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

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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 oflearning 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 spaceThis 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).