Materialising the Cold War

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Three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, in a climate of international tension, the Cold War is more relevant than ever. And yet a generation now has no experience of it, and its public history is uneven. The Cold War's character as an 'imaginary war' in the global north poses special challenges for public engagement, especially for exhibiting material objects in museums. Synthesising approaches from material culture studies and Cold War history, critical heritage studies and museum practice, our project analyses these challenges and proposes a new framework for a Cold War museology. We focus on the process we call 'materialising the Cold War': the transformation of artefacts from the immaterial context of the Cold War to material objects in museums.National Museums Scotland and the University of Stirling will apply these multi-disciplinary methods to co-produce a major exhibition and schools programming, and we will generate innovative resources and outputs for museum users, heritage professionals and academics. In addition, our project partners - Royal Air Force Museums, Imperial War Museums, the Norwegian Luftfartmuseum in Bodo, and the Allied Museum in Berlin - will benefit significantly from our findings and collaboration as they each develop major new galleries within the next decade (one motive in their participation); a powerful legacy for the project.Framed by this international context, Materialising the Cold War will ask of UK museum objects: why have they been collected? How are they displayed? How have people responded to this 'fearsome heritage' - those who remember the Cold War and those who don't, whether family museum visitors, school groups, or dedicated enthusiasts? Throughout, we emphasise the fundamentally unstable and contested nature of the ways in which Cold War objects are made to mean something, and the breadth of the emotional register they stimulate.Our project will therefore:- be the first critically to take stock of how different institutions in the UK have addressed the fundamental challenge of materialising the Cold War in the context of a museum;- build on this original knowledge to develop an analytical framework for materialising the Cold War;- develop new approaches to collecting and display;- and thus offer a timely conceptual and practical foundation for a developing field.Our multi-disciplinary research team will comprise Dr Sam Alberti, museologist and senior manager at National Museums Scotland (PI); University of Stirling Cold War historian Professor Holger Nehring (Co-I); two fixed-term researchers, one based at the University of Stirling and the other at National Museums Scotland; and a fractional administrative post at National Museum Scotland to support them. They will work co-productively with curators and learning officers at National Museums Scotland, heritage scholars at the University of Stirling and an existing AHRC CDP doctoral student supervised by the PI and Co-I. An Advisory Board drawn from the project partners and other experts in the heritage and HEI sector will contribute substantively. Within the museum collections this team will explore, physical traces of the Cold War manifest not only in the devices of destruction that perpetuated the nuclear stalemate, but also in the material culture of readiness and more subtly in the technologies of everyday life. From bombers to radiation detectors to peace badges, pertinent collections are scattered across the sector. As Cold War witnesses decline, there is now a timely opportunity to harness memories associated with these objects, to collect more, and thereby to enhance a broader understanding of the sheer scale of the conflict. This project will develop the first systematic analysis and assessment of Cold War heritage in museums and apply this original knowledge to museum practice.