- Observing the 1980s
Investigators: Lucy Robinson, Jane Harvell, Jill Kirby, Fiona Courage, Stuart Lamour, Jessica Scantlebury and Dorothy Sheridan -
Observing the 1980s brings together, for the first time, ‘voices’ from both the Mass Observation Collections and the British Library Oral History Collections, as well as various ephemera. This material offers a unique and inspiring insight into the lives and opinions of British people from all social classes and regions during the 1980s. The oral history interviews made available online under a Creative Commons license for the first time include testimony from women from Greenham Common Peace Camps, veterans, war photographers and combatants’ family members from the Falklands War and conflict in Northern Ireland, as well as the Republican hunger strikers and their family members. The Mass Observation Project documents include lengthy discussions of the Falklands War, as well as conflict more generally, Northern Ireland, memories of war, and the wider Cold War context. Our ephemera collection includes documents from anti-war campaigners, the far-Left, and community organisations.
- Raising the Nation: Parenting and the State in Britain and Europe, 1870-1950
Investigators: Hester Barron and Claudia Siebrecht -
How can we best understand the changing nature of the relationship between parenting and the state from 1870-1950? To what extent did the state concern itself with the way in which identities – of gender, class, nation and Empire – were mediated and transmitted to children? How did tensions between ideologies of nurture, control and protection play out in everyday practices of parenting? How far did the state take responsibility for absent parenthood, family planning and issues of generational obligation? In this period, different European regimes were increasingly invested in the next generation for the realisation of their goals as they negotiated significant political and socio-economic change. Meanwhile, parents were not passive recipients of state direction but acted as historical agents in their own right. Rituals and cultures of parenting could both affirm and undermine state politics. This project offers an original comparative and transnational perspective on the politicised nature of parenting practices and the relationship between state authority and the private sphere.
We are organising two workshops, to be held in September 2013 and March 2014, to bring together a group of early-career researchers with a range of expertise. The result will be a tightly-knit collection of essays which will make a challenging and lasting impact on the field.
- War: An Emotional History
Investigators: Claire Langhamer, Lucy Noakes and Claudia Siebrecht -
Love, grief, hate and fear are among the emotions most immediately associated with the rhetoric, experience and memory of war. War is often lived through and remembered as a time of heightened emotional intensity during which patriotic fervour, the break up of families, encounters with the enemy, loss of life, and extraordinary levels of violence engender a range of complex emotional responses. What was the personal emotional disposition in which men, women and children sustained and endured war, and continued to live their lives under the shadow of conflict? In what manner do emotional responses evolve in the aftermath of conflict as people rebuild relationships and go on to remember war?
A two-day conference held at the British Academy in July 2014 will seek to explore the degree to which war impacted upon the emotional world of those who lived through times of conflict and to consider how individuals in a range of different national contexts have responded to war from the medieval to the modern period.
- Everyday Racism in Transnational Perspective
Investigators: Clive Webb, Gideon Reuveni, Gerhard Wolf, Claudia Siebrecht -
It has long been commonplace to claim that racism has become one of the defining ideologies of the modern world. Although its historical roots stretch back centuries, racism in a modern sense, especially in terms of its direct links to politics, political parties and institutions, is little more than a century and a half old. The last century witnessed the radicalization of race as an “imagined community” across the political spectrum and in a variety of violent forms, ranging from social segregation to full-scale genocide. But while racism itself is fundamentally transnational in both theory and practice, abetted by the development of mass media to help forge racist networks and activists across the globe, research on racism has remained surprisingly national in orientation. Indeed, most scholarship to date has concentrated almost exclusively on how racism and racial politics operate within the confines of territorial states.
A workshop will be held at Sussex on 31 October - 1 November 2013, devoted to reconsidering the ideas and everyday practices of racism in a broader transnational context. In what ways, for example, are the Jim Crow American South, pre-war Nazi Germany and Apartheid South Africa comparable? How were they related to each other in terms of shared ideology and political activity? Or more generally, how does a explicitly comparative international framework expand and/or revise our understanding of racism and racial politics in various historical settings?
- In the Fields and in the Streets: east Kent in wartime
Investigators: Sian Edwards and Chris Warne -
In the Fields and in the Streets: east Kent in wartime’ is a recently completed cultural engagement research project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), studying local experiences of the Second World War with a specific focus on home defence and resistance. Through a combination of archival research and oral testimony the project uncovers the story of civilian forms of resistance during the Second World War with a particular focus on the secretive government Auxiliary Units. The Units were set up across Britain in the summer of 1940, in preparation for the possible invasion of Britain by Nazi forces, codenamed Operation Sea Lion. The distinctiveness of this project lies in its inter-disciplinary approach with the project researcher, working alongside conflict archaeologists and Kent County Council, focused on placing the local stories of the Units within the landscape of east Kent. The key objective of this was to encourage intergenerational storytelling and an engagement with the history of the local community. Some of the outcomes of this project include a lesson plan for local schools, a heritage trail, a pop up exhibition and an oral history community discussion group. It has been heralded a success by all those involved and has opened up a number of avenues for future research.