Category Archives: Research

Introducing … Men, Women and Care

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It has been nearly five months, I realise, since I started my new project, and I have yet to formally introduce it to the public.  There are reasons for this.  Much of the past five months has involved rather more administrative work discussing the project than actual research.  And even then there doesn’t seem to be a great deal to show for it.  The website is still being built, I am still working out the nuts and bolts of the project’s centrepiece, the team is still being recruited.  But last week we made the first formal appointment to that team, a skeleton website should be up and running soon, and we are on the cusp of the new teaching semester, so now seemed a propitious moment for slightly more formal introductions. So here goes.

Star and Garter poster

Fundraising Poster for the British Red Cross Star & Garter Home

Men, Women and Care: The gendering of formal and informal care in interwar Britain is a European Research Council Starting Grant funded research project based in the School of History at the University of Leeds.  Over five years, it will explore the ways in which the State, charities and, above all, the family provided medical and social care to disabled ex-servicemen in the aftermath of the First World War, particularly the relationships which developed between these three groups in the course of care provision.  It asks how State, medical and charitable institutions, often dominated by men, interacted with the wives, mothers and sisters who found themselves caring for men who had suffered life-altering wounds and illnesses as a result of their war experiences and how these interactions shaped social and cultural understandings of care-giving as a gendered practice.

At the heart of the project is the creation of a database of the material held in PIN 26, the section of The National Archives which contains nearly 23,000 First World War pension award files.  This is not a digitisation project; many files contain medical records which it would not be ethical to digitise.  Rather, the database will collect demographic information and give an indication of what supplementary material the files contain.  This will allow for both quantitative analysis of the entire sample, as well as helping researchers identify relevant files for further qualitative analysis.  The project will work closely with The National Archives to enable the database to be made freely and publicly accessible upon completion.

In addition to working with the National Archives, the project is looking to build relationships with local, national and international partners to explore how this research might shape and be shaped by contemporary understandings of medical and social care provision, particularly in relation to the role of the family.  The project itself is a central element of the Medicine and War strand of the Legacies of War research and engagement hub based at the University of Leeds, and we are looking forward to building on the strong relationships and innovative work that Legacies of War has developed since its inception.

The Men, Women and Care team, at present, is made up of me as principal investigator and Alexia Moncrieff, who will join as postdoctoral researcher fellow over the summer.  Currently completing her PhD on the Australian Army Medical Services in the First World War at the University of Adelaide, Alexia’s research for the project will focus on the ‘Overseas’ subsection of PIN 26, to explore how ideas of distance shaped the provision of care by different institutions.  We are also in the process of recruiting two PhD candidates who will start their research on related questions in October.  Given the richness of the PIN 26 archive, as well as the range of related material in the archives of local government, charitable institutions and personal narratives, I am very interested in hearing from anyone who would like to collaborate or contribute.

As I say, there will be, in the near future, a project website and Twitter feed (@WW1PensionsCare – as soon as Twitter allows me to register it).  Please bookmark and follow us to see how we develop and do get in touch if you want to find out more.

 

Breaking the silence

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It’s been a long time since I have posted, over three months in fact.  This is not down to a lack of material to write about (I have pondered at least a post a month which has never been written) and only slightly to do with lack of time (although I am pleased to say that the book is now four draft chapters long and well on the way to being completed in draft form).  Rather, I have got out of the habit of blogging and have struggled to get back into it.

Posting on here requires me to make the time to identify subjects, think them through and actually write posts down. Other things have to take a lower priority for this to happen and, as Matt Houlbrook recently pointed out, there are times when other things need to be prioritized.  Life can be more than history, and neither history nor historical blogging can alway console us for everything life throws us.

But there comes a point when even the priorities beyond history cease, at least temporarily, to be so compelling, when the deadlines retreat for a while, when the business of teaching and admin and childcare and housework have the potential to be treated as background noise rather than the narrative itself. But restarting old habits, however beneficial we may know them to be, can be difficult.  Blogging, like any other form of writing, at least for me, is a form of concentrated labour that needs time and space, time and space which need to be consciously carved out of already crowded days.  Forcing myself to do something that is difficult and time consuming but which has no deadline may be a very good self-mortifying discipline; that doesn’t mean I can or will do it.

