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

随着第二次世界大战一百周年的临近，我们的项目解决了一个重要的问题：我们如何确保英国未来对战争的纪念反映出战争经历的全部多样性？政府委托的报告、人权理事会资助的“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为纪念英国所有社区所经历的第一次世界大战所做的努力。然而，他们也同意，在百年纪念期间，对黑人和少数民族社区的代表和纪念，对公众对战争的理解几乎没有产生总体影响。我们通过蜉蝣和讲故事的相互联系的途径来解决这个问题，以捕捉在官方纪念和纪念仪式中经常看不到的经历。为此，我们的项目恢复了蜉蝣作为一种理解被边缘化的战争经历的手段，并探索了在文学表现中使用蜉蝣的潜力，以促进公众对战争的更多样化和包容性的理解。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馆中。我们感兴趣的是，在过去的一个世纪里，作家们是如何利用蜉蝣作为他们写作和/或文学手段的提示或辅助手段的，以及它们在当前的使用如何被利用为新的叙事和纪念战争的方法，揭示和/或放大战争经历的各个方面，这些方面继续被推到英国文化记忆的边缘。在dcms委托编写的《第一次世界大战百年纪念的教训》（2019年）报告中，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历史的方式”（第5页）。我们的项目将使用历史、参与性和文学批判性研究，结合创造性写作，将战争的叙事参与与战争的短暂痕迹和战争的遗产联系起来。我们将FWW作为一个案例研究重点，利用该团队在这一领域的重要专业知识，同时也利用其他学术机构和关于其他冲突（特别是大屠杀）短暂痕迹的创造性工作，制定可转让的想法和方法。我们的项目在学院之外的影响集中在通过使用短暂和创造性的表达，从更多样化的角度促进对FWW的看法。我们会举办创意及知识联产工作坊，参加者为14至18岁的青少年，以及对黑人、少数族裔及工人阶层的工作经验有兴趣的社区团体。为年轻人举办的创意研讨会将让年轻的参与者以超越标准学校课程的方式，创造性地和反思性地参与并回应（数字化的）蜉蝣。这些创意工作坊为年轻人提供了机会，在项目团队的指导下发展自己的写作技能，并反思自己在塑造未来冲突遗产方面的作用。在社区知识联合制作讲习班上，参与者将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，使这些故事能够为更广泛的受众所了解，并在地方、区域或国家一级采用更广泛的纪念方法。这项计划不仅会为工作坊参加者和项目成员带来原创的作品，也会为社区团体、教育工作者和在FWW工作的有创意的作家带来持久的、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.