Papers by Chloe Ashbridge
Post-British England and the Rural North
Routledge eBooks, Mar 31, 2023
“All I Need Is Myself”
Routledge eBooks, May 3, 2022
Brexit England and the Deindustrial North
Rewriting the North
Rewriting the North: Place, Nation, and the Cultural Politics of Devolution
Between the 1997 devolutionary moment and the 2016 Brexit-vote, the Union’s continuity has become... more Between the 1997 devolutionary moment and the 2016 Brexit-vote, the Union’s continuity has become increasingly uncertain. In England, the fraught relationship between the North and the South East of England has been at the centre of debates regarding devolution, with the ‘English Question’ taking on an explicitly regional dimension. At the same time, British devolution developed a distinctively cultural registration, functioning on the one hand as a surrogate for national parliamentary representation; and, on the other, regional decentralisation, an attempt to disrupt the status of London as Britain’s cultural epicentre. Rewriting the North extends this debate by appraising the relationship between British constitutional culture and the literary North. To do so, this thesis advances two interlinked arguments. First, that Northern England has functioned in the national imagination less as a geographical territory than as a culturally loaded spatial metaphor for a nexus of socio-econo...
Alluvium Relaunch Editorial
Alluvium: 21st-Century Writing, 21st-Century Approaches, 2019
This paper takes Anthony Cartwright’s The Cut (2017) as its central focus, a novel commissioned b... more This paper takes Anthony Cartwright’s The Cut (2017) as its central focus, a novel commissioned by European publisher Peirene Press as a fictional response to the UK’s 2016 Brexit vote. I provide a discussion of what I term the ‘cultural politics of devolution’ in Cartwright’s text, suggesting that it offers a critique of the British centralised state form and makes demands for the decentralisation of political power. Focussed on a small deindustrialised town, The Cut is an English regional polemic exploring how uneven development played a decisive role in the outcome of the European Union referendum. Building on Doreen Massey’s insight that places are not simply physical locations but ‘articulations of social relations’ (Massey, 1994: 22), my discussion of Cartwright’s novel is concerned with the way a discursive, cultural version of ‘the North’ was mobilised ideologically as a fulcrum of the Leave vote within Brexit media and political discourse. I trace the ways in which The Cut ...
Cambridge Journal of Education
This article identifies a conceptual paradox between recent educational policy in England and a s... more This article identifies a conceptual paradox between recent educational policy in England and a social-democratic understanding of critical literacy. Recent political events including Brexit, the 2020 U. S. Presidential Election, and the Coronavirus Pandemic reiterate the need for pedagogies that equip students to critique information circulated online. After setting out critical literacy's genealogy as a democratic educational model, the authors situate these theoretical approaches within the context of English secondary education reform. The article then draws on teacher agency research to consider the practical barriers to implementing a critical literacy pedagogy capable of navigating the present political landscape. Addressing gaps within literary education and digital media research, the overall argument is that educational policy in England since 2010 has served the priorities of a neoliberal state system. In this context, enacting the democratic, social-justice orientated critical literacy demanded by the challenges of communicating in the twenty-first-century is both daunting and urgent.
Alluvium Editorial 8.1
Alluvium: 21st-Century Writing, 21st-Century Approaches
Robert T. Tally Jr and Christine M. Battista (eds) (2016) Ecocriticism and Geocriticism: Overlapping Territories in Environmental and Literary Studies
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Papers by Chloe Ashbridge