The European Studies Council Modern Europe Colloquium presents
Jordanna Bailkin, Jere L. Bacharach Endowed Professor in International Studies and Professor of History, University of Washington:
“Bad Neighbors: Race, Violence, and Proximity in Britain from the Second World War to COVID-19.”
Jordanna Bailkin is a scholar of modern Britain and empire, dedicated to exploring the global dimensions of British studies and participating in scholarly and public conversations about Britain’s shifting status in the world. Her research interests include decolonization, legal history, urban identity, gender history, and the history of material culture and emotions. In addition to her full-time appointment in History, She also serves in African Studies, the Center for West European Studies, the Department of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies, Museology, the Program on the Built Environment, and South Asian Studies.
Her first book, The Culture of Property (Chicago, 2004), considered the legal and philosophical evolution of cultural property in Britain and its former empire. Her next book, The Afterlife of Empire (Berkeley, 2012), explored how decolonization transformed British society and the welfare state in the 1950s and 1960s. She argued that the collapse of empire was not just a military or diplomatic process, but also a deeply personal one, restructuring daily routines, individual relationships, and social interactions. This book won the Morris D. Forkosch Prize from the American Historical Association, the Stansky Book Prize from the North American Conference on British Studies, and the Biennial Book Prize from the Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies.
Her third book was Unsettled: Refugee Camps and the Making of Multicultural Britain (Oxford, 2018). During the 20th century, dozens of refugee camps in Britain housed hundreds of thousands of Belgians, Basques, Jews, Poles, Hungarians, Anglo-Egyptians, Ugandan Asians, and Vietnamese. But “refugee camps” in Britain were never only for refugees. Refugees shared space with Britons who had been displaced by war and poverty. These camps generated unique intimacies and frictions, illuminating the closeness of individuals that have traditionally been kept separate – “citizens” and “migrants,” but also refugees from diverse countries and conflicts. As the world’s refugee crisis has once again brought to Europe the challenges of mass encampment, Unsettled offers warnings from a liberal democracy’s recent past.
Her new book, forthcoming from Oxford University Press is Friends and Neighbors: Taking Care in Modern Britain. This project considers how state policies have shaped personal relationships between Britons from the Second World War to COVID-19. From friendship and neighboring to romantic love, parenting, and caregiving for the disabled, Britain’s caring relationships were forged by and against the state’s constraints.