Voices of War and Peace - Core Centre Continuation Proposal

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Remembering, just like forgetting, is always a political act. The First World War was a global conflict which left its mark on the local. Was it experienced differently in urban and rural areas? What were the relationships between soldiers and civilians during and after the war? Did it shape individual and community identities? Did it have different meanings for contemporaries? There was a consensus that the dead were to be commemorated and remembered, but there was less agreement over how the example of sacrifice was to be understood and the meanings to be attributed to and experiences to be drawn from acts of commemoration. How have these meanings changed over time? How is it being understood today? Is it a truism that 'the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there'? Certainly, Britain in 2016 is a very different country to that of 1914 and has been described by Parekh (2000) as 'a community of communities.' What sense are young people making of the local memorials to the dead which sit in the urban and rural landscapes and the acts of commemoration organised by an older generation which centre upon them? What meaning does the war have for young people who have grown up in a society where live reports of conflict are instantly available on a smartphone and where stories of casualties, destruction and refugees are instantly reported in the media? How will young people connect this past with their present and their future? As the First World War moves out of memory into history, what will be the record of commemoration that they will have experienced and will be left after 2019 for future historians to reflect upon? The issues embedded in these questions formed, and continue to form, the framework of the Voices of War and Peace: the Great War and its Legacy project. Committed to cross-disciplinary research, structural commitment to community engagement with research and professional commitment 'in a mission of understanding' to investigate, analyse, apprehend, criticize and judge and thereby translate Edward Said's idea of 'communities of interpretation' into practice (Said 2003) the Voices' Centre has reached out to multiple communities and publics, local and national, to explore through dialogue issues around memory, remembering and commemoration. The Centre exists to respond to community requests for support in terms of building research skills and in supporting community driven research agenda; and it exists to work in partnership with the other AHRC funded Engagement Centres, the Heritage Lottery Fund, the Centenary Partnership, and arts and heritage organisations in exploring the connections between public and academic histories of the First World War. Sharing knowledge, expertise and resources about the impact of conflict on gender relations on the home front during and after the war, on the spiritual elements of personal and family identity, on family relationships and what it was to be a child growing up in an age of conflict, loss and displacement, and on global relationships in the decades that followed the Peace the Voices project will leave its own legacy for community/academy relations in terms of the capacity for the co-design and coproduction of research, an understanding of the complicated relationship between remembering and forgetting and a desire to continue to 'think forward through the past'.