Continuing to Dig: supporting and sustaining innovative community heritage projects in London and the South East
Lead Research Organisation:
University College London
Department Name: Information Studies
Abstract
Building upon the original 2012 Dig Where We Stand project, the Continuing to Dig (Where We Stand) project brings together a team of researchers from across UCL with expertise in community archaeology, community archives, museum collections, public history, oral history, film studies, geography, cultural heritage and wellbeing, and the use of digital technologies in engaging the public in community heritage to work with and support the heritage activities of a range of community groups funded by the HLF as part of the All Our Stories programme. Members of the team have extensive experience of community heritage projects and public engagement activities, and the aim of this project is to bring the expertise located within UCL to the attention of a wider audience, to deepen existing and establish new partnerships with community groups, explore the benefits of bringing together different branches of community heritage activities and seek to encourage the participation of young people in community heritage activities.
Drawing inspiration from the History Workshop slogan "Dig Where You Stand", this project is based on the principle that a community's sense of place and identity partly rests on its understanding of its past. Building on existing initiatives and work in community archaeology, community archives, local history, cultural heritage, oral history, public geography, community film and media studies and digital heritage, the researchers in this team all share a belief in the profound impact that engaging with history and local heritage can have in sustaining communities and enhancing the quality of life and well-being of those who participate in heritage activities. We are committed to sharing our knowledge and expertise to develop and sustain broad participation (particularly amongst young people) in a range of community heritage activities. The opportunity to work with various HLF funded projects from across London (and further afield) offers the chance to work and exchange knowledge with various communities on many different subjects with many different inspirations and desired outcomes. The project also gives researchers in UCL the opportunity to work together across departmental and disciplinary backgrounds. This project seeks to make clear the benefits for heritage practitioners and researchers of closer collaboration and interdisciplinary approaches by organising a project team and programme of events designed to stimulate dialogue, the mutual exchange of ideas and knowledge, and build future collaborations between different academic disciplines and between academic research and community research.
Ultimately the project should increase the recognition of the community heritage expertise available within UCL and result in some exciting and innovative research activities and outcomes by HLF funded community groups and some sustainable longer term partnerships between academics and community heritage groups. This process and the learning which flows from it will be documented in conference papers at the appropriate community heritage conferences, an article on community heritage collaborations in a peer review journal (the International Journal of Heritage Studies) and practical guidance designed in collaboration with our community partners on strategies for encouraging young people to participate in heritage activity.
Drawing inspiration from the History Workshop slogan "Dig Where You Stand", this project is based on the principle that a community's sense of place and identity partly rests on its understanding of its past. Building on existing initiatives and work in community archaeology, community archives, local history, cultural heritage, oral history, public geography, community film and media studies and digital heritage, the researchers in this team all share a belief in the profound impact that engaging with history and local heritage can have in sustaining communities and enhancing the quality of life and well-being of those who participate in heritage activities. We are committed to sharing our knowledge and expertise to develop and sustain broad participation (particularly amongst young people) in a range of community heritage activities. The opportunity to work with various HLF funded projects from across London (and further afield) offers the chance to work and exchange knowledge with various communities on many different subjects with many different inspirations and desired outcomes. The project also gives researchers in UCL the opportunity to work together across departmental and disciplinary backgrounds. This project seeks to make clear the benefits for heritage practitioners and researchers of closer collaboration and interdisciplinary approaches by organising a project team and programme of events designed to stimulate dialogue, the mutual exchange of ideas and knowledge, and build future collaborations between different academic disciplines and between academic research and community research.
Ultimately the project should increase the recognition of the community heritage expertise available within UCL and result in some exciting and innovative research activities and outcomes by HLF funded community groups and some sustainable longer term partnerships between academics and community heritage groups. This process and the learning which flows from it will be documented in conference papers at the appropriate community heritage conferences, an article on community heritage collaborations in a peer review journal (the International Journal of Heritage Studies) and practical guidance designed in collaboration with our community partners on strategies for encouraging young people to participate in heritage activity.
