Overview

This open access book offers a new approach to understandings of welfare in modern Britain. Foregrounding the agency individuals and groups claimed through experiential expertise, it traces deep connections between personal experience, welfare, and activism across diverse settings in modern Britain. The experiential experts studied in this collection include women, students, children, women who have sex with women, bereaved families, community groups, individuals living in poverty, adults whose status sits outside professional categories, health service users, and people of faith. Chapters trace how these groups have used their experiences to assert an expert witness status and have sought out new spaces to expand the scope, inclusivity, and applicability of welfare services.

Full Product Details

Author:   Caitríona Beaumont ,  Eve Colpus ,  Ruth Davidson
Publisher:   Springer International Publishing AG
Imprint:   Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN:  

9783031649899

ISBN 10:   3031649893
Pages:   381
Publication Date:   18 December 2025
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Not yet available  
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Table of Contents

1. Introduction.- 2. Quaker women in humanitarian and social action: faith, learning, and the authority of experience.- 3. Communities of Care: Working-class women’s welfare activism, 1920-1970s.- 4. The “housewife as expert”: re-thinking the experiential expertise and welfare activism of housewives’ associations in England, 1960 -1980.- 5. Childminders and the limits of mothering as experiential expertise, England c. 1948-2000.- 6. “Daddy knows best”: professionalism, paternalism, and the state in mid-twentieth century British child diswelfare experiences.- 7. Fire, Fairs, and Dragonflies: The Writings of “Gifted Children” and Age-Bound Expertise.- 8. Claiming and curating experiential expertise at the children’s telephone helpline, ChildLine UK, 1986-2006.- 9. Justifying Experience, Changing Expertise: From protest to authenticity in anglophone “mad voices” in the mid-twentieth century.- 10. Qualified by virtue of experience? Professional youth work in Britian 1960-1989.- 11. “Let me tell you how I see it…”: White women, race, and welfare on two Birmingham council estates in the 1980s.- 12. Student Voices, Expertise, and Welfare within British Universities, 1930s to the 1970s.- 13. Connecting the disconnected: Telephones, activism, and “faring well” in Britain, 1950-2000.- 14. Placing Experiential Expertise: The 1981 New Cross massacre campaign.- 15. “Low risk doesn’t mean no risk”: The making of lesbian safer-sex and the creation of new (s)experts in the late 20th century.- 16. Afterword.

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Author Information

Caitríona Beaumont is Professor of Social History at London South Bank University, UK. Eve Colpus is Associate Professor of British and European History post-1850 at the University of Southampton, UK. Ruth Davidson is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Mile End Institute, School of History, Queen Mary University of London, UK.

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