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17 - Archive Utopias: Linking Collaborative Histories to Local Democracy
- Edited by Simon Popple, University of Leeds, Andrew Prescott, University of Glasgow, Daniel Mutibwa, University of Nottingham
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- Book:
- Communities, Archives and New Collaborative Practices
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 03 March 2021
- Print publication:
- 26 February 2020, pp 235-250
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Summary
We want to introduce the work we did together, and we will explore it in this chapter from three starting points:
In the York Guildhall – the historic meeting place of the Guilds and now the full City of York Council Chamber – there is a sign probably put up in 1891 (Figure 17.1). It reads: ‘No manifestation of feeling from the public will be allowed during the council meetings’. Lianne Brigham and Richard Brigham photographed and shared this photograph on their York Past and Present Facebook 17,000-strong group to much amusement: ‘typical!’.
Lianne, Richard and Helen Graham – as part of a previous research project – had noted a serious problem with ‘them’ and ‘us’ culture in local democracy. On one side there is a lot of ‘just moaning’ as Richard calls it, where the council gets blamed for everything and people are not constructive. On the other side, the council and other public organisations do not find it easy at all to respond to offers to help from local people and find it very difficult to find ways of sharing responsibility (Bashforth et al, 2015).
Victoria Hoyle, City Archivist, spoke at an event ran by Lianne, Richard and Helen called ‘What has heritage ever done for us?’, where she called for a closer relationship between the archive and creating democratic presents and futures: ‘I would like to see it used more as a resource by council officers and also by residents to access information about how the city governs itself … I would like to think that there is a future where “look it up in the archive”, “visit the archive”, “have you thought about the archive?”, is the first step in designing solutions to problems and celebrating our past achievements’. (Hoyle, 2015)
From these three starting points a project was born that explored how York's city archives could be used to open up different kinds of democratic relationships. It focused on archival collections relating to Hungate, an area of York that was designated a ‘slum’ and demolished by the council during the 1930s.
Four - Socialising heritage/socialising legacy
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- By Martin Bashforth, Mike Benson, Tim Boon, Lianne Brigham, Richard Brigham, Karen Brookfield, Peter Brown, Danny Callaghan, Jean-Phillipe Calvin, Richard Courtney, Kathy Cremin, Paul Furness, Helen Graham, Alex Hale, Paddy Hodgkiss, John Lawson, Rebecca Madgin, Paul Manners, David Robinson, John Stanley, Martin Swan, Jennifer Timothy, Rachael Turner
- Edited by Keri Facer, University of Bristol, Kate Pahl, Manchester Metropolitan University
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- Book:
- Valuing Interdisciplinary Collaborative Research
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 05 April 2022
- Print publication:
- 05 April 2017, pp 85-106
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Summary
Introduction
At some point during our inaugural research team workshop we started to generate many different ideas about how to increase participation in heritage decision-making. We tried to keep track as the questions flowed by writing recurring words on pieces of paper, to be linked, connected and ordered at some later point. The words were in some ways not surprising. Heritage, of course. Stewardship. Custodianship. Expert. Leadership. Institutions. Ownership. Differences/Tensions. Scale. Personal. Values. Voice (‘+ not heard’, was added in another hand in biro). So far, so predictable. These words, after all, index the big conceptual challenges that have been identified to a greater or lesser extent in heritage policy, practice and its research for the last four decades. Yet as we spoke, each of these terms started to change in dimension. As the different people around the table gave examples, and checked they understood each other's contributions, the familiar words were in the process of gathering new uncertainties and ambiguities as well as new colours, textures, shapes and potentials.
We were brought together by a funding scheme that supported not just collaborative research, but also its collaborative design. While we did have a shared interest in our overall question ‘how should heritage decisions be made?’, we – as you will see by how we describe ourselves – came to this question, and our first workshop, from quite different places and different trajectories. To frame it in the language implied by this book, we carried with us different inheritances – legacies – from our disciplines, professional backgrounds, organisations and places. As such, the other crucial thing we had in common was an interest in the potential for rethinking ‘heritage’ offered by drawing on many different perspectives and working across hierarchies and institutional boundaries. We used both these shared commitments and our different perspectives to collaboratively design our project.
In this chapter we tell the story of our project with the aim of showing how our research emerged through dynamic connections between know-how generated through practitioner reflections, dialogue, characterised by conversations between us as a project team and conceptual innovation, in terms of the way this allowed us to think about heritage and decision making differently.