Materialising the Cold War
Lead Research Organisation:
National Museums Scotland
Department Name: Science & Technology
Abstract
Three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, in a climate of international tension, the Cold War is more relevant than ever. And yet a generation now has no experience of it, and its public history is uneven. The Cold War's character as an 'imaginary war' in the global north poses special challenges for public engagement, especially for exhibiting material objects in museums. Synthesising approaches from material culture studies and Cold War history, critical heritage studies and museum practice, our project analyses these challenges and proposes a new framework for a Cold War museology. We focus on the process we call 'materialising the Cold War': the transformation of artefacts from the immaterial context of the Cold War to material objects in museums.
National Museums Scotland and the University of Stirling will apply these multi-disciplinary methods to co-produce a major exhibition and schools programming, and we will generate innovative resources and outputs for museum users, heritage professionals and academics. In addition, our project partners - Royal Air Force Museums, Imperial War Museums, the Norwegian Luftfartmuseum in Bodo, and the Allied Museum in Berlin - will benefit significantly from our findings and collaboration as they each develop major new galleries within the next decade (one motive in their participation); a powerful legacy for the project.
Framed by this international context, Materialising the Cold War will ask of UK museum objects: why have they been collected? How are they displayed? How have people responded to this 'fearsome heritage' - those who remember the Cold War and those who don't, whether family museum visitors, school groups, or dedicated enthusiasts? Throughout, we emphasise the fundamentally unstable and contested nature of