Gender, Youth, Community, Methodology and More:

A Symposium Celebrating the Life and Work of Pearl Jephcott

College Court Conference Centre

University of Leicester

July 9th 2015

Pearl Jephcott (1900-1980), in a research career spanning some forty years, made an outstanding contribution to British social science research. Her key works, including Girls Growing Up (1942), Rising Twenty (1948), Some Young People (1954), Married Women Working (1962), A Troubled Area: Notes on Notting Hill (1964), Time of One’s Own (1967) and Homes in High Flats (1971), alongside other reports and articles, paved the way for many of the subsequent developments that were to come in the sociology of gender, women’s’ studies, urban sociology, leisure studies and the sociology of youth. Moreover her work is fascinating as it is very detailed, extensive, methodologically sophisticated and is replete with originality, innovation and sociological imagination. Yet despite this Jephcott’s work has become neglected and relegated to second hand booksellers and ‘studies from the past’. Her legacy deserves more attention and should be more widely celebrated. This free one-day symposium attempts to do just that.

Bringing together researcher from a range of fields, this one-day symposium offers academics and postgraduate students the opportunity to learn more about recent research that revisits and builds upon the work of this social research pioneer. The day represents a unique chance for a dialogue around Pearl’s legacy and to hear how subsequent researchers have extended the rich vein of research she began in the 1940s. Pearl’s legacy cuts across disciplines and research paradigms: across social sciences and humanities, historical and contemporary data, primary and secondary sources, quantitative and qualitative approaches and, as such, we envisage this event will appeal to a wide audience.

This is a free conference with lunch included but pre-registration is required as places are limited.

9:30                Registration and Coffee

9.50                Introduction and Welcome.

10.00              Pearl Jephcott: Biographical Starting Points,

John Goodwin and Henrietta O’Connor, (University of Leicester)

10:30             Pearl Jephcott and Feminist Collaborative Research Practice

Lynn Abrams (University of Glasgow)

11:00              TEA BREAK

11:30              Pearl Jephcott, Married Women Working and the Sociology of Women in post-war Britain

Helen McCarthy (Queen Mary University of London)

12:00              (Re)Imagining Pearl Jephcott’s ‘Time of One’s Own’: Methodological challenges and theoretical insights from a comparative study of youth leisure and social change

Susan Batchelor and Lisa Whittaker, University of Glasgow

Alistair Fraser, University of Hong Kong (in absentia)

12.30              Revisiting ‘Homes in High Flats’: Its inception and Jephcott’s methodology in practice

Barry Hazley and Valerie Wright (University of Glasgow)

1pm – 2pm    LUNCH

14:00              The Early Years

Tony Jeffs (Durham University)

14.15              Jephcott, Bermondsey and the Anthropologists in 1958

Jon Lawrence (University of Cambridge)

14.30             From Nottingham to Notting Hill: Explorations of Delinquency

John Goodwin and Henrietta O’Connor, (University of Leicester)

15:00                         TEA BREAK

15.30             Round Table Discussion: What Next for Pearl Jephcott?