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Community archives are often viewed as repositories of knowledge and experience that are nevertheless somehow remote from the taxpayers who often fund them. However, the idea of an archive has more recently been popularized by digital resources that allow access to established archives and also permit users to create archives of their own. This book examines the changing relationship between citizens and their notions of archives. The growing number of archives, and the evolving practices associated with collecting and curating, mean that we are now in the process of remaking the very idea of the archive. Communities have been at the heart of this exciting work and their experiences are both central to our understanding of this new terrain and in challenging the traditional histories behind the control of knowledge and power. Using a wide range of case studies, this edited collection shows how community engagement and co-creation is challenging and extending the notion of the archive.
This chapter offers a ‘wibbly-wobbly’ account of a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transsexual (LGBT) community history and archiving project, How We Got Here. The project was initiated by The Proud Trust (TPT), ‘home of LGBT+ youth’, a regional network of LGBT youth groups across Manchester and North West England, who partnered with a number of organisations, including Schools OUT UK. The project traced three interrelated threads of LGBT activism that were particularly focused on Manchester and the north-west of England, but both the project and the original activism also paid attention to how the city and region are inevitably enmeshed in national and global politics. The three strands of activism are centred on: the establishment of the first purpose-built gay centre in Europe, in Manchester in 1988, now managed by TPT; work in schools, supporting teachers and pupils, including the setting up and campaigning of Schools OUT UK (formerly called the Gay Teachers’ Group); and histories of LGBT youth work in Manchester. Thus, the project also centred on histories of LGBT activism that rarely receive attention — including the campaigning of teachers and youth workers in schools and youth clubs and beyond.
This chapter is a collaborative piece about doing collaborative ethnography. It primarily draws on the authors’ ethnography over many years in establishing and developing the field of collaborative ethnography through their published work. The chapter introduces collaborative ethnography as a methodology, but also describes the encounter that led to writing this book. In the Rotherham project, collaborative ethnography became a way of closing the distance between those who write about people and those who are written about. It made explicit the discussions and debates that happen when we learn together, but it also went further. As such, this chapter is a multi-voiced piece of writing, which begins with a discussion about the nature of research itself, and then moves on to describe the research encounter.
This is a book that challenges contemporary images of place. Too often we are told about deprived neighbourhoods but rarely do the people who live in those communities get to shape the agenda and describe, from their perspective, what is important to them. In this book the process of re-imagining comes to the fore in a fresh and contemporary look at one UK town, Rotherham. Using history, artistic practice, writing, poetry, autobiography, and collaborative ethnography, this book literally and figuratively re-imagines a place. It is a manifesto for alternative visions of community, located in histories and cultural reference points that often remain unheard within the mainstream media. As such, the book presents a how to for researchers interested in community collaborative research and accessing alternative ways of knowing and voices in marginalised communities.
This is a book that challenges contemporary images of place. Too often we are told about deprived neighbourhoods but rarely do the people who live in those communities get to shape the agenda and describe, from their perspective, what is important to them. In this book the process of re-imagining comes to the fore in a fresh and contemporary look at one UK town, Rotherham. Using history, artistic practice, writing, poetry, autobiography, and collaborative ethnography, this book literally and figuratively re-imagines a place. It is a manifesto for alternative visions of community, located in histories and cultural reference points that often remain unheard within the mainstream media. As such, the book presents a how to for researchers interested in community collaborative research and accessing alternative ways of knowing and voices in marginalised communities.
This is a book that challenges contemporary images of place. Too often we are told about deprived neighbourhoods but rarely do the people who live in those communities get to shape the agenda and describe, from their perspective, what is important to them. In this book the process of re-imagining comes to the fore in a fresh and contemporary look at one UK town, Rotherham. Using history, artistic practice, writing, poetry, autobiography, and collaborative ethnography, this book literally and figuratively re-imagines a place. It is a manifesto for alternative visions of community, located in histories and cultural reference points that often remain unheard within the mainstream media. As such, the book presents a how to for researchers interested in community collaborative research and accessing alternative ways of knowing and voices in marginalised communities.
This chapter argues that emotions help people with ‘meaning making’, and offer different experiences of the world through a different lens. It does so in the context of women’s writing, as writing connects ordinary women and gives them the opportunity to articulate feelings not expressed or shared before. In academic social science, emotions have historically been associated with the irrational and quite opposed to the objective scientific search for knowledge. However, in the last decade or so, sociologists have recognised that ethnographic research cannot be clinical and detached from human emotions. We can say ‘emotions do things’ — they move us but also connect us with others.
This chapter considers alternative histories of urban settlement through the intersection between family and neighbourhood. It proposes a form of co-production that connects specific small-scale communities not to meta-histories, but to documents that have a specific meaning within their own notions of narrative. The ‘stuff’ of such histories, because they are as much about the private, intimate, and familiar, is about stuff in the home — much of it undiscovered, perhaps only half-realised by families. Many historians have seen this as the ephemera of marginal oral histories. In extension of arguments about the role of oral history made elsewhere, this chapter argues that the connection between the intimate, which includes the material memorabilia and personal documents in homes, and the public community, helps us to explore the ways in which ideas of postcolonial citizenship are related to the idea of the home.
This chapter addresses the question of how historical knowledge can help one to make sense of communities like Rotherham. It first considers what counts as ‘historical knowledge’, and examines the limitations of historiography in producing histories at a local level, where issues of class, gender, and ethnicity are played out in people’s everyday lives. The chapter then explores how historians are expanding what counts for historical knowledge — in particular, the co-production of research, which can be defined as research with people rather than on people. It also provides some real-world examples of co-production in action. Finally, the chapter provides some arguments as to why historical knowledge matters.
This chapter focuses on the identities of British Muslim young women from a writing group, and shares some of the themes that emerged during these writing sessions. Three specific themes related to identity came out of the girls’ writing group: place and globalisation; religion; and language. In the UK, there is an increased focus on social cohesion and integration. Young people from minority ethnic communities experience a great deal of pressure in order to fit in with the national narrative of ‘Britishness’, and often feel that they should conform outwardly in their dress and physical appearance, and adopt British sociocultural practices. Those individuals who maintain their faith, language, and cultural identity are seen as segregating themselves and living parallel lives.
