Liz Stanley
Biographic Data
| ID | 179343 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Liz Stanley |
| GIVEN NAMES | Liz |
| FAMILY NAME | Stanley |
| SIGNATURE | STANLEY L |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Edinburgh |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7831-3283 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 83 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 606 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 82 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1979 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
‘Back into the personal' or
Like most academic feminists, we are involved in a search for a way of doing research, and of writing about this, that will encapsule ‘feminism.’ We attempt to relate feminist principles and beliefs to living feminism within everyday life, to living as feminists doing research, and we have written about this in our book, Breaking Out (1983). The purpose of this paper is to draw together more succinctly some of our ideas about why and how such lin…
Reintroducing Olive Schreiner
This book explores the thought of Olive Schreiner, the internationally famous writer, feminist theorist, social critic, opponent of imperialism and nationalism, and analyst of violence and war, best known for her novels and short stories, articles and critical commentaries, and her feminist treatise, Women and Labour. Expounding her groundbreaking ideas and analyses to a new generation of sociologists, it presents Schreiner as one of the first pr…
Olive Schreiner, War and Pacifism
Some new primary sources make an important contribution to re-thinking Olive Schreiner’s ideas about war and pacifism and are discussed in depth and their analytic reverberations explored. Many previously unknown Schreiner letters and postcards to her niece Lyndall (Dot) Schreiner have become available; Schreiner’s open letters, essays and allegories written over the Great War period have been collected and published; and the manuscripts of her u…
Harriet Townsend and Networks of Settler Women in Business in the Eastern Cape, 1840–1848
Harriet Townsend was an Eastern Cape businesswoman who established a jewellery and retail shop in the frontier town of Cradock in the 1840s, importing superior goods via Port Elizabeth and Cape Town, and using outworkers to finish plain goods to a high standard and make bespoke items to order. The business received considerable assistance from a group of merchant advisors. It developed rapidly and achieved a considerable turnover, with its custom…
An Empire of Letters
Around 800 Roman tilia—writing tablets made from folded slivers of wood veneer and a little over postcard size—have been found in archaeological investigations at Vindolanda, a Roman fort in northern England. Dated to the period 85 CE to 130 CE, their existence is helping revise knowledge of the Roman letter and the part it played in how military governance was organized, the ways in which personal, public, and military aspects were interrelated,…
The Medium and the Message
Afterword
This essay reflects on the writing of lives and fictions in a South African context in light of the contents of this special issue, and draws parallels with some of the approaches adopted by the contributors. It discusses biography, autobiography, diaries, letters, and testimonies by or about Steve Biko, Nelson Mandela, Eugene Marais, Njube son of Lobengula, Cecil Rhodes, and Olive Schreiner, and problematizes some of the key terms in thinking ab…
Before
The “warts and all” transcriptions of two early Olive Schreiner draft manuscripts of parts of what was later published as From Man to Man are examined in detail. They are analysed by treating them as avant-textes and using a genetic criticism approach. Doing so, different aspects of her writing practices come into view around the distinction she made between her “ordinary writing”, which encompassed “in the moment” additions, deletions, and amend…
Biography
An interest in biography has a long history in sociology and includes work by such luminaries as Weber, Mills, Merton, and Elias. It has developed around the broad trajectories of biographical sociology and the sociology of biography and encompassed ideas about the everyday, the thinking subject, life histories, storied lives, identities, and reflexivity. It has had two key influences on sociological work. Its emphasis that ideas derive from part…
Protest and the Lovedale Riot of 1946
Protests occurred at many black educational institutions in South Africa before the usual dating of such occurrences from the 1970s on. Among these, a riot and related protests at Lovedale Institute in 1946 are explored here using archival material from extensive inquiries made contemporaneously by its authority figures, including its principal, staff, council and a committee of enquiry, with the voices of students and parents barely audible in t…
Epistolarity
