Under Construction @ Keele 2016 Volume 2 Issue 1 | Page 26

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Applying the philosophical methodological approach of Collingwood to a Foucauldian
feminist analysis of State and philanthropic responses to ‘deviant’ women in
Liverpool (1809-1967)
Kirsty Greenwood
(PhD Criminology, Keele University)
This paper draws on Collingwood’s unique, yet under-utilised,
philosophical methodological approach to construct a social history of
state responses to ‘deviant’ women via semi-penal institutionalisation in
the city of Liverpool between 1809 and 1967. A critical utilisation of
Collingwood allows for the reclamation of a humanist element of poststructuralist theorist Foucault, whilst simultaneously recognising the
gendered limitations of the approach. Historical data does not present a
sequence of abstract and disjointed events but ‘a series of processes of
actions and thoughts’.1 Drawing on archives at Liverpool Central Library,
this paper explores how the critical social historian can use imagination to
discover pertinent characteristics of, and connections amongst and
between, events. It also investigates the tension between the exploratory
nature of working with relatively small data samples and the extensive
diversity of