So, in an attempt to get myself back into the habit of finding some time and space to write in this voice, a voice which I know is important to me both personally and professionally, I present you with the following query and half-formed thoughts which arose yesterday when I asked on Twitter whether any historians had included details of childcare responsiblities in their grant applications.  I received no more than a dozen responses, so this is a deeply unscientific survey, but the results interested me on a number of levels.  From the answers I did receive the following information emerged:

– The inclusion of childcare most often occurs as an explanation for past behaviours (time off for maternity leave) rather than as justification for proposed future behaviours (such as why a certain number of research trips of a certain length have been budgeted for).

– Some funders (take a bow, AHRC) have specific policies for taking childcare responsiblities into consideration. I did not know this. I am very glad I do now.

– There is a US/UK divide, with US applicants much more willing to view childcare as a legitimate concern of funders than UK applicants.

– Almost all responses were from women. Where men did responded it tended to be to be in relation of their female partner’s applications, rather than their own.

– All responses expressing anxiety about how the inclusion of childcare would be viewed by funders came from women, but so did the cheerleading for funders who explicitly stated that childcare consideration could and should be included in applications.

As I say, the tiny sample of responses makes any conclusions difficult to draw, even if I had any, but I remain interested in seeing where this discussion might take me, not least because of my own responses.  I have never included childcare in any application beyond the statement of maternity leave taken and the inclusion of my children’s birth certificates as evidence of my qualification for time credited for leave.  But now I am seriously questioning whether I should have done or do so in the future.

Thinking about it, I realise the extent to which I still separate my caring responsiblities from my professional identity, despite the immense impact they have on each other, an impact I freely acknowledge here.  How I ensure my children are properly cared for while fulfilling my obligations as a researcher and a teacher is an immensely complicated issue requiring great good will from many others (as I was reminded when my son fell ill two hours before my husband was due at work and 2.5 hours before I was due to teach as seminar).  Yet I still assume that sorting them out is my responsibillity rather than my funders.  That others, funders and academics, don’t see it as such is both cheering and challenging.

There is also a question of gender to be addressed, a question that seems obvious but which I find surprisingly hard to articulate.  Is childcare still a dominant concern of women? Are men more confident in asserting their right to have childcare responsibilities taken into account?  If so, why?  And what about other caring responsibilities?  Like so many of my colleagues, the necessity of caring for aging parents is becoming an increasing demand on my time and emotional energy, time and emotional energy that cannot then be invested in research.

I will need to think more about this, ask more questions, have more discussions, write more blog posts.  If I want to change the status quo, my own as much as anything, I need to break silence.

 

The things we do not talk about

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Things have been a bit quiet on the blogging front for the past couple of months. This has been for a few reasons.

a) I have been preparing for the end of my current project (which officially finished last week) by doing rather a lot of other writing – conference papers for the imminent summer conference season, a book proposal, detailed chapter outlines, even some things that some day may actually start to look like chapters of the book I want to complete this summer.
b) I have been preparing for the beginning of the next project, which should start in September, by finalising a number of administrative details including, most time-consumingly it turns out, organising an ethical review of the project and responding to several ethical queries raised by the body funding the work. Because the basis of the project involves documentation relating to the medical histories of ex-servicemen from the First World War, this has turned out to be more complicated than anticipated, as I will come back to in a minute.
c) Three members of my close family are suffering from illnesses which have involved a significant commitment of temporal and emotional resources from me, including multiple trips to the US. The severity of these conditions ranges from the life-threatening to the debilitating but all have been life-altering, both for the sufferers and for those of in their immediate family who, along with a variety of medical professionals, are seeking to care for them.

Now, you may have noticed that I am being rather vague about the specific details of the illnesses that have become such a central part of my life recently. This is deliberate. I have spoken in more detail about what is happening with various friends and colleagues who may be able to identify some or all of the family members I am referring to. Even then, outside my family and one or two very close friends whose support in maintaining my own equilibrium has been invaluable to me, I have not confided the precise details of diagnosis, treatment or prognosis.