Exploring what is at stake in the common lament that letter writing is dead, we cautiously celebrate a new age of ‘e-epistolarity’. In doing so, we build on our collaborative article of 2006, ‘Letters as/Not a Genre’, to consider the ongoing pacts, politics and arts in written relationship and the mixed methods that academics might adopt in analysing the growing archives of digital and digitised communication. As with our earlier piece, the essay…
Settler colonialism and migrant letters
The ‘migrant letter’ has been proposed as a separate genre of letter-writing around features concerning absence, identity and relationships and location. However, questions arise about this claim, made using largely North American material. Explored in a different context, important complexities and differences come into view. This is discussed regarding the settler colonial context of South Africa using data from the Forbes family collection, co…
Documents of Life
Operationalizing a QLR project on social change and whiteness in South Africa, 1770s–1970s
The Whites Writing Whiteness project is concerned with changes to the racial order in South Africa over a long time-period and connects ‘big numbers’ and work on very large archive collections with close textual analysis of particular documents. It uses longitudinal data within a QLR methodological approach, combining formal analysis with a sampling process. In operationalizing this, letters from the Findlay Family collection with thousands of do…
The Death of the Letter? Epistolary Intent, Letterness and the Many Ends of Letter-Writing
Is the letter now 'dead', in terminal decline because of the impact of new digital technologies? Such arguments raise important points. However, they fail to distinguish between prevailing genre conventions for letter-writing in different time periods and the underlying 'epistolary intent' and 'letterness' involved, and so overstate the newness of the changes discussed. Examples of over-time departures from 'the letter' but which display clear ep…
The Scriptural Economy, the Forbes Figuration and the Racial Order
Social change and large-scale transformations are as important to everyday life sociology as to macro sociology approaches. South Africa has been a 'hotspot' of change with a number of such transitions occurring in a condensed time-period, in particular regarding 'race' matters. A large South African family collection, concerning the Forbes family, is used to explore how the processes of change regarding the racial order can be analysed within an…
Sex Surveyed, 1949-1994
First published in 1995. This book provides the only feminist overview of the development of both the mainstream and the feminist variant of the survey as a means of investigating sexual attitude and behaviour. Illuminating reading for the general reader, essential for students on Sexuality, Methodology, Women’s Studies a d British Modern Social History courses and key text for all Sociologists.
Imperialism, Labour and the New Woman
Olive Schreiner (1855-1920) was the best-known feminist theorist and writer of her time. Her writings spanned a number of conventionally separate genres (including the novel, short story, allegory, political essay, polemic and theoretical treatise), which she crafted to produce a highly distinctive feminist and analytical 'voice'. A feminist who was contemporaneously an internationally-renowned social commentator, Schreiner's developing political…
Exploring media construction of investment banking as dirty work
Purpose - To explore how two kinds of UK-based media positioned investment banking as dirty work during the financial crisis, thereby engaging in moral enterprise (Becker 1963) and contributing to the shaping of society’s normative contours (Cohen 1972). - Design/methodology - We employ rhetorical analysis to explore how newspaper editorials and an online blog portray investment banking as tainted between April 2008 and October 2009. - Findings –…
Feminist Praxis (RLE Feminist Theory)
Olive Schreiner, Epistolary Practices and Microhistories
Focusing on the letters of the South African feminist writer and social theorist Olive Schreiner (1855–1920), this article explores Schreiner's strategic uses of letter-writing as a key tool in her work as a cultural entrepreneur in a number of different social and political contexts. In advocating a microhistory approach which recognizes that macro and micro are interconnected and should be seen as lenses of perspective rather than as separate s…
The Work of Making and the Work it Does
Programmatic ideas regarding cultural sociology and its inter-relationship with cultural production inspired by the work of Inglis et al., Mukerji and Bennett are explored. A particular cultural assemblage, the editorial practices arising in an interdisciplinary project concerned with researching and publishing the letters of South African feminist writer and social theorist Olive Schreiner, is detailed. Four key aspects of the particular 'bringi…
I Just Express My Views & Leave Them to Work’
