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First-year historians explore Bodleian's treasures

Pembroke's first-year historians had a special visit to the Weston Library last term for a fascinating session at the Centre for the Study of the Book. 

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Pembroke Spotlight: Dr Endrit Shabani on Albania's Fight for Women's Place in Democracy

Two Pembrokians, alumnus Dr Endrit Shabani and Fellow Professor Stephen Whitefield, came together to design the Women's Participation in Elections Index to measure the barriers preventing women in Albania from participating in politics. Dr Shabani shares more about the findings of the Index.

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Pembroke Spotlight: Imee Marriott on Yoga and Maternity in 1990s Britain

NEWS |

Imee Marriot body shot.

 

Recent Pembroke alumna Imee Marriott (2021, History) gives an insight into her undergraduate thesis exploring the relationship between yoga and maternity in 1990s Britain.

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Yoga and Maternity in 1990s Britain

Imee Marriott (2021, History)

I arrived at the topic of my undergraduate thesis, A Fruitful Union: Yoga and Maternity in 1990s Britain, through a personal interest in yoga, and a curiosity about its embodiment of a plethora of values antithetical to neoliberal capitalism, and its status as a lauded commercial success story of the 21st century. Being a History student, the obvious answer was to look backwards. Historians such as Suzanne Newcombe and Elizabeth De Michelis have grappled with yoga’s arrival and popularisation in Britain, whilst Andrea Jain has written compellingly on yoga’s alignment with consumer culture and ‘neoliberal spirituality’. But an identifiable ‘gap’ in historiography (within the British context) was the 1990s, despite the fact the 90s were a crucial time within yoga’s acculturation in Britain. It is also a crucial, though perhaps yet under-examined, period in gender history, as shifting ideas about gender acclimatized in a post-Thatcherite and post-Second Wave Feminism moment. 

Taking these two broad topics - yoga and femininity - I started to probe sources, particularly Yoga and Health, a monthly, commercial magazine which ran from 1976. What leapt, ineluctable, from its pages was a preoccupation with the maternal subject and the maternal body, and an alignment with the tail end of the Natural Birth Movement. As an unmistakably close relationship between yoga and maternity emerged, my central research question crystallised: How was the maternal subject constructed within yoga as a set of practices and beliefs developing in the neoliberal moment of the 20th century? Moreover, how could this function as a window of understanding onto yoga and femininity during a period of flux for both? The answer took me down unexpected paths, producing encounters with eugenics, new environmentalism and post-Fordism and more.