Jeudi 20 novembre 2025 à  17h : Tom Wright (university of Sussex), ‘The Politics of Inarticulacy: Oracy, Education, and Mid-Victorian Reform’

Maison de la Recherche de Sorbonne Université (28 rue Serpente, Paris 6^e, M° Odéon ou Saint-Michel), salle S001.

This paper examines the intellectual history of inarticulacy and its role in shaping ideas of citizenship in nineteenth-century Britain. Between the Reform Act of 1832 and the Education Act of 1870, political thinkers and reformers repeatedly framed the “inarticulate” working class as morally and intellectually unfit for participation in public life. I analyse how this idea developed across political speeches, educational reports, and literary and journalistic sources. I then offset these elite claims about working-class inarticulacy with debates within the Chartist and wider labour movements over the moral and political value of speaking and listening. By reconstructing this debate, the paper makes a claim for oracy – a modern educational term for ‘speaking and listening’- as a neglected but valuable lens for historians of ideas, education, politics and citizenship. I show how ideas about working class inarticulacy still impact the neglect of ‘voice’ in British state education and reflect on how the age of generative AI is bringing oracy to the forefront of modern pedagogy.

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