This is for two reasons. Firstly, these medical details are not mine to share. They are, by all accepted ethical standards, the information of the patients. They have chosen to share this information with me (thankfully, as this has allowed me to offer what support I can to people I love very much and who are important to me), but have not necessarily chosen to share it more widely. It is not my right to share it in ways that they might not wish me to, however much the information shapes my own life. Indeed, on at least one occasion I have been asked specifically not to discuss the situation in detail with people outside the immediate family.

But, even if I had the explicit permission of the primary individual to share this information, there are other important considerations I need to take into account before discussing these illnesses. Because the sufferer and I are not the only ones involved. Coping with these conditions has, in all three cases, involved important interconnected networks which include, from my perspective, my husband, my parents, my siblings, my dad’s wife and her daughters, my children and my in-laws. All of us within these networks have our own emotional relationship with the illnesses and those suffering from them (as well as a variety of other additional stresses in our live – new jobs, house moves, professional concerns, etc.) Not all of us might be comfortable with a public discussion of the details of the medical matters that are shaping all our lives so profoundly.

Which brings me back to those ethical questions that I have been attempting to answer over the past six weeks. I was asked, among other things, to confirm that the information I will be collecting and analysing for the project is in the public domain and does not contravene any data protection laws. As it happens, the information is all publicly available and, because the subjects whose data is being scrutinized are dead, data protection laws do not apply. However, I was also asked to consider whether I was likely to reveal information (specifically medical details) that might be considered sensitive to those who are living. And here the issue of confidentiality arises. Because while the data involved may not be that relating to any living person, there is the possibility that the stories the data has to tell – about medical conditions and the care provided and received for these conditions – might be considered sensitive by surviving family members. Information about the nature of a wound or illness might be exposed which challenges the family stories told about a relative. Details of care might reflect new light on the behaviour of surviving family members. Embarrassing details about the effects of wartime injuries might emerge. As I haven’t yet done the research, I don’t know if such information will emerge; even if it does, I cannot predict whether any individual family or family member might be negatively affected by the information if they ever become aware of my research. Ethically I cannot ignore the possibility and must consider what contingencies I must put in place to ideally prevent and, in the worst case, remedy, any such effect.

The result has been a number of long and very fruitful conversations, in person, on the phone and via email, with a variety of archivists, data protection officers and researchers working in related ethical fields. The ultimate conclusion is that I will keep the sensitivity of the information I am dealing with in mind as I undertake and eventually publish my research. I will pseudonomise sources, although this will have to be balanced by the necessity of maintaining appropriate conventions of citation for my field. And I will continue discussing, with peer reviewers, with colleagues, with archive and university officials, the appropriate course to take in the specific contexts that may (or may not) arise.

There is, it turns out, no simple concrete answer to this sort of ethical question, and nor should there be. But I think it is helpful for me to acknowledge that, throughout this process my sensitivities and consequent decisions will be shaped, in part, by my awareness of my own willingness to share my family’s medical history in public. If I am unwilling to discuss certain details of my own family’s situation, including both the patients and carers, in public, how much can I ask of the families of the men I am researching? The answer is, at the moment, I don’t know, although I suspect it will change over time. However, I can say that my personal experience has re-emphasised for me the importance of the project I will be undertaking. Because to fully understand medical care-giving, whether historically or today, we must acknowledge and understand the role, and consequent sensitivities, of the family.

A letter to the Imperial War Museums

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The following post contains links to a pay-walled site, for which I apologise, but I hope the gist will be clear. On 24th February, 2015, The Times published a brief report on plans by the Imperial War Museums to introduce reduced hours and daily charges of £14 a day for use of their London reading room, the only place scholars and researchers can access the unique collection of documents and books relating to modern warfare which form the basis of the Museums’ collection. This plan is modification of an original plan to close the library and Explore History facilities. It has, however, caused great concern among scholars, myself among them. I was one of over seventy academics and historians to sign a letter to The Times, written by Dr Clare Makepeace of University College London and published on 26th February, expressing our belief that these plans will negatively impact on future scholarship, impair understanding of modern conflict, and silence the voices of veterans of two world wars who are no longer with us, voices that continue to need to be heard in our society. There was not space in the letter to give voice to the huge range of concerns about specific impacts that these plans may have, but one that was voiced by many involved was the impact on post-graduate and early career scholars, those whose work has the potential to be most original but who are often shortest of discretionary funds for research. I am taking this opportunity, therefore, to host the publication of an open letter to the Imperial War Museums, written by Christopher Phillips of the University of Leeds and signed by seventeen other postgraduate students, which clearly articulates these concerns. If you are a postgraduate and would like your name added to the list of signatories, please contact Chris at C.Phillips@leeds.ac.uk with your name and institution.

