On 1 September 1923, a major earthquake struck the Kanto Plain in the east of Japan. The earthquake triggered countless fires across Tokyo and Yokohama that raged for three days. The “Great Kanto Earthquake” displaced over two million refugees and killed between 91,000 and 140,000 people in what remains the deadliest earthquake in Japanese history. News of the earthquake reached Britain in a roundabout way and quickly became a major news story. This paper investigates how the British press covered the earthquake throughout the weeks that followed the disaster.
This paper argues that the British press highlighted what the tabloids interpreted as the cultural differences between Britain and Japan. Newspapers argued that the earthquake and fires had decimated the wooden houses that typified Japanese architecture. In contrast, the press reported that the buildings that had been built from brick and concrete along Western designs had survived unscathed. Newspaper cartoons depicted Japanese women in kimonos and contrasted the clothing styles of Japan with those of the West. At the same time, photographs in the press depicted the survivors of the earthquake and the Japanese people as resilient and stoic. This paper concludes that British newspaper coverage of the earthquake illustrates that architecture, dress, and photography played a significant role in shaping British perceptions of the Japanese people during the inter-war period.
My PhD researches anti-militarist activity within the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). This paper draws on research for my thesis and examines how British conscientious objectors during the First World War and its aftermath were ‘othered’ as a result of their anti-war stance. Previous scholarly accounts have already highlighted the exclusion many conscientious objectors experienced, citing their imprisonment in harsh conditions as well as post-war disenfranchisement. Historians have also noted that such individuals were typically portrayed by their contemporaries as weak and effeminate, questioning whether they could be truly British. My paper argues that this perception of foreignness was fundamentally linked to the ‘othering’ of these anti-war activists, and in fact led to widespread fears that conscientious objectors posed an existential threat to British society.
Throughout the First World War, many politicians were convinced anti-militarists were in the pay of Germany who used them to destabilise Britain, a belief which, while unsubstantiated, retained a remarkable following amongst wider British opinion. ‘Moscow Gold’, which almost seamlessly replaced the German money trope following the 1917 Russian Revolutions, carried even more potency, and ran parallel to the belief that conscientious objectors, inspired by Russia’s peace with Germany in 1918, had become virtually synonymous with Bolsheviks. These fears helped to fundamentally direct Government attitudes towards conscientious objectors and ensured many remained imprisoned months after the war ended, highlighting the very real consequences of ‘othering’ particular elements within society.
The medical profession too has displayed marginalising and dysfunctional behaviour at institutional and professional levels and perhaps, still does. This paper describes two examples of the chronic power imbalance between the dominant British Army Medical Department (AMD) and the Indian Medical Service (IMS), the colonized ‘other’.
While medical organisation within the British Army dates back to the seventeenth century, it was not until the early nineteenth century that the AMD was established followed by the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) in 1898. Whereas the IMS, latterly often staffed by Irish and Scottish doctors, was born out of the colonizing presence of the East India Company which had gained a foothold in India in 1600.
By the dawn of the twentieth century, the professional and cultural hegemony of the AMD, through exclusion and marginalising, had created a climate that stilled the voices of senior IMS doctors and denied them agency. Furthermore, a reductionist British view of the IMS, meant that modern medical techniques and support for research were hard to come by for the colonial ‘other’.
Two examples illustrate this. Ronald Ross of the IMS, awarded the Nobel Prize for his work on malaria transmission, spoke candidly about his research constantly being stymied by the AMD. My own research revealed how Colonel Hehir IMS was marginalised by his senior colleague, General Hathaway RAMC in the infamous Mesopotamian Campaign in 1915.
Imperial necessity meant that colonizing institutions and officials, though numerically fewer, routinely exploited their power to dominate their professional equals.
The colonial ‘state’ was an intersection of different layers of interaction and relationship shaped by the coloniser's othering of the colonised. I examine how the constructive narrative of the colonised as ‘primitive’ shaped colonial policing and use the notion of colonial durability to show how othering reproduces itself in the policing of Indigenous communities in Africa. I highlight three key findings from my fieldwork among the Afikpo people. The first is the most striking. First, policing was a process through which the othering of indigenes was realised, the spatial segregation under the colonial state was a deliberate attempt to institutionalise otherness in enforcing colonial laws. Second, in the aftermath of the Second World War, inspired by anti-colonial sentiments and fears of communist infiltration, the construction of the other moved from ‘primitive’ to ‘potentially dangerous’ prompting a relapse into paramilitary policing and strained police-community relations. Third, colonial durability in postcolonial policing has given way to the resurgence of indigenous policing instruments. The impact of colonial othering on the policing of Indigenous communities has not been well captured. By shedding light on these findings, the study underscores the critical need for a dedicated field for studying African policing history not merely for historical interest but for its material effects.