Planned Impact
Who will benefit from this research project?
a) Academics in UCL and elsewhere (see academic beneficiaries)
b) Heritage professionals in museums, archives and archaeological societies who will have access to more information about community heritage activities and engaging with community groups, particularly young people with heritage activity.
c) Schools, universities and other organisations working with young people in a framework where they might wish to introduce those young people to heritage activities
d) Community groups, especially community groups already actively participating (or thinking of doing so) in local or community heritage work
e) Society in general
How will they benefit from this research project?
This project is all about the exchange of knowledge with community heritage groups and other groups and individuals interested in getting involved in or supporting community heritage activity. It starts from a recognition that although great knowledge and expertise already resides in community heritage practitioner groups, great (and often different) knowledge also resides within higher education institutions like UCL. This project seeks to bring together some of that knowledge and expertise from across the disciplines at UCL in order to make it available to those wishing to get involved or are already
involved in community activity. This knowledge can be used to address serious problems for the sustainability of community heritage (eg digital preservation) or to develop new practices / approaches (eg community archaeology or digital approaches to creating and sharing community heritage). In some cases this may result in sustained collaborative relationships between the university and community groups. The public events, individual knowledge exchange, online resources and longer term research partnerships should all result in more sustained, rigorous and ultimately more useful and widely accessible community heritage materials.
The events, websites and community engagement models (especially those developed with regard to engaging young people) will be available to all other institutions (schools, museums, archives, social and welfare agencies) who wish to engage with community heritage, and this should again the support the creation of more successful and impactful community heritage projects and collaborations. In broader terms the members of this project and their partners believe that community heritage and participation in community heritage can have significant impacts on individuals, communities and society in general particularly in terms of culture, understanding and belonging, health and well-being but also in concrete terms of things like employability and the
acquisition of useful skills and experience. Community heritage covers a wide range of activities and a wide range of 'communities', ranging from those with a local history focus to those with a focus on a history and heritage organised around an minority or ethnic identity. These different interests and communities will result in different possible impacts, and the HLF funded groups this project is working with reflect some of this huge diversity. However what is true of all these activities, is the more developed and sustainable they are, they better known they are, the more they can approach their heritage work in an innovative and holistic way through the collaborations with university researchers embedded in this project, then the larger, the more widespread and the more significant their impact is likely to be. This project aims to help community heritage activities achieve those impacts.
a) Academics in UCL and elsewhere (see academic beneficiaries)
b) Heritage professionals in museums, archives and archaeological societies who will have access to more information about community heritage activities and engaging with community groups, particularly young people with heritage activity.
c) Schools, universities and other organisations working with young people in a framework where they might wish to introduce those young people to heritage activities
d) Community groups, especially community groups already actively participating (or thinking of doing so) in local or community heritage work
e) Society in general
How will they benefit from this research project?
This project is all about the exchange of knowledge with community heritage groups and other groups and individuals interested in getting involved in or supporting community heritage activity. It starts from a recognition that although great knowledge and expertise already resides in community heritage practitioner groups, great (and often different) knowledge also resides within higher education institutions like UCL. This project seeks to bring together some of that knowledge and expertise from across the disciplines at UCL in order to make it available to those wishing to get involved or are already
involved in community activity. This knowledge can be used to address serious problems for the sustainability of community heritage (eg digital preservation) or to develop new practices / approaches (eg community archaeology or digital approaches to creating and sharing community heritage). In some cases this may result in sustained collaborative relationships between the university and community groups. The public events, individual knowledge exchange, online resources and longer term research partnerships should all result in more sustained, rigorous and ultimately more useful and widely accessible community heritage materials.
The events, websites and community engagement models (especially those developed with regard to engaging young people) will be available to all other institutions (schools, museums, archives, social and welfare agencies) who wish to engage with community heritage, and this should again the support the creation of more successful and impactful community heritage projects and collaborations. In broader terms the members of this project and their partners believe that community heritage and participation in community heritage can have significant impacts on individuals, communities and society in general particularly in terms of culture, understanding and belonging, health and well-being but also in concrete terms of things like employability and the
acquisition of useful skills and experience. Community heritage covers a wide range of activities and a wide range of 'communities', ranging from those with a local history focus to those with a focus on a history and heritage organised around an minority or ethnic identity. These different interests and communities will result in different possible impacts, and the HLF funded groups this project is working with reflect some of this huge diversity. However what is true of all these activities, is the more developed and sustainable they are, they better known they are, the more they can approach their heritage work in an innovative and holistic way through the collaborations with university researchers embedded in this project, then the larger, the more widespread and the more significant their impact is likely to be. This project aims to help community heritage activities achieve those impacts.
