Alison Atkinson-Phillips

Oral historians regularly use photographs, personal artefacts, or the landscape to access a fuller range of personal feelings and meanings of the past. Yet while archival films are regularly used to stimulate community reminiscence, little has been written about the potentialities of audiovisual elicitation as part of oral history methodology. This paper explores the value of film elicitation methods to revisit a largely forgotten public campaign aimed at halting the closure of shipyards in North East England. We used two short documentary videos as memory prompts for union activists and film producers. The films elicited strong emotional responses, prompting participants to reflect on the gaps between their memories and the ways events were portrayed at the time. In a region where the loss of the shipbuilding industry has significant ongoing social, cultural and economic impacts, the closures are often remembered as a historical inevitability. In contrast, revisiting the films with those who participated in their production offered an opportunity to visit a moment of possibility. We argue that film elicitation is a powerful tool for oral historians who want to explore marginalised histories while avoiding some of the pitfalls of ‘recovery’ oral history.

Heritage archive material is known to embody memory that is vital in forming group and community identity. In this paper we present a case study of what can happen when official and unofficial heritage are brought together in a diasporic dialogue with a group of Iraqi Christians (Assyrians, Chaldeans, Syriacs) living in England and with whom we worked within the Gertrude Bell Archive in Newcastle University. The paper examines how collective memory is mobilized within migration groups and shows these Iraqi Christians’ affiliation with their collective memory in relation to unresolved historical issues and collective trauma and how the living memory of the collective shapes individual decisions and sense of collective identity. Further, the paper aims to highlight the importance of moral responsibility in maintaining a lineage with the memory of the collective as a means to express moral continuity with the past.

As public historians living and working in Britain, we live in interesting times. The last twelve years have seen political turbulence in the United Kingdom and its four constituent nations of England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. In this article, we aim to explain why understanding the role of the state in public history in Britain is important. In doing so we consider the current political and public history context, including the rise of non-university based public historians who are working across a range of sectors, as well as the relatively recent rise of taught public history at postgraduate levels within the universities. We do the above in the context of the cultural history wars that have raged in the United Kingdom over the last decade, and the possible links between this and the promotion of wider heritage activities through politically directed funding. We argue that a clear future task for public historians is work aimed at understanding the ways history is being used to shape public perceptions of the past, and how that plays out in the present.

This article considers a shift in public memorialization towards the remembrance of experience, rather than death. Drawing on research into Australian public memorials to lived experiences of loss and trauma from 1985 to 2015, I compare the trends identified in that research with similar memorial projects internationally. I have found that the emergence of memorials to lived experience is an expression, and an expansion, of the kinds of knowledge that can be remembered publicly, and is influenced by discourses of trauma, human rights and transitional justice.

Executive Summary

Oral histories provide insights into how welfare policy has impacted people over the last 100 years.
Working-class traditions of social solidarity and mutual aid are recurring strategies by which people respond to hard times.
A place-based sense of connection continues to provide an important starting point for practices of solidarity and effective care.
Policymakers must listen to the life experiences of those who are living with, or have lived with, poverty and their wider support networks.
DWP policy and state welfare provision must be ‘proofed’ to support citizens who experience life shocks and sudden changes in circumstances.

The Mapping Historical Dialogue Project (MHDP) was developed in 2014, as part of a larger initiative relating to historical dialogue and accountability housed at Columbia University’s Institute for the Study of Human Rights. In the months and years that followed, a group of scholars and practitioners from ten different countries and representing all continents served as researchers to the project. The four authors of this essay are amongst this core group. The Mapping Historical Dialogue is a global interactive geographical map that gathers information on projects of contested memory in (post-)violent conflict countries. The ongoing digital project builds on a crowdsourcing model, relying on incremental contributions to connect a diverse network of individuals who often do not have access or knowledge of one another’s work. This paper gives an overview of the development of the mapping project and then outlines some of the diverse historical dialogue initiatives that speak to questions of memory, transitional justice, and human rights. The article offers insights into different regional contexts and countries, such as colonization and aboriginal trauma in Australia, slavery in the United States, the legacy of the Civil War “disappeared” and the Franco dictatorship in Spain, including the example of the EUROM network led by the University of Barcelona, as well as examples of the human rights movement in the Southern Cone countries, Chile and Argentina.

This article considers the commemoration of the institutional abuse of children within Australia. National inquiries have drawn public attention to experiences of childhood loss and trauma associated with institutional abuse, and memorials are increasingly seen as a way such experiences can be acknowledged and that survivors can be provided with a space for 'healing' of some kind. Drawing on extensive research into the memorials to lived experiences created in Australia since 1985-2015, this paper will outline the different processes and power structures that have led to the creation of memorials to survivors of childhood abuse. This includes the entanglements of national inquiries and their recommendations; the move towards public memorialisation of experience; and the complexities of decision-making about location and place. I compare examples of memorialisation at sites of former orphanages and care homes with others created in public spaces and with direct government input. I argue that in the creation of memorials that acknowledge childhood trauma, good intentions must be matched by good processes that centre the needs of survivors.

This article reports on Foodbank Histories, a multi-organisational project connecting oral histories and social justice at Newcastle West End Foodbank (NWEF). Foodbank Histories recorded interviews with clients, volunteers, and supporters of NWEF, aiming to raise awareness of food poverty and generate income for the foodbank. We outline the proliferation of foodbanks in contemporary Britain, and situate Newcastle in its socio-political and geographical contexts. The article reviews the methodology and epistemology of this collaborative project, and particularly the challenges of coproduction. It also details the ongoing public outputs from this dynamic project.

This paper explores a new genre of public memorials: those which commemorate lived experiences of loss and trauma. This work contributes to the growing body of literature on memory work in settler-colonial and transitional justice settings. Transitional justice has become an internationally accepted framework for societies attempting to move from civil conflict to peaceful democracy. While Australia’s (post)settler-colonial context does not fit this description, transitional justice mechanisms have been widely adopted as a means of coming to terms with the nation’s past. I offer four short case studies through which I discuss memorials that acknowledge human rights abuses, and consider the kinds of cultural ‘work’ such memorials are expected to do in the present. Firstly, public memorials are used by marginalised counterpublics to claim a space in the national story. Secondly, they are used to create spaces where survivors of human rights abuses can have their loss acknowledged and be given space to grieve. Thirdly, they are used as acts of witnessing, to speak back into the dominant public sphere. Finally, and more recently, memorials have been created by governments as part of the widespread adoption of transitional justice mechanisms. Such memorials are seen as acts of symbolic reparations and used to respond to claims of past human rights abuse on the part of the state.