As an...
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Gendered diets, the inmates of the workhouses in Basford Union 1866
For breakfast, I usually eat porridge. In fact, I’m quite sure everybody eats porridge at breakfast time. But only two hundred years back, savoury porridge flavoured with onions was all the rave, and for poor people it might have been supper rather than breakfast. Porridge was and still is, cheap...
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The Long Walk
Some images endure; they become symbolic; of a time, event, or of some real or imagined human quality. The enduring image of the COVID19 pandemic in India will not be of masked health-workers; overworked, tired, but ultimately celebrated; it will be of a ceaseless swarm of decrepit workers walking, children...
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Happy International Women’s Day 2019
This blog, by project members Sarah Carmichael, Kate Frederick and Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk, was posted on International Women's Day 2019 om the UU website: https://www.uu.nl/en/background/dirty-laundry-then-and-now-international-womens-day-and-working-conditions-in-the-global-textile