Dear Ms Lees,

Having read the letter to The Times by Dr Clare Makepeace and seventy-six academic colleagues (published 27 February), we would like to place on record the reservations of the postgraduate and undergraduate communities over the proposed changes to IWM’s research provision.

The decision to charge £14 per day for researchers to access IWM’s collections will have a disproportionately negative effect on the student population and will materially alter the manner in which researchers approach IWM as an institution. At best, the £14 per day charge will lead undergraduate and postgraduate researchers to rely upon material which has already been highly cited in academic and popular works, leading to a narrowing of focus upon a relatively small number of the collection’s holdings and a commensurate reduction in the development of original, ground-breaking research based upon the exploration of previously under-used material. At worst, IWM’s decision to charge researchers £14 per day will result in a significant number of students choosing to forego any engagement with the collections whatsoever. As the letter signed by our academic colleagues makes clear, such actions will serve only to impair our understanding of modern warfare.

Primary research at undergraduate and postgraduate level is a significant aspect of academic learning. The writing of dissertations and theses plays a fundamental role in introducing new material to the historical conversation and in testing, challenging, and improving the work of established academics, many of whom have already registered their concern and discomfort at the proposed changes to IWM’s services.

Yours sincerely,

Christopher Phillips, PhD student and Postgraduate Tutor, University of Leeds
Christina Andrew, President of the War Studies Society, King’s College London
Aimée Fox-Godden, PhD student, University of Birmingham
Alina Enzensberger, PhD student, Humboldt-Universität, Berlin
Carlos Alves Lopes, PhD student and integrated researcher, Instituto de História Contemporânea, Lisbon
Linda Maynard, PhD student, Birkbeck, University of London
Meighen McCrae, DPhil candidate, Linacre College, University of Oxford
Margarida Portela, PhD student and integrated researcher, Instituto de História Contemporânea, Lisbon
Adam Prime, PhD student and Postgraduate Tutor, University of Leicester
Philippa Read, PhD student and Postgraduate Tutor, University of Leeds
Claire Rennie, PhD student and Postgraduate Tutor, University of Leeds
Olivia Tidswell, MA student, University of Leeds
Michael Reeve, MA student, University of Leeds
Melyssa Dawson, MA student, University of Leeds
Patrick Watt, PhD candidate and Postgraduate Tutor, University of Edinburgh
Vicky Davis, PhD student, Institute of Historical Research, London
Ashleigh Gilbertson, PhD student, University of Adelaide
Caitriona McCartney, PhD student, University of Birmingham

Tears, idle tears

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Never let it be said that the BBC’s flagship television programme marking the centenary of the First World War, Britain’s Great War, has had no impact on academic research. Following a flippant comment on Twitter, in response to Jeremy Paxman’s description of members of the British cabinet crying at the outbreak of war, I seem to have rather publicly committed myself to writing an article on British soldiers crying during the First World War.

This is actually slightly less ambitious and out of left field than it might first appear. I have a number of examples of men crying, and commenting on crying in relation to their masculine sense of self, while at the front. I am also actively looking for examples of men showing emotion through tears in hospital. These are examples of men crying as a response to fear or to pain. Following from André Loez’s article in Macleod and Purseigle (eds.), Uncovered Fields: Perspectives in War Studies (Brill, 2004), on French soldiers’ tears, I suspect there are also men who cry out of grief and relief/joy.  I would love to find more examples of these, so if anyone comes across any, please do let me know.

I have also been working my way through quite a lot of literature on the history of emotions, as I try to work out my theoretical and methodological approach to the study of masculine subjectivity, something that has definitely changed since I published my book five years ago.  This is a fascinating and complicated subject that I will be posting about at greater length in the near future.  Having a discrete, concrete project to work on that allows me to put a mass of theory into some sort of practice should be quite a useful discipline.  I have always been the sort of researcher who needs to write as she goes, if only to keep my ideas in order.

