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We bring together politicians, commentators, academics, students, and members of the public to discuss and debate the major challenges facing us in a fast-moving and ever-changing world.
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Behind Closed Doors: The Secret Life of London Private Members' Clubs
On 15 November 2022, ITV's Political Editor, Robert Peston, tweeted about being refused entry to a private members' club in Central London (https://twitter.com/Peston/status/1592619989324165120?s=20&t=9a5cZga2Ph5wiMchaM-4EQ) for wearing 'comfortable mid-top trainers' and sparked fierce debate about the traditions and standards of London clubs as well as their influence on public life in 2022.
In this special episode of the Mile End Institute Podcast - recorded earlier this Summer - Dr Seth Thévoz (http://www.sethalexanderthevoz.com/) (a freelance historian and the foremost expert on 'Clubland') explores the fascinating story of the rise, decline, and resurgence of London's private members' clubs, from the late-eighteenth century to the present day.
Reflecting on his latest book, Behind Closed Doors (https://www.littlebrown.co.uk/titles/seth-alexander-th%C3%A9voz/behind-closed-doors/9781472146465/), Thévoz explains that, while clubs may have started out as white, male, aristocratic watering holes, all sections of society built their own clubs and lived their lives there: highbrow and lowbrow; women and men; working-class, middle-class and upper-class; international and British.
11 Aug 2022
Britain Alone: How a decade of conflict remade the nation
In the last episode of this series of the Mile End Institute Podcast, our Deputy Director, Dr Karl Pike (https://www.qmul.ac.uk/politics/staff/profiles/pikekarl.html), talks to Dr Liam Stanley (https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/politics/people/academic-staff/liam-stanley) from the University of Sheffield about his new book, Britain Alone: How a decade of conflict remade the nation (https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526159205/), which was published by Manchester University Press earlier this year. Beginning with the global financial crisis of 2008, Britain Alone explores how a decade of 'austerity' as well as immigration and the hostile environment, nostalgia, race and the 'left behind', and the Covid-19 pandemic shaped Britain. Karl and Liam's conversation builds on these cultural, economic, and political themes and traces the 'complex nationalist path' that Britain found itself on after 2008.
27 Jul 2022
Practical Utopia: The Many Lives of Dartington Hall
In this episode of the Mile End Institute Podcast, Dr Lyndsey Jenkins (https://www.qmul.ac.uk/mei/staff/dr-lyndsey-jenkins.html) talks to Dr Anna Neima (https://warwick.academia.edu/AnnaNeima) about her new book, Practical Utopia: The Many Lives of Dartington Hall (https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/practical-utopia/CA9010EE1249F5B2277CBE54AB2BD6EB#fndtn-information) which was published by Cambridge University Press in April. In this fascinating conversation, Lyndsey and Anna discuss how the 1200-acre estate at Dartington Hall near Totnes in Devon was transformed into a 'social experiment of kaleidoscopic vitality' in the 1920s and 1930s by the American heiress, Dorothy Elmhirst (née Whitney) and her husband, Leonard.
They consider how a network of utopian communities across the United Kingdom shaped education, the arts, and agriculture in first half of the twentieth century and what policymakers today can learn from the 'cooperative and democratic' way of living, enriched by lifelong learning and 'a sense of creative and spiritual fulfillment', which was pioneered at Dartington Hall before the Second World War.
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