Organisations
Publications
| Description | UCL Dig Where We Stand (DWWS): Continuing to Dig: supporting and sustaining innovative community heritage projects in London and the South East) project (2013) followed on from the UCL Dig Where We Stand: Developing and Sustaining Community Heritage project (2011-2012), one of twenty one multidisciplinary university teams nationally funded by the AHRC across the UK to support the community heritage research activities of groups funded by the HLF. The DWWS team included UCL-based researchers from archaeology, archives, history, oral history, cultural heritage, digital humanities, public geography, film studies and museum studies, all united by an interest in community-based heritage and in engaging our disciplines and our research with people outside the university and it was supported in its work by a number of community and heritage based organisations such the Community Archives and Heritage Group (CAHG) and the Black Cultural Archives (BCA). The project took its name and inspiration from the Swedish author and activist Sven Lindqvist's influential Gräv där du står (Dig Where You Stand, 1978) and his English article of the same title in Oral History (1979). Lindqvist argued that because it was important that workers (and others) should carry out their own research, it was essential for someone to facilitate that processes by providing guidance on the techniques and methods of historical research. He thus produced Dig Where You Stand, '...a handbook which would help others, especially workers to write these factory histories in their own neighbourhoods and their own places of work'. In a similar fashion the UCL DWWS research team aimed to work with HLF-funded groups to enable them to develop and implement their research ideas, offering training in particular research skills where necessary, and encouraging a more holistic approach to community-based heritage research by bringing together the different elements (eg archaeology, archive research, oral history and digital technology). The team were particularly interested in working with projects which sought to encourage greater participation by young people in community heritage activities. In the original DWWS project (2011-12) the team ran a number of events including a Community Heritage workshop ('Starting to Dig'), a week-long archaeology project at Hendon School, an archaeology summer school including expert workshops in find identification and archiving and numerous presentations at community history focussed conferences. The team also worked with a number of groups advising them on their applications to the HLF, held one-to-one surgeries and delivered workshops on heritage research techniques such as oral history, archival research, exhibition practice and preservation of finds with grant holders. Then as part of the the follow on funding from the AHRC Research for Community Heritage scheme, the DWWS 'Continuing to Dig' team was expanded to include three community heritage focussed Early Career Researchers and the whole team worked in a more sustained fashion with ten to fifteen groups on the actual delivery of their projects. In the main, our collaboration focussed on the exchange of skills and expertise rather than the co-development of new and innovative community-based heritage research, but we did also work with many of the groups, especially young people, to do historical, archival, oral history and archaeological research. In some cases (such as with Mental Fight Club and AldaTerra ) the team were able to develop relationships which we have led to further innovative community heritage research developments. In terms of a final outcome, many of the groups were able to use the techniques, equipment and good practice guidance that DWWS were able to offer to produce community-based heritage research considerably enhanced from their original intended. To give one example, one project, Hoxton Hall's 'Stories of Shoreditch' reported that they had 'greatly benefited' from the guidance and conversations with DWWS on oral history and particularly on the ethics of recording and display, and that this had resulted in 'a project that is of real relevance to the community of Shoreditch and our organisation' and that this learning was now embedded in the organisation and would contribute to their future heritage and archive work. Naturally there were problems and challenges involved in this sort of programmed (as opposed to organic) collaboration, Dig Where We Stand allowed university researchers and community-based heritage and archive groups to get know each other and work together, and we seed relationships which will develop and sustain themselves over the coming years. |
| Exploitation Route | The research and collaborative research practice have continued in further research activities with partnerships with community heritage groups such as AldaTerra and Hoxton Hall, developing plans with groups such as Mental Health Fight Club, the use of more collaborative and participatory approaches in the on-going work of the PI, Co-Is and ECRs and finally in an international collaboration with researchers at the University of Gothenburg to explore the international history and legacies of the Dig Where You Stand movement and its community-based heritage techniques. |
| Sectors | Culture Heritage Museums and Collections |
| URL | http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/dig-where-we-stand/2013/08/ |