So I will keep hunting for examples of men whose stiff upper lip trembled far more often than we might believe, and work at locating them in the context of the history of emotions in wartime.  Thank you, BBC and Twitter, yet another job to add to my list!

Scribble, scribble, scribble

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So, it is the first week of October and I find myself faced with a series of deadlines for pieces of written work.  In the next two months I need to give a conference paper on voluntary medical services during the First World War, complete an encyclopedia entry on subjectivity and emotion in the British armed services and submit a preliminary application for a grant.  All three are fairly major, if short, pieces of writing for important and potentially (at least in the case of the encyclopedia article) extensive audiences.  They also all need to be constructed in different registers – one to be delivered verbally, one with objectivity (about a highly emotive subject) at its core and one aimed at a non-specialist but nonetheless highly erudite audience. This is going to be a unique challenge for me, both in terms of tackling new forms of written work and new research ideas, and in terms of the amount of work and flexibility that is going to be required of me.

I have been thinking about them all for a considerable period of time, including writing outlines, but it is only this week that I have started putting pen to paper to flesh out my ideas.  Already I have found myself coming up against questions about how I organise my ideas and my time.  Today’s experiment involves using very short periods of time to work intensively on several projects in rotation.  Next week, when I have scheduled a day in the library to flesh out my references, I will be able to compare my productivity with a day spent concentrating on just one piece for a more extended period.  It will be interesting to see how things turn out and to see what approaches work at different stages in the writing process.

Time permitting, I hope to blog about the process and use the opportunity to reflect on how (and why) I write history.  With any luck, by the end of the month I will have drafts of all three pieces and avoided a nervous breakdown.  Then the fun of editing will begin…

Playing at Royal Welch Fusiliers?

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A tweet tonight reminded me that it has been a while since I have written a blog post.  While I have several posts lined up, the past few weeks have been overwhelmed with family business, so I thought I would return with the following family story:

The other day I was watching my children play with their Duplo (large Lego blocks, for those of you who have never suffered the trauma of thinking that your offspring has ingested one of the regular sized pieces).  My son (age 4) had attached two wheeled pieces to each other and was carefully constructing an edifice which he informed me was a tractor.  My daughter (age 21 months) had amassed every one of the small people who come with just about every box sold (we have about 15 at this point) and carefully lined them up on the table, first standing, then lying down.

Watching their varying behaviour was fascinating. Feminist that I am, I have been fairly strict about not distinguishing their gender when it comes to toys, although, yes, I do dress my daughter in dresses and floral print tops that I would never dream of putting my son in.  And I have cut my son’s hair since he was around 9 months, while my daughter’s curls have been allowed to grow.  Where their toys might be considered gendered (a mouse doll’s house or the pirate dressing up outfit) I encourage both to play with them, sharing, of course.  Yet when faced with a gender-neutral toy such as the Duplo, each child chooses to approach it in an entirely different way.

Is this because of their respective sexes?  I have read the media reports of chimpanzees which use a stick differently (tool or weapon) depending on their sex.  And here are my children apparently following gender norms in their play: the boy constructing, the girl socialising (as much as as 21-month-old with limited vocabulary can).

And yet, and yet…  My son has always built things.  He has an engineer’s mind, the sort that wants to know how and why things work.  My daughter has always been sociable, delighting in engaging with people in whatever way she can.   I don’t think that these traits are defined by their relative possession of XY or XX chromosomes. These are facets of them as individuals, not of their sex.  As their mother, what I must encourage is this sense of individuality and what I must guard against is the imposition of gendered social norms, however neatly they appear to fit.

Perhaps there is also a lesson for me for my research as well. Gender categories are all very well for attempting to understand the society that creates them, but they must be applied to the individual with caution. From the CO who was both fired by a desire to serve his country while at the same time refusing to take up arms, to the warrior poet who renounced war and yet returned to his battalion, men (and women) transgressed gendered assumptions throughout the  war.  No one fits a neat characterisation of masculinity or femininity in life any more than in play, something I must strive to remember when I eventually make it back into the archive.

Curioser and curioser

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One reason for the recent hiatus in my posts on here is that, a little while ago, I fell down a metaphoric rabbit hole.

