Ephemera and writing about war in Britain, 1914 to the present

As we move towards the centenary of the Second World War, our project tackles an important question: how can we ensure that future commemoration of war in Britain reflects the full diversity of war experience? Government-commissioned reports, the AHRC-funded 'Reflections on the First World War Centenary' project and individual scholars have highlighted some outstanding individual and community efforts to commemorate the First World War (FWW) as experienced by all communities in Britain. However, they also agree that the representation and commemoration especially of Black and ethnic minority communities during the centenary has made little overall impact on popular understanding of the war. We address this problem through the interlinked pathways of ephemera and storytelling to capture experiences that are frequently invisible in official memorials and commemorative rituals. To this end, our project recovers ephemera as a means of understanding marginalised experiences of the FWW and explores the potential of using ephemera in literary representations to promote a more diverse and inclusive public understanding of war. We understand ephemera as fragile and/or mundane items of everyday life, preserved in private homes and public archives. We are interested in how writers have been using ephemera as prompts or aids for their writing and/or as literary devices over the course of the past century, and how their use in the present can be harnessed for new narrative and commemorative approaches to war that reveal and/or amplify aspects of war experience that continue to be pushed to the margins of British cultural memory. In the DCMS-commissioned report 'Lessons from the First World War Centenary' (2019), the authors highlighted the 'huge success' of using the arts to facilitate effective engagement with commemoration (p. 4) and noted that 'the arts offer a way to sensitively deal with contested histories' (p. 5). Our project will use historical, participatory and literary-critical research in combination with creative writing to connect narrative engagement with war with the ephemeral traces of war on the one hand and the war's legacy on the other. We focus on the FWW as a case study, using the team's significant expertise in this area, while also drawing on separate bodies of scholarship and creative work on the ephemeral traces of other conflicts, particularly the Holocaust, to formulate transferable ideas and methodologies. Our project's impact beyond the academy centres on facilitating approaches to the FWW from a more diverse range of perspectives through the use of ephemera and creative expression. We will run creative and knowledge co-production workshops with two audiences: young people aged 14-18, and community groups with a vested interest in Black, ethnic minority and working-class experiences of the FWW. Creative workshops for young people will be see young participants engage with and respond to (digitised) ephemera both creatively and through reflective commentaries in ways that go beyond standard school curricula. These creative workshops offer young people the opportunity to develop their skills as writers with guidance from the project team, and to reflect on their own role in shaping the future legacy of conflict. The community knowledge co-production workshops will see participants use ephemera relevant to their own family or community to create narratives that can make these stories accessible to wider audiences and feed into broader commemorative approaches at a local, regional or national level. The project will lead not only to original creative work by workshop participants and project team members, but will also yield lasting, transferable resources for community groups and educators and for creative writers working on the FWW.