Alison Atkinson-Phillips

The imaginative, and often speculative, approaches afforded by creative inquiry enable creative practitioners to interpret memory in material and embodied ways that are not always easily translated into traditional journal articles. As a community of scholars, it is important that Memory Studies takes this kind of critical-creative inquiry seriously as contributions to the field – not (only) as objects of study from which meanings are extracted and interpreted in a quest to produce knowledge, but as alternative forms of research ‘output’, producing and displaying knowledge on and in its own terms. While they have not been able to be included within this special edition, many of the artists and filmmakers who produced work for the 2023 Memory Studies Association annual conference cultural programme engaged deeply with the complexities of community as a site of memory and a locus of change...

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.

Australian history has undergone major transformations over the twentieth and twenty first centuries. Started by small groups of antiquarians and novelists, it is today practised in a myriad of ways by millions of Australians. Local, community and family historians spend huge amounts of time and resources investigating the past. The Stolen and Forgotten Generations seek connection and healing through history. The digital revolution has democratised history making and its production and consumption. In the academy, land settlement, politics and great men have been supplanted by Indigenous histories, immigration stories, gender and memory perspectives, cultural, environmental and public history. Through 22 readable chapters by leading practitioners, this book explores the complex, multi-roomed house of Australian history.

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.

Australia is a nation in which migration plays an important role in the national imaginary. Yet the position of the migrant, particularly those who fall outside of current definitions of whiteness, is ambiguous and unstable. The importance of Australia’s migrant heritage, and the need to understand the migrant’s place as citizen, are reflected in a series of migration- or maritime-themed museum sites in major Australian cities. Each of these sites also hosts a kind of “user pays” commemoration, in which a migrant or their descendants can pay to add their names to a “Welcome Wall” or other form of tribute. Yet within Australia’s settler-colonial context, the question of who has the right to offer welcome is complex and draws attention to the question of Aboriginal sovereignty. This paper draws on Dennis Byrne’s concept of networked heritage to consider urban spaces of migrant memory in dialogue with other less visible sites, including places of Aboriginal and settler incarceration, postwar reception centers, and the “black sites” of contemporary immigration detention.