What literally happened was that I received an e-mail informing me that, if a grant application for which I was in the process of applying was successful, I would have to complete an ethical review before the project began because (and I quote) the project ‘involves any personal stories (even if the person is no longer alive)’.  This prompted me to enquire whether this review was necessary because the project’s outputs* were to be broadcast rather than published or if this was true of all projects involving personal stories.  It turns out that this requirement is true of all projects involving personal stories of all, including those who have been dead for less than 100 years.  I was completely unaware of this fact and, as a result, have been scrambling to apply for a retrospective review for my research project which has formally been running for 18 months (ethical reviews are supposed to occur before the project actually starts).

The result has been that I find myself tangled in something of a surreal mess.  How, for instance, do I answer the question ‘Will participants be taking part in the research without their knowledge and consent?’? The subjects of my research are dead.  They are, by definition, unable to give consent of any sort, let alone informed consent.  Is the archiving of the material I am using enough to presume consent on the part of the subject?  Even when the donor of the material is a descendant rather than the creator of the material?  I have always assumed this to be the case, not because of any ethical review carried out into my research methodology but because archived material comes under intellectual property (IP) protocols.  As a result, I need to get the necessary copyright clearance to actually publish anything I use from archival sources and copyright passes on to the descendants of the creator of the document.  This is why so many acknowledgements in historical monographs contain phrases like ‘Every effort has been made to contact the copyright holders of the materials quoted’.  The further away from the date of donation we get, the more tenuous are links with the copyright holders and many archives have lost touch with the holders over the years.  Most archives have in place a system whereby material can be used even if direct permission has not been gained but every effort has been made by the author to gain it.  Such efforts can be quite complex.  For instance, the copyright of personal letters held by the National Archive (NA) remains with the descendants of the writer.  Official documents (anything written for a government department or agency) comes under Crown Copyright.  So a letter from a disabled ex-serviceman to the Officers’ Awards branch of the Ministry of Pensions has a private copyright holder who must tracked down, while the response from the official is easily cleared through Crown Copyright.

All of which is possibly fascinating but a matter of IP, not ethics.  And while it helps to address concerns over the misrepresentation of archived material, it doesn’t answer the question of how informed consent to participate in a study is to be given by the dead.  All the protocols I have read around the subject (data protection, informed consent, verbal informed consent, reimbursement and low-risk observation) deal with living subjects only, raising issues which certainly have relevance for those using oral histories but having little to say to someone whose work is entirely archive-based.  So I am going to have to send my form off to the review committee and hope for the best.  And start seriously considering shifting my research focus to the Napoleonic Wars, or possibly surreal children’s literature.

*Apologies for the use of bureaucratic language.  A month of writing grant applications has had a bad effect on me. Normal service should hopefully resume shortly.

Library time

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So, another hiatus in posting here while I have done battle with my next conference paper, this one on representations of shell shock as immaturity across 20th century British popular culture.  It is the third paper I have written on the subject.  Every time I write the proposal for the paper I think what a brilliant idea it is; every time I actually sit down to write the paper itself I find myself doing vicious intellectual battle and wondering how I could think there was any mileage in the concept at all.  Still, I must be doing something right as both the previous tilts at this particular windmill have been published. And this is a conference paper, so I am going to leave it intentionally (honest, guv!) rough in the hope of getting useful feedback.  Given that the conference is being attended by what feels like all the world-class historians of shell shock available, this could be either a very good (or very, very bad) idea.  We will see. I am going to write the second draft next week.

This seemingly endless struggle has been interspersed with some work more directly related to what I am paid to do.  I spent a fabulous week in the Army Medical Services Museum (about which I intend to write a much longer blog shortly) and gave a paper to the Legacies of War seminar series. (Like the majority of those papers, it will be on-line soon here.)  This was another rough draft and the feedback was immensely useful so I am hopeful that, when I actually get around to rewriting and expanding the paper, there will be some hope of publishing it.

