The ESRC Project (2018-2022), Northern Exposure: Race, Nation and Disaffection in "Ordinary" Towns and Cities after Brexit set itself the task of challenging simplifications about diversity and social polarisation that predominate in the political sociology of Brexit and after. It was based on a wide range of oral history interviews with mainly elderly residents in four typical mid-sized towns in the North of England and extensive co-productive fieldwork with local authorities and third-sector actors there.

How can parties influence their associations with social groups? The impact of differential policy platforms on group structured voting behaviour is well recognised. Increasingly, however, scholars are also examining the effect of parties’ rank and file make-up as well as that of direct rhetorical group appeals on such associations. Some moreover argue that attachments to parties are sticky heuristics, based on a running tally of both past and present party performance. In light of these predictions I propose a conjoint experimental study of class voting in the UK.

All organizations have work that no one wants to do: planning the office party, screening interns, attending to that time-consuming client, or simply helping others with their work. From office housework to more important assignments, the work that goes unrewarded, is more often handled by women than by men. The talk will present research on how and when gendered work arises, and how differences in assignments impact compensation, negotiation and advancement.

Historians have long asserted the close connection between ethnology—the practice of systematically describing cultural differences—and the politics of imperial domination. But in this respect, the Ottoman Empire presents an apparent paradox. Despite expanding across a territory that encompassed all or part of over 30 modern nation-states, early Ottoman authors almost avoided describing the cultural diversity of the empire’s subject peoples.

The Mughal (Timurid) empire in its prime (1526-1707) was markedly different in its institutional makeup and cultural outlook than the Delhi Sultanate in its era of expansion (1206-1414). If the Delhi sultans ruled as vassals of the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad and Cairo, the Mughals ruled as kings of the world, a fact reflected in their regnal titles such as “World-Seizer” (Jahangir); “King of the World” (Shah Jahan); “Alamgir” (World-Seizer), which had not been thinkable in the time of the Delhi sultans. This change can be attributed to the Mongol heritage of the Mughals.

When Thomas Roe arrived in India in 1616 as the first English ambassador to the Mughal Empire, the English barely had a toehold in the subcontinent. Their understanding of South Asian trade, culture, and the complexities of Indian society was sketchy at best. To the Mughal court, with its vast wealth and influence, the English were minor players on a very large stage.

Chinese elites of the late Ming dynasty (1368-1644) were, like many writers elsewhere in the early modern era, obsessed with the ideal of authenticity (zhen). This showed nowhere more clearly than in their appreciation of folksongs. Supposedly composed by lower class people in the “streets and alleyways,” folksongs represented a form of poetic utterance free of the literary constraints that stifled elite writing. Praised and cited across a wide spectrum of literary opinion, folksongs appeared in collections by Yang Shen (Gujin fengyao,1543), Li Kaixian (Shijing yanci, c.