Our Approach

How can we broaden the stories we tell about war?

Why is the First World War still remembered from a largely white, male, middle-class, combatant perspective in Britain? And what can we do to change that?

We think that looking at ephemera – small everyday traces of war, from letters and postcards to keepsakes and souvenirs – can give us insights into less widely acknowledged parts of the war’s experience – and that we can harness the power of storytelling to bring these experiences into the public eye. As part of our research, we have been exploring existing archives and collections that house ephemera, a wide range of published texts (literary writing and life writing) that draw on ephemera, and conducted interviews with individuals who collect such ephemera or whose family or personal commemoration of the war is based around ephemera. As well as using these traditional scholarly approaches, we worked with  community groups, relevant cultural and heritage organisations and individual community stakeholders to think about the role ephemera can play in individual and collective storytelling about the war. Through creative workshops we co-developed new ways of representing diverse experiences of war through storytelling.

Our research questions

• What roles can and do ephemera play in the representation and long-term memorialisation of conflict?
• To what extent can ephemera facilitate new insights into marginalised aspects of war experience and their representation and commemoration?
• In what ways can literary engagement with ephemera help to reflect on and shape the long-term legacy of the FWW, particularly through approaches that write marginalised and minority voices back into public understanding of the war?
• How can writers in the present engage with ephemera in different literary forms to explore the silenced traumas and imagined histories of wartime?

Our values

Transparency: An openness about what we gain from collaborating with our community partners and what we hope our partners and participants gain from working with us.

Respect and empowerment: We see this project as one in which we enable each other to tell the stories that matter to us, and respect different perceptions, memories, experiences and forms of knowledge.

Co-operation: We are aiming to undertake a process of joint co-operation and collaboration. Whilst important, the published outputs of our project are not of greater value than the opportunities for us to learn from each other along the way.

Flexibility: We recognise that expertise and knowledge comes in many forms. We wish to be guided by our collaborators and partners rather than attempting a ‘one size fits all’ or ‘top down’ approach. Our community partners and participants will often know far more than we do about their area of interest. What we bring to the table is experience of research and how to package this research for public and academic audiences.

Accountability: We understand and commit to a process of accountability where we are responsible for the actions and promises undertaken by the project.

Welcoming: We are eager and excited to be approached by anyone who feels they can provide value to the whole project. Importantly, we are open-minded and willing to be creative as to how that value may best be realised.