The Biopolitics of Care in Second World War Britain

Associate Professor Kimberly Mair (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

248 Seiten

2023
Bloomsbury Academic (Verlag)
978-1-350-28209-4 (ISBN)

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During the crisis of the Second World War in Britain, official Air Raid Precautions made the management of daily life a moral obligation of civil defence by introducing new prescriptions for the care of homes, animals, and persons displaced through evacuation. This book examines how the Mass-Observation movement recorded and shaped the logics of care that became central to those daily routines in homes and neighbourhoods.

Kimberly Mair looks at how government publicity campaigns communicated new instructions for care formally, while the circulation of wartime rumours negotiated these instructions informally. These rumours, she argues, explicitly repudiated the improper socialization of evacuees and also produced a salient, but contested, image of the host as a good wartime citizen who was impervious to the cultural invasion of the ostensibly ‘animalistic’, dirty, and destructive house guest. Mair also considers the explicit contestations over the value of the lives of pets, conceived as animals who do not work with animal caregivers whose use of limited provisions or personal sacrifice could then be judged in the context of wartime hardship.

Together, formal and informal instructions for caregiving reshaped everyday habits in the war years to an idealized template of the good citizen committed to the war and nation, with Mass-Observation enacting a watchful form of care by surveilling civilian feeling and habit in the process.

Kimberly Mair is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Lethbridge, Canada. She is the author of Guerrilla Aesthetics: Art, Memory, and the West German Urban Guerrilla (2016).

List of Illustrations
Preface
Introduction
1. Keeping Watch over the Population: Careful Intelligence Saves Lives
2. Lousy Guests and Good Hosts: Atrocity Stories of Evacuation
3. Lazy Dogs, Essential Cats, and Useful Forms of Care
4. Confused Animacies: Who is Caring for Whom?
5. Careless Homes Cost Lives: The Home as a Caring Agent
Bibliography
Index

Erscheinungsdatum	10.07.2023
Reihe/Serie	The Mass-Observation Critical Series
Zusatzinfo	6 bw illus
Verlagsort	London
Sprache	englisch
Maße	156 x 234 mm
Themenwelt	Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Neuzeit (bis 1918)
	Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► 1918 bis 1945
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
	Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Kulturgeschichte
	Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Militärgeschichte
ISBN-10	1-350-28209-X / 135028209X
ISBN-13	978-1-350-28209-4 / 9781350282094
Zustand	Neuware