Reviews for Critical Problems In The History Of Science Proceedings Of The Institute For The History Of ...

The average rating for Critical Problems In The History Of Science Proceedings Of The Institute For The History Of ... based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-12-30 00:00:00 Ronald Diss (This was written as a blog for the Migrants' Rights Network website - www.migrantsrights.org.uk) The complex, messy societies we live in often seem to be swamps of seething discontent and injustice. Migrants know this better than most, roped off as they usually are from the array of rights which make life just about bearable for those who lucky enough to be certified as ‘insiders’ – aka ‘citizens’. Yet sometimes the disparate groups pushed out of official society’s mainstream manage to come together, attain some level of collective awareness of their disadvantages, and embark on strategies which succeed in bringing about change. Migrant community organisations should be very interested in examples of where this has happened: they should be aiming to emulate these past successes to remedy the injustices which exist today. One case that could be studied is the movement which began back in the 1950s and built up momentum in the following decades, to obtain protection under UK, and later European law, against the evil of racial discrimination. The fact that the people who were subjected to the ‘colour bar’ discriminations of that period were also immigrants is not something which should be lost on today’s generation of community organisers in cities and towns across the UK. So how, and why, did anti-racist campaigners during this period manage to pull together the disparate migrant communities of their day into a coherent bloc, forge the alliances needed to force home their message, and win the outlawing of direct and indirect forms of discrimination? Iyiola Solanke has considered some of the issues involved in building the movement which fought for the rights of black and Asian immigrants during these years in her interesting book, Making Anti-Racial Discrimination Law . She identifies several critical moments in this struggle as being pivotal to the success of the movement. The first of these concerns the decision by the movers and shakers of the movement to systematically excavate and lay bare the evidence on racial discrimination during that period. That it happened was not doubted by anyone; but as long as knowledge was confined to episodic and anecdotal accounts of individuals being refused jobs or b&b ‘digs’ it could be contained by the elites with a bit of tut-tutting, saying in effect, ‘highly regrettable, but what can one really do about peoples’ personal prejudices?’ Solanke argues that the UK establishment was stripped of the opportunity to use this response by the social investigation methodologies which were pioneered during this period and emerged in a developed form in the Rose report on colour and citizenship’ and the PEP report on racial discrimination. These comprehensive accounts of the issues at stake gave political leaders no place to hide and added huge momentum to the campaign to complete what the ace Relations Act had started in 1965 with further legislation continuing real teeth in the 1970s. If a systematic approach to social investigation was important to the success of the anti-racist movement, Solanke argues that its awareness of what she calls ‘the political opportunity structure’ of that time was the clincher. The leadership of Britain’s black immigrant communities was intensely interested in the political travails of the governments of their day. Working with a crew of activist humans rights lawyers they were able to probe all the dilemmas of 1960s and 70s Britain and come up with a narrative on race equality that trumped the attempts of the right wing to rally against further advances and break-throughs. Solanke’s study prompts thoughts and questions which should be considered by groups working for the rights of migrants today. Do we have any strategy for laying bare the evidence for the new forms of discrimination and exploitation which we know exist in contemporary Britain? Solanke argues that it is not enough for social investigation to be limited to the academic discourse, but following the examples of the Rose and the PEP reports, it has to mobilise and make full use of the knowledge, the frustration and the indignation which exists amongst the migrant groups themselves. Then there is this question of today’s ‘political opportunity structure’. What is being done to probe into the processes and procedures which guide the decision-making of our power elites? What do we know of the tension that strain the coherence of their policies, and the places where a timely intervention on the part of advocates of migrant rights cold tip the balance in favour of progress? These issues are every bit as salient today as they were in the 1960s and 1970s. Migrant rights campaigners would do well to consider the lessons to be learnt from the work of their predecessors and to consider approaches to work they pioneered and which could be emulated in our current work.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-10-17 00:00:00 James Martin Insanely useful book which sets out the best writing and learning styles for any law student.