Place, Politics and Pedagogy in the Everyday Lives of Two Manchester Districts, 1880- 1939.

This PhD will provide a spatial rethinking of the intellectual and political lives of working-class Mancunians, arguing
that educational organisations provided reciprocal spaces through and against which political ideas were
formulated. From the 1880s 'rediscovery of poverty', Manchester's urban districts were transformed into the
middle-class social reformer's workshop: the Ancoats Brotherhood, Manchester Art Museum/Horsfall Gallery and
the University Settlement all descended within two decades, offering educative opportunities to residents.
Simultaneously, the working classes were (re)forming cultural and educational spaces of their own: the Clarion
Club, Socialist Sunday Schools, Labour Colleges and dedicated trade union spaces sprung up as active hubs of
learning and culture in the city.

Demonstrating the fruitfulness of adopting interdisciplinary frameworks, this research will re-energise stagnating
histories of education by proposing a new rhizomatic understanding of the construction of class consciousnesses
and community identity/politics (beyond Thompson, Stedman Jones, Rancière) and progress discussions about
how and why particular ideas flourished in certain places and not others such as those surrounding the perceived
scarcity of Marxism in Great Britain (McKibbin, 1984) and the formation of 'little Moscows' (Knotter, 2011). This
thesis will also have pedagogical implications, highlighting practices of inclusion and exclusion in areas marked by
migration, religion and contested physical space

This project will centre working-class students as complex agents shaped by and shaping landscapes of
education. Conventional histories of adult education have tended to favour an institutional focus: examining the
leadership, programmes and politics of institutions and organisations in isolation (see: Simon, 1965; Fieldhouse,
1977; Rowbotham, 1981; McIlroy, 1996). In doing so, such histories entrench a notion of separation or
distinctiveness of high and low learning/culture, taught in hermetic spaces belonging to or overseen by different
classes. In addition, such histories assign the act of learning to pre-determined spatiotemporal boundaries: the
classroom, the museum, the confines of a political meeting. Yet as Lefebvre notes, such 'specialised activities
have never been separate from everyday practice; they have only appeared to be so' (Lefebvre 1991, p.86).
Although histories of learning such as Jonathan Rose's (2001) study of working-class reading and Stuart
Macintyre's (1980) survey of Marxist autodidacticism have offered insight into more habitual practices, no project
has yet considered wider experience within a context of 'self-managed' learning, crossing multiple organisations
and pedagogical practices (Lefebvre, 1969, p.141). As such, this thesis will shift perspective to recognise how
people related to and navigated the web of educative options in the city, their agency within them and how their
everyday lives external to the classroom shaped and mediated thinking. This is particularly important as it
challenges narratives of the dominant role of industrial elites in the provision of adult education and cultural space
and education as an instrument of deradicalisation or control (see: Gunn, 2007).