For years I mothered in silence for fear of judgement and stigma. I spent my master’s year and the first year of my PhD embracing my own voice and using it to tell the taboo hidden stories of many other mothers. My miscarriage knocked my confidence in sharing. No one had ever shared their miscarriage story with me. So again, I was plummeted into silence and loneliness. That experience showed me that some stories are easier than others to share. When someone else has already pathed the road, when you already know there’s others out there who have been through what you have been through, speaking out can come easier. But it’s never easy. In sharing my loss, a handful of mothers reached out with their own miscarriage narratives, mothers I know but until that point have never truly known. I was no longer alone, no longer without voice. And neither were they.
As a feminist researcher my research is built upon the amplification of those whose voices have been ignored. For too long academics have hidden away their personal lives to appear objective and scientific. Within this research, my voice, as with the voices of other mothers, will not be hidden away. Instead, this research highlights how the sharing of real-life mothering experiences, many of which are my own, acts as a resistance to the institution of motherhood that for far too long has set mothers up to fail.
Trigger warning: details of miscarriage and blood.
By 1900 “the prostitute” had become a symbol of modernity (Samuels 2006), epitomising the perceived dangers of a new age marked by inexorable change, and the erosion of the bourgeois societal order. “The prostitute” is central for the demarcation of the boundaries of “acceptable femininity” dividing women in “good” and “bad”, constituting an instrument of patriarchal control integral to early 20th century German society (and beyond). This paper argues that the construction of “the prostitute” in early 20th century German culture is a site of Othering closely intertwined with other ideologies of exclusion.
Drawing on scientific literature, such as criminal anthropological, medical, and psychiatric texts and literary and theatrical imaginings of “the prostitute” such as Wedekind’s Lulu and Böhme’s Thymian this paper maps their misogynist underpinnings and demonstrates both structural parallels and intersections with antiziganism and antisemitism. Employing tenets of critical theory and feminist psychoanalysis, I will show that “the prostitute” becomes a symbol and a carrier of degeneration. She is linked to the construction of the “vagabond”, a figure typically associated with the antisemitic notion of “the wandering Jew” and the antiziganist projections of the “sedentary gypsy”. This ascertained “intersectionality of ideologies” (Stögner 2017) can offer further clues on how gender interacts with other ideologies to moderate and reinforce images of powerful others threatening society.
In the 1930s, domestic service permits were a key route through which Jewish women could emigrate to Britain. Around 20,000 Jewish women arrived in Britain on these permits between 1938 and 1939 alone, however the experiences of such women and society’s attitude towards them remains largely absent in historiographies of Britain and Anglo-Jewry. In this paper, I will use The Jewish Chronicle to demonstrate how class, gender and sexuality influenced society’s attitude towards Jewish refugee women. The topic of domestic service refugees is important since the introduction of middle-class Jewish women to Britain’s working-class domestic service industry complicated the image that Anglo-Jewry sought to portray of itself, namely, of an assimilated and middle-class Jewish population in Britain. This image was only further complicated by the association of immigrants with prostitution in this period because of white slave trafficking. A survey of The Jewish Chronicle’s engagement with these issues will provide a new perspective on how Anglo-Jewry chose to navigate its way round domestic service refugees to ensure these women were able to blend in with the middle-classes and not become associated with the image of the poor, sexually promiscuous immigrant. By frequently highlighting refugee domestics’ educated backgrounds and unsuitability for servant positions, The Jewish Chronicle was a key means through which Anglo-Jewry asserted its class identity in the interwar years, and domestic service refugees became central to these discussions in the 1930s.
In contemporary Western societies, overt manifestations of racism and sexism are increasingly condemned and penalised, yet covert forms of these prejudices persistently infiltrate both institutional and interpersonal spheres. Particularly affected are Black women leaders, who navigate the complexities of intersectional identities (race and gender), facing gendered-racial microaggressions that undermine their health, well-being, and efficacy within organisations. The literature underscores the detrimental effects of microaggressions, equating their impact to overt aggressions. A notable challenge for Black women in leadership is the power paradox: simultaneously embodying authority and experiencing vulnerability due to gender and racial biases. This duality may influence their identity, coping strategies, and response to microaggressions, especially in power-laden interactions. The objectives of this study are to; (i) explore how Black women leaders in UK workplaces perceive gendered-racial microaggressions from junior employees within the context of power dynamics, (ii) examine their strategies for responding to these microaggressions considering the complex interplay of authority and vulnerability, and (iii) evaluate the influence of these power-laden interactions on their career decisions and progression. Utilising in-depth interviews, the study will delve into the nuanced ways in which power dynamics shape the experiences of Black women leaders, highlighting the intersection of gender, race, and power. Given the significant portion of life spent in the workplace, understanding these dynamics is not only pertinent but also urgent. This study intends to contribute to the discourse by elucidating the role of power in the perception, reaction to, and career implications of gendered racial microaggressions for Black women in leadership positions.
