Aspiration, Agency, and the Production of New Selves in a Scottish New Town, c.1947-c.2016.

Narratives of deindustrialization, urban decline and failing public housing and the negative outcomes associated with these processes dominate accounts of post-war Scotland, bolstering the interpretation of Scottish exceptionalism in a British context. Within these accounts working people appear as victims of powerful and long-term external forces suffering sustained and ongoing deleterious vulnerabilities in terms of employment, health, and housing. This article challenges this picture by focusing on the first Scottish new town which made space for working people's aspiration and new models of the self manifested in new lifestyles and social relations. Drawing on archival data and oral history interviews, we identify how elective relocation fostered and enabled new forms of identity predicated upon new housing, new social relations, and lifestyle opportunities focused on the family and home and elective social networks no longer determined by traditional class and gender expectations. These findings permit an intervention in the historical debates on post-war housing and social change which go beyond the materialistic experience to deeper and affective dimensions of the new town self.

Ambivalent horizons: competing narratives of self in Irish women's memories of pre-marriage years post-war England.

Over the past-20-years research into the experiences of Irish female migrants in twentieth century Britain has been steadily accumulating. Based largely on the use of oral history, this work has been important in shedding light on various aspects of women's experiences, including how young women negotiated unfamiliar urban spaces and asserted an 'ethnic' identity in England. The dynamics shaping the re/construction of such experiences, and what they can tell us about the fashioning of gendered migrant selves, has, by contrast, received relatively little attention. Based on an in-depth analysis of the personal migration narratives of three women who migrated from southern Ireland to England between 1945-69, this article aims to provide insight into how migrants' early experiences of settlement in post-war England were conditioned by the consumption and internalization of a number of competing constructions of femininity circulating within British and Irish culture during the post-1945 period. While these constructions made available a number of different frameworks on which women could draw to order their experiences and fashion an identity, tensions within and between them could also create problems for the process of self-construction. As well as the particular circumstances of each individual's encounter with their new environment, the distinctive character of women's negotiation of these tensions alludes to the different ways women sought to construct a preferred version of their past in post-war England, raising questions about the ways past and present, public and private, interact in the production of migrant histories.