Roundtable: Launch of Everyday Welfare in Modern British History: experience, expertise and activism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025)

This roundtable discussion marks the launch of Everyday Welfare in Modern British History: experience, expertise and activism, co-edited by Caitríona Beaumont, Eve Colpus and Ruth Davidson (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025).

This open access book offers a new approach to understandings of welfare in modern Britain. Foregrounding the agency individuals and groups claimed through experiential expertise, it traces deep connections between personal experience, welfare, and activism across diverse settings in modern Britain. The experiential experts studied in this collection include women, students, children, women who have sex with women, bereaved families, community groups, individuals living in poverty, adults whose status sits outside professional categories, health service users, and people of faith. Chapters trace how these groups have used their experiences to assert an expert witness status and have sought out new spaces to expand the scope, inclusivity, and applicability of welfare services.

Caitríona Beaumont is Professor of Social History at London South Bank University. Her key research interests are histories of female activism and women’s social movements in Ireland and Britain during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her book Housewives and Citizens: Domesticity and the women’s movement in England 1928–1964 was published in 2013 by Manchester University Press. She is principal investigator for the AHRC-funded network ‘Agency and Advocacy: Locating Women’s Grassroots Activism in England and Ireland, 1918 to the present’ (2023-2025). She is a councillor and trustee of the Royal Historical Society and visiting full professor at University College Dublin, Ireland.

Eve Colpus is an associate professor of British and European History post-1850 at the University of Southampton, UK. Her research interests are in histories of voluntary action, histories of childhood, histories of technology and women’s and gender history. Her first book Female Philanthropy in the Interwar World: Between Self and Other was published in 2018 by Bloomsbury Academic. She is a principal investigator on the AHRC-funded project, ‘Children and young people’s telephone use and telephone cultures in Britain c. 1984–1999’ (2021–2025). She is also a deputy editor of Women’s History Review.

Ruth Davidson is an IHR Research Fellow 2024-25 at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London. Her research interests centre on women, class and policy in twentieth century Britain.

Michael Lambert is a Research Fellow and Director of Widening Participation at Lancaster Medical School. His research focuses on the dynamics of the welfare state across twentieth century Britain and its Empire, with a spatial interest in the North West of England and policy focus on children and families. He has contributed written, oral and commissioned evidence and served as a witness to several historical institutional abuse inquiries.

Angela Davis teaches in the Department of History and Geography at École Jeannine Manuel, Paris. Her research interests have centred on child and maternal health and welfare in post-1945 Britain and her publications include Modern Motherhood: Women and the Family in England, 1945-2000 (Manchester University Press, 2012).