My thesis examines youth perpetrators in the Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda, 1994. Throughout my research, there is significant focus on pre-genocide ethnic tension within Rwandan communities. Before the genocide, there was significant Othering of the Tutsi population by the Hutu Extremists in power, leading to the massacres which took place in 1994.
My paper will look at the process of Othering in pre-genocide Rwanda. The main focus period will be from 1st October 1990 to the 7th of April 1994. During this period of less than four years, Rwandan society undertook a gradual but firm escalation of ethnic tension throughout the population. In the lead up to the genocide, Hutu Extremist groups created a propaganda campaign Othering the Tutsi population.
Triggered by the outbreak of a civil war, my paper will look at the process of Othering created by different parts of Rwandan society. Looking at the Churches, Schoolhouses and Propaganda and homelife, this paper will analyse the actions of the Hutu Extremists which created the conditions for genocide. I will showcase the Rwandan instance of Othering with a discussion of the lack of resistance to Othering by the churches – with the Archbishop of Kigali being a member of the leading Extremist party – the pro-extremist curriculum in schools and the propaganda created by the state in the lead up to the genocide. The process of Othering by the Extremist government was so successful that many Rwandans today still feel it within society.
Othering often can be discovered as a hidden foundational principle of a state’s nationality legislation. This paper explores to what extent blood lineage or kinship – the principle of jus sanguinis – institutionalises the process of ‘othering’ and racism for a lot of descendants of Algerian immigration, most of them born and bred in France. French legislation on naturalisation is, avowedly, based on assimilation with French cultural values rather than on involuntary blood genealogy. I argue that this contradiction makes an identification with the so called ‘French republican values’, almost impossible. My collection of oral histories from Franco-Algerians aged twenty to fifty challenge both the French law and the formalised cultural embodiment of Frenchness. This paper’s hypothesis is that, in order to overrule societal othering, there is an urgent need for a rethinking of the term ‘ethnicity’, both in its institutional and in its self-identification semantics.
The first part uses legal evidence from dual nationals deprived of French citizenship, and from foreign citizens who had their application for French nationality refused on the basis of a particular ethno-cultural behaviour which is not prohibited by the law. It attempts to prove that citizenship is often used to impose exclusion rather than inclusion on descendants of immigration.
The second part evaluates how another legal principle – that of ‘effective nationality’, translated by French sociologist Patrick Weil in the requirement to comply with the ‘four pillars of French nationhood’ – creates a self-identificatory tension in French-born descendants of Algerian immigrants living in France.
The Brazilian author Clarice Lispector’s fiction has always avoided easy categorisation by critics, with the unfortunate exception of one: “foreignness”. Since her debut novel Perto do coração selvagem (Near to the Wild Heart) in 1943, this label has been a recurrent theme for both national and international critics. Though her novel was very positively received, they questioned her identity and threw into doubt her Brazilianness (a typical rumour of the time being that “[she] doesn’t exist. It’s the pseudonym of someone who lives in Europe.”). This began even before critics were aware of her background as the daughter of Ukrainian Jews, who immigrated to Brazil when Clarice was barely a year old. Given her own self-avowed, proudly Brazilian identity, Lispector has always bristled against the reification and essentialising of her “foreignness”. Despite this, even among her supposedly more sensitive contemporary champions this approach continues. Benjamin Moser and Hélène Cixous, for example, both maintain this “foreignness” as integral to their respective Jewish and feminist readings of her work. This paper will challenge this othering critical practice, arguing instead for Lispector’s links to Brazilian modernismo and the historically syncretic nature of Brazilian language and literature, which incorporates European, African and Indigenous influences, albeit not without unease. I will conclude with a brief gloss of how my own PhD project approaches Lispector’s distinctive stylistics, by centring on Lispector’s individuality and her own syncretism, identified as the interplay of her Jewish and Brazilian cultural backgrounds in her fiction.
This paper investigates the pervasive issue of cultural marginalisation within architectural literature, focusing on the indigenous culture of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and its impact on domestic privacy. Cultural marginalisation has resulted in the "othering" of practitioners of the local culture, relegating them to a status incongruent with the majority or the dominant national ideology.
While existing literature tends to emphasize a limited segment of the nation, this research centres on Jeddah's domestic culture, specifically exploring the dynamic nature of intra-house privacy. Uncovering a significant gap in scholarly discourse, indigenous practices are either excluded or dismissed as incongruent with established criteria.
Consequences of cultural marginalization include a distorted portrayal of Jeddah homes, limiting the applicability of study outcomes, and restricting readings, analyses, and results due to the prolonged dominance of a single conception. This perpetuates the portrayal of alternative practices as alien, novice, and odd, rather than acknowledging them as the cultural norm for many inhabitants.
