Black middle class Britannia

Lawyers for the Poor explores the development of legal advice and aid provision in England between 1890 and 1990. It is the first book-length study to place legal advice provision in the wider context of English civil society and the welfare state, and it demonstrates how making it easier for people to get advice on their problems was shaped by changing ideas of what it meant to be a citizen. This book examines the origins in the after-hours ‘Poor Man’s Lawyer’ voluntary work of individual lawyers in late Victorian London through to the state-subsidised legal aid schemes of post-war Britain. It considers how affordable access to help with legal matters came to be seen as a right for all, and how charities, the main political parties, the trade unions and the media were involved in trying to achieve this by the 1940s. It also reveals the problems and advantages of offering legal advice services as part of the welfare state after 1949 and the ongoing concerns about using public money on private troubles – issues that remain unresolved in the twenty-first century. This book will be of interest to students and researchers of welfare, citizenship, politics, social policy and voluntary action in twentieth-century Britain, and to practitioners.

This book analyses how racism and anti-racism influence Black British middle-class cultural consumption. In doing so, this book challenges the dominant understanding of British middle-class identity and culture as being ‘beyond race’.

Paying attention to the relationship between cultural capital and cultural repertoires, this book puts forward the idea that there are three black middle-class identity modes: strategic assimilation, class-minded, and ethnoracial autonomous. People towards each of these identity modes use specific cultural repertoires to organise their cultural consumption. Those towards strategic assimilation draw on repertoires of code-switching and cultural equity, consuming traditional middle-class culture to maintain an equality with the White middle class in levels of cultural capital. Ethnoracial autonomous individuals draw on repertoires of browning and Afro-centrism, removing themselves from traditional middle-class cultural pursuits they decode as ‘Eurocentric’, while showing a preference for cultural forms that uplift Black diasporic histories and cultures. Lastly, those towards the class-minded identity mode draw on repertoires of post-racialism and de-racialisation. Such individuals polarise between ‘Black’ and middle-class cultural forms, display an unequivocal preference for the latter, and lambast other Black people who avoid middle-class culture as being culturally myopic or culturally uncultivated.

This book will appeal to sociology students, researchers, and academics working on race and class, critical race theory, and cultural sociology, among other social science disciplines.

This book is a detailed exploration of the working practices of a community of scientists whose work was questioned in public, and of the making of scientific knowledge about climate change in Scotland. For four years, the author joined these scientists in their sampling expeditions into the Caledonian forests, observed their efforts in the laboratory to produce data from wood samples, and followed their discussions of a graph showing the fluctuations of the Scottish temperature over the past millennium in conferences, workshops and peer-review journals. This epistemography of climate change is of broad social and academic relevance – both for its contextualised treatment of a key contemporary science, and for its original formulation of a methodology for investigating and writing about expertise.