Ephemera and writing about war in Britain, 1914 to the present

在我们迈向第二次世界大战一百周年之际，我们的项目解决了一个重要问题：我们如何确保英国未来的战争纪念活动反映了战争经验的充分多样性？政府委托的报告，AHRC资助的“第一次世界大战百年纪念反思”项目和个别学者强调了一些杰出的个人和社区努力纪念第一次世界大战（FWW），英国所有社区都经历过。然而，他们也同意，百年纪念期间的代表和纪念活动，特别是黑人和少数民族社区的代表和纪念活动，对公众对战争的理解几乎没有产生全面的影响。我们通过短暂和讲故事的相互关联的途径来解决这个问题，以捕捉在官方纪念馆和纪念仪式中经常看不到的经验。为此，我们的项目恢复蜉蝣作为理解FWW的边缘化经验的一种手段，并探讨了在文学表现中使用蜉蝣的潜力，以促进更多样化和包容性的公众对战争的理解。我们将蜉蝣理解为日常生活中脆弱和/或平凡的物品，保存在私人住宅和公共档案中。我们感兴趣的是，在过去的世纪中，作家们如何使用蜉蝣作为他们写作的提示或辅助手段和/或文学手段，以及如何利用它们在现在的使用来进行新的叙事和纪念战争的方法，揭示和/或放大战争经验的各个方面，这些方面继续被推到英国文化记忆的边缘。在DCMS委托撰写的报告《第一次世界大战百年纪念的教训》（2019年）中，作者强调了利用艺术促进有效参与纪念活动的“巨大成功”（第4页），并指出“艺术提供了一种敏感地处理有争议的历史的方式”（第5页）。我们的项目将使用历史，参与和文学批评的研究与创造性写作相结合，连接叙事参与与战争与战争的短暂痕迹，一方面和战争的遗产。我们专注于第一次世界大战作为一个案例研究，利用团队在这一领域的重要专业知识，同时也借鉴了其他冲突，特别是大屠杀的短暂痕迹的学术和创造性工作的单独机构，以制定可转移的想法和方法。我们的项目的影响超越了学院中心，通过使用短暂的和创造性的表达，从更多样化的角度促进对第一次世界大战的方法。我们将与两个观众举办创意和知识联合制作研讨会：14-18岁的年轻人，以及对黑人，少数民族和工人阶级的FWW经验感兴趣的社区团体。为年轻人举办的创意研讨会将看到年轻的参与者以超越标准学校课程的方式，创造性地和通过反思性评论来参与和回应（数字化）蜉蝣。这些创意讲习班为年轻人提供了机会，使他们能够在项目小组的指导下发展写作技能，并反思自己在塑造未来冲突遗产方面的作用。社区知识共同制作研讨会将看到参与者使用与他们自己的家庭或社区相关的短暂事件来创作叙事，使这些故事能够被更广泛的受众所了解，并在地方，区域或国家层面上融入更广泛的纪念方法。该项目不仅将导致研讨会参与者和项目团队成员的原创性工作，而且还将为社区团体和教育工作者以及为FWW工作的创意作家提供持久的，可转移的资源。

As we move towards the centenary of the Second World War, our project tackles an important question: how can we ensure that future commemoration of war in Britain reflects the full diversity of war experience? Government-commissioned reports, the AHRC-funded 'Reflections on the First World War Centenary' project and individual scholars have highlighted some outstanding individual and community efforts to commemorate the First World War (FWW) as experienced by all communities in Britain. However, they also agree that the representation and commemoration especially of Black and ethnic minority communities during the centenary has made little overall impact on popular understanding of the war. We address this problem through the interlinked pathways of ephemera and storytelling to capture experiences that are frequently invisible in official memorials and commemorative rituals. To this end, our project recovers ephemera as a means of understanding marginalised experiences of the FWW and explores the potential of using ephemera in literary representations to promote a more diverse and inclusive public understanding of war. We understand ephemera as fragile and/or mundane items of everyday life, preserved in private homes and public archives. We are interested in how writers have been using ephemera as prompts or aids for their writing and/or as literary devices over the course of the past century, and how their use in the present can be harnessed for new narrative and commemorative approaches to war that reveal and/or amplify aspects of war experience that continue to be pushed to the margins of British cultural memory. In the DCMS-commissioned report 'Lessons from the First World War Centenary' (2019), the authors highlighted the 'huge success' of using the arts to facilitate effective engagement with commemoration (p. 4) and noted that 'the arts offer a way to sensitively deal with contested histories' (p. 5). Our project will use historical, participatory and literary-critical research in combination with creative writing to connect narrative engagement with war with the ephemeral traces of war on the one hand and the war's legacy on the other. We focus on the FWW as a case study, using the team's significant expertise in this area, while also drawing on separate bodies of scholarship and creative work on the ephemeral traces of other conflicts, particularly the Holocaust, to formulate transferable ideas and methodologies. Our project's impact beyond the academy centres on facilitating approaches to the FWW from a more diverse range of perspectives through the use of ephemera and creative expression. We will run creative and knowledge co-production workshops with two audiences: young people aged 14-18, and community groups with a vested interest in Black, ethnic minority and working-class experiences of the FWW. Creative workshops for young people will be see young participants engage with and respond to (digitised) ephemera both creatively and through reflective commentaries in ways that go beyond standard school curricula. These creative workshops offer young people the opportunity to develop their skills as writers with guidance from the project team, and to reflect on their own role in shaping the future legacy of conflict. The community knowledge co-production workshops will see participants use ephemera relevant to their own family or community to create narratives that can make these stories accessible to wider audiences and feed into broader commemorative approaches at a local, regional or national level. The project will lead not only to original creative work by workshop participants and project team members, but will also yield lasting, transferable resources for community groups and educators and for creative writers working on the FWW.