The paper challenges this status quo by presenting findings that highlight the fluid nature of privacy in Jeddah homes as a cultural practice. It explains the process that led to such marginalization and proposes methods to undo the "othering" of local inhabitants and their culture. Emphasizing the responsibility of scholars to re-evaluate methodologies and assumptions, the paper urges the consideration of nuanced needs and lifestyles in future housing projects for the diverse inhabitants of Jeddah.
Our publishing workshop will give you an introduction to publishing as an academic. We’ll hear the experiences of a postgraduate student who recently published in an academic journal for the first time and from an experienced Professor with a long publishing history.
In this paper I explore the construction of Gothic monstrous characters in Miguel Angel Asturias’ El Señor Presidente (1946) as a form of Othering utilizing racial features and traits of disability. The first aim of this paper is to show how the author revisits the figure of Dracula to construct his dictator character, while drawing on racial and anthropological features. Thus, the author creates a hybrid monster that highlights the horror of a proto-totalitarian dictatorship regime, rather than focusing on the dictator alone. The second aim of this paper is to highlight how the author depicts other characters by using traits of disability: therefore, evoking a Gothicised version of the freak show. Hence, the author reveals how mental illness and physical disability were used as markers in the early modernization undertaking (particularly under what I propose to call proto-totalitarian regimes). Thus, this paper aims to show how the author utilizes the freak show to depict the effect of proto-totalitarian policies over physical and mental health of individuals and communities. My approach to literature, through the Gothic, contributes to the field of historical otherness by highlighting the techniques of othering in Latin America during the early twentieth century.
This paper examines medical and religious discourse to explore some ways in which homosexual men were othered in Northern Ireland between the 1960s and the 1980s. Existing scholarly accounts have focused on the Gay Liberation campaign for the extension of the Sexual Offences (1967) Act to Northern Ireland which eventually succeeded in 1982. This paper draws on recent research conducted in Belfast for AHRC funded research project, Queer NI before Liberation.
The notion of homosexuality as a sickness was never wholly accepted in Northern Ireland. It was believed by many to detract from theological ideas of ‘sin’, yet the ascendancy of pseudo-medical practices which aimed to ‘cure’ were prolonged by the effects of religious culture. Psychologists working in Belfast perceived a personality disorder which might be alleviated by interventions including aversion therapy. Through doing so they, positioned male same-sex desire as an aberration which deviated from a heterosexual, masculine norm. Writings by psychologists demonstrate how efforts to effect a ‘cure’ involved trying to make patients emulate and perform a narrowly conceptualised version of normative heterosexual masculinity. Meanwhile, churches in Northern Ireland had drawn upon a long tradition of theological homophobia to construct the homosexual man as a sinner, whose behaviour placed him outside religiously derived sexual norms. The law reform campaign of the late seventies forced them to confront the issue. More liberal religious voices - including a group of Protestants who rejected the notion of sinfulness but instead mobilised a discourse of love and compassion - were drowned out by an infamous campaign by fundamentalist Christians.
In 1952, the popular press reported that American woman Christine Jorgensen had undergone the 'world's first sex change' surgery. Newspapers in Britain were curious but sympathetic to Christine's story, giving her space to describe her female self-identification and generally accepting her as an attractive, highly feminine woman. However, three decades later, conceptualisations of trans women in Britain had altered significantly. In 1980, Michael Caine starred as a ‘transsexual’ psychiatrist and murderer of women in Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill (1980). The film was embroiled in controversy in Britain, as feminists and reporters claimed it ‘glamourises murder by a transvestite, and [is] a root cause of growing male violence against women’. Between 1952 and 1980, trans women had shifted from being recognised as women to being demonised as male aggressors in popular media and the press. Why were trans women othered from womanhood in this period?
This paper argues that from the mid-1950s, sexological theories that questioned trans self-identification and the efficacy of gender-affirming surgery began to permeate popular culture. Over the next thirty years, these theories contributed to increasing social, legal, and biological proscriptions against trans people. Beginning with Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), contemporary anxieties around gender variance found expression in popular culture through the trope of the ‘transvestite killer’, a gender-confused ‘male’ character who takes not only women’s lives but their identities. This paper traces the development of the ‘transvestite killer’ in film from Psycho to Dressed to Kill, situating the trope within wider discourses around transfemininity in the popular press. In doing so, this paper decodes why trans women were increasingly stigmatised and othered from womanhood in the mid to late twentieth century and identifies the significance of film within this process.
Trigger Warning - this paper contains discussion of transphobia, violence, and sexual abuse.
5.25pm – 5.30pm: Conclusions
Book your free ticket here!