Library Shoot 58 (2)I also spent a really enjoyable Saturday morning in Special Collections, working with writers from Snowgoose.  Legacies of War is working with writers from the project to research a series of monologues based on the civilian experiences of the First World War in Leeds which will be performed on camera and available for festivals, as an educational tool and to view on-line.  The Saturday session I helped facilitate was an opportunity to introduce the writers, who were unfamiliar with working in historical archives, to the holdings of the Liddle Collection.  The Liddle catalogue is something of a mystery, even to professional historians with archival experience.  Add to that the complexities of copyright law and queries over the reproduction of images and the potential for intimidation is quite high.  So it was a complete joy to help this group quite literally get their hands on original documents and objects. Library Shoot 42 Library Shoot 24 (2)An hour in and everyone was engrossed in their research, a sight I found remarkably rewarding.  It was also a pleasure to be able to offer advice to someone whose research interest is likely to take her beyond Special Collections and into the city archives and other resources that I am not familiar with.  Helping someone to plot the map for a research journey is almost as exciting as plotting your own, I discover.

Library Shoot 53 (2)

My work for Research for Community Heritage has, to date, been somewhat confusing and occasionally unnerving but the interactions with the community research groups have, as this last experience exemplifies, been enormously rewarding in unexpected ways.  (On a similar note, some work I have done with Headingley LitFest has made me view Park Square in Leeds in an entirely new light.)  There are aspects of the project that make an unanswerable case for community engagement by the academy. More thought needs to be given about the ways in which such engagement integrates with other academic responsibilities, especially for early careers researchers, but the engagement itself offers enormous potential rewards for all involved.

(Photo credit: All photographs are by Laura Whitaker of www.definingbeauty.co.uk)

Cake, biscuits and lemony pudding

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Cake: It may not be obvphotoious from this picture, but on one of the post-it notes in the ‘hospitality’ section is written the word ‘CAKE’.  This, along with all the other post-its, was part of a ‘brain dump’ exercise undertaken as part of a facilitated meeting of the Legacies of War steering group aimed at defining the next steps for the project.  The process took 3 busy very hours, moving from defining desirable outcomes for interested parties (individuals, funders and audiences, both in the flesh and on-line) through the brain-dump of achieving those ends to prioritizing aims and, via a series of specific questions, suggesting practical steps for achieving those priorities.

The final result was this:

photo (2)a rather neater arrangement of post-it notes.  ‘Cake’ did rather get lost in the shuffle, with priorities being defined as the way the project is run, locating the project in the international context of war commemoration and breaking down barriers. However a few immediate plans of action were decided upon and the process, unlike anything I have participated in before, was a fascinating experience.  I am not sure precisely how useful it would be more than very occasionally, but as a focusing exercise it certainly worked in the short term and hopefully will show results in the medium to long term as well.  And cake, we all concluded, is not a bad answer to any question.

Biscuits: Following this intense morning, four of us then headed over to the Imperial War Museum North for a meeting of regional scholars to discuss the forthcoming exhibition on the First World War in Manchester and the North West.  While the (very nice) biscuits were promoted as a principle attraction, the discussion of pretty much every aspect of the war, from recruitment and enlistment to demobilisation and disability managed to distract us from them most effectively.  The scope of the proposed exhibition is vast, covering aspects relating to both civil and military experience over the course of the entire war, with the locality serving as the focus.  As a result, I suspect the museum’s researchers got more than they perhaps bargained for in terms of suggestions of subjects to be pursued.  It will be very interesting to see how the project develops.  In the meantime, I got to take away a good deal of information about the demographics of the Manchester region c.1914 and some food for thought about population mobility in the years before the war.

Lemony pudding: These were the puddings on offer at lunch on the second day of the Social History Society conference, held at the beginning of the week.  I was only able to attend two days but those were both so full that I haven’t yet been able to fully absorb everything that I learned. Highlights were meeting Carina Peniston-Bird, with whom I had a chat over said lemony puddings, and Cath Feely, whose work on conscientious objectors’ reading in wartime is intriguing.  My top paper, though, has to be Helen Smith’s on masculinity and sexuality in northern working-class communities in the years just after the First World War with its important challenge to Joanna Bourke’s argument about male intimacy as a product of the trenches.  It reaffirmed for me the importance of work and professional identity as key to understanding masculinities, something that I need to explore more in relation to my ideas about the centrality of life cycle and maturity to these understandings as well.

So, lots to think about on all sorts of levels.  Never underestimate the power of dessert.