There are disturbances as well as regularities in the gender order, including challenges to and re-workings of conventional hierarchies. An example of such re-workings provides the focus of discussion: the political interventions of South African feminist writer and social theorist Olive Schreiner (18551920). Discussion of Schreiners letters to a number of important white political figures is organised around an epistemological question: can Schr…
The Epistolary Pact, Letterness
To a great extent, this is the epistolary pact-the call for a response from a specific reader within the correspondent's world.Most of the other aspects of epistolary discourse
The Domestication of Death
Sociological work on the sequestration of death has taken on some canonical qualities, while secondary discussion has not recognized interesting divergences within it. While drawing on Giddens (1991) provides useful ideas, the work of Elias (1983, 1985, 1994) is an especially helpful means of historicizing, contextualizing and theorizing domestic figuration and its role in responding to the threatening 'otherness' of death. Case studies concernin…
Breaking Out Again
Breaking Out is one of the classics of feminist sociology. In this new edition Liz Stanley and Sue Wise review the main developments in feminist thinking on research issues since the book first appeared
On Auto/Biography in Sociology
The specification of temporal origins for biography and autobiography - typically within the Enlightenment or modernism - that appear in sociological discussion are interrogated through discussing two parallel sites of origin. The first is Merton's discussion of 'sociological autobiography', the second the feminist concern with reflexivity within sociological research processes. Both are related to the notion of 'auto/biography'. 'Auto/biography'…
Letters as / not a genre
With the rise of life writing studies, letters have become the subject of an increasing number of interdisciplinary analyses. The following essay ruminates on what common characteristics hold such analyses together and the peculiar difficulties they encounter in theorising a genre that perhaps, out of all writing practices, most exposes the limits of genre theory itself. The essay is written, appropriately, as a dialogue, in which Margaretta's Vo…
A Child of Its Time
Responding to John Scott's (2005) 'Sociology and its others', the idea of hybridic sociologies is developed, Mills' ideas about 'the sociological imagination' are discussed, Scott's proposal for a core curriculum countered with some suggestions for extended in-depth disciplinary debate about an intellectually expansionist programme for UK sociology, and responses to these suggestions as well as to the broad argument are welcomed
Moments of Writing
The knowing because experiencing subject
Biography as microscope or kaleidoscope? The case of ‘power’ in Hannah Cullwick's relationship with Arthur Munby
Narrative methodologies
Rethinking 'Current Crisis' Arguments
Proclamations of 'current crisis' in sociology are long-standing and have recently resurfaced in Britian and North America. This article explores the response of Alvin Gouldner to an earlier 1970s perceived 'current crisis'. It then discusses some of the key dimensions ascribed to the current 'current crisis' - fragmentation, the decline of the intellectual, the need for a higher profile for public and professional sociology - to evaluate the str…
Feminist Praxis
Recovering women in history from feminist deconstructionism
The ESRC's 2010 Framework for Research Ethics
The ESRC's (2010) Framework for Research Ethics extends the remit of its 2005 research ethics framework in three significant ways: the system is to be fully mandatory and it will no longer be possible to make the case that no out of the ordinary ethical issues arise; the Research Ethics Committees (RECs) set up under the ESRC's 2005 document have extended remit, including reviewing all research proposals accepted by the ESRC and other funding bod…
Aftermaths
This discussion aims to provide ‘a genuine historicisation ... that counters the tendency to treat twentieth-century practices as a prism through which to interpret ... previous centuries' concerning a
Doing Ethnography, Writing Ethnography
Simulacrum Diaries
Diary writing is popularly defined around assumptions about the temporal and spatial circumstances of writing, which underpin the kind of knowledge diaries are often understood to "hold." The epistemological status of diaries is rooted in an assumed ontology, concerning the time/space of their writing and the temporal location of their writer in relation to "entries" in them.This article explores "what happens" to the knowledge a diary is seen to…
To the letter
Thomas and Znaniecki's The Polish Peasant in Europe and America emphasises the importance of people representing their own lives, in written autobiographical life histories and more particularly in letter-writing and correspondences. Some of the canonical and disciplining processes that led to this book 'disappearing' from the key texts of sociology are outlined. However, the emphasis is on Thomas and Znaniecki's conceptualisation of the self aro…
Mourning becomes
I. The Mother of Invention
Women's work, class and the urban household
It has Always Known, and we have Always been 'other
It has been suggested that the contemporary form of capitalism - knowing capitalism - is distinctively different from its earlier incarnations by being 'knowing' in unprecedented ways; and that there is a 'coming crisis of empirical sociology', because related technological developments are producing a leading-edge research infrastructure located firmly within knowing capitalism, rather than in academic social science. These arguments are counter…
Putting it into Practice
Feminist fractured foundationalism has been developed over a series of collaborative writings as a combined epistemology and methodology, although it has mainly been discussed in epistemological terms. It was operationalised as a methodology in a joint research project in South Africa concerned with investigating two important ways that the experiences of children in the South African War 1899-1902, in particular in the concentration camps establ…
The Scriptural Economy, the Forbes Figuration and the Racial Order
Social change and large-scale transformations are as important to everyday life sociology as to macro sociology approaches. South Africa has been a 'hotspot' of change with a number of such transitions occurring in a condensed time-period, in particular regarding 'race' matters. A large South African family collection, concerning the Forbes family, is used to explore how the processes of change regarding the racial order can be analysed within an…
The Epistolary Pact, Letterness
To a great extent, this is the epistolary pact-the call for a response from a specific reader within the correspondent's world.Most of the other aspects of epistolary discourse
Olive Schreiner Globalising Social Inquiry
Globalization theory sees the processes of change it is concerned with as distinctively new, with a feminist analytics part of the newness of the current period too, focusing on some of the specific gender dynamics involved. However, the work of the feminist writer and social theorist Olive Schreiner (1855-1920) challenges, indeed overturns, such assumptions. Similar structural economic and political circumstances to those now called globalizatio…
Narratives from Major to Minor
Feminist research, feminist consciousness and experiences of sexism
Doing feminist research
Breaking out
Shorter Notices
Whales and minnows
Breaking Out
Biography as microscope or kaleidoscope? The case of ‘power’ in Hannah Cullwick's relationship with Arthur Munby
Women's work, class and the urban household
All work and no play? The sociology of women and leisure
Moments of Writing
British feminist histories
Recovering women in history from feminist deconstructionism
Doing Ethnography, Writing Ethnography
Romantic Friendship? Some Issues in Researching Lesbian History and Biography
The main feminist conceptualisation of women's close relationships from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century characterises these as ‘romantic friendships’ and argues that a stereotype of ‘the lesbian’ was invented by sexologists such as Havelock Ellis and applied to these relationships in order to condemn them. A number of pieces of primary research are presented which suggest that this approach is highly problematic. In the case of Emil…
Feminist Praxis
The knowing because experiencing subject
The Social Survey in Historical Perspective, 1880-1940
On Auto/Biography in Sociology
The specification of temporal origins for biography and autobiography - typically within the Enlightenment or modernism - that appear in sociological discussion are interrogated through discussing two parallel sites of origin. The first is Merton's discussion of 'sociological autobiography', the second the feminist concern with reflexivity within sociological research processes. Both are related to the notion of 'auto/biography'. 'Auto/biography'…
Nothing mat(t)ers
Women have servants and men never eat
The category ‘gender’ has become axiomatic to feminist analysis: analysing the dynamics and outcomes of gender has come to be seen as constituting ‘what academic feminists do’. Within feminist analysis, gender is positioned as ana prioricharacteristic of social life; and gender is also analytically privileged as the most salient characteristic of people and social situations. Both assumptions are challenged. This article argues instead that gende…
Rejecting the Legend, Rereading de Beauvoir, Reworking Existentialism
I. The Mother of Invention
Brochures/Reviews/Reports
Class in International Perspective
Rapid Response/Sociology Online
Sociology (57 works) · Gender Studies (29 works) · History (29 works) · Art (28 works) · Epistemology (27 works) · Philosophy (27 works) · Law (24 works) · Political science (24 works) · Literature (21 works) · History (18 works)