All rooms are equipped with an overhead projector
Rooms C, D, E, F, G and H (H only on Saturday): slide projector (framed slides, carrousel. There are extra carrousels available to set up your presentation in advance)
Rooms C, D, M, N, O, U and Committee Room 2: beamer to connect your laptop. You have to bring you own laptop. (If you want to use your Apple notebook, please contact us, as it may be incompatible.)
Rooms C, T and U: VCR
Programme
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A User's Perspective of Welfare: Individuals’ Life Experiences during the old Poor Law
| During the last twenty years historians of social policy have increasingly been concerned with attempts to examine the history of welfare provision from the standpoint of welfare recipients. However, such studies have focused overwhelmingly upon twentieth-century welfare with few studies examining the pivotal poor laws of the eighteenth and early nineteenth-century (though see Lees 1998). Building on previous work (Shave 2005), this paper will examine the importance of the agency through the frames of both the supposedly homogenous ‘poor’ and the individual before considering the archival possibilities in attempts to glean insights into the experiences of welfare recipients during the poor laws. The paper will then reconstruct the biographies of eight parishioners from the Dorset parish of Motcombe for which detailed archives have survived. By systematically tracing the lives of individuals, this examination will not only reveal the diverse range of experiences of ‘the poor’ but will also highlight the complex fluctuations produced through the negotiation between individuals, families and the parish throughout the different stages of their life-course(s).
References
Lees, L.H. (1998), The Solidarities of Strangers: The English Poor Laws and the People, 1700-1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
Shave, S. A. (2005), The Spaces of Individual Experience: Labouring Lives and the Poor Laws in Rural Dorset, 1790-c.1840 (Undergraduate Dissertation, School of Geography, University of Southampton).
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