The First World War and its Legacy 2020 and Beyond: Community, Collaboration and Conflict

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

The historian Raphael Samuel described history as 'a social form of knowledge; the work in any given instance of a thousand hands' (Samuel 1994). In 2014 the AHRC funded five First World War Engagement Centres to work with community groups to explore the legacies of the First World War. Responsive to community agendas, the Centres offered skills workshops on recording local heritage, and digitization; content specific workshops based on using archive/museum collections or linked to commemorative events; and workshops which explored through a 'temporally inflected lens' issues around silences, representation and memorialisation. The result was that the Engagement Centres created unique community-academic collaborations, generating new knowledge about the First World War and about the value of the past to communities living in the UK today. However, the nature, context and consequences of the centenary could only be fully appreciated at its conclusion. Similarly, the practices of co-production and multiple partnerships across universities, community and heritage organisations, demonstrated their full potential at a series of the cross-Centre Festivals across the UK in 2019. This proposal responds to both sets of outcomes. The First World War and its Legacy 2020 and Beyond: Community, Collaboration and Conflict aims to sustain the social and cultural impact of the work of 'a thousand hands' of citizen researchers through the co-design and co-production of a series of e-books which will keep in circulation community research as a living resource and in doing so offer a model for future heritage policy around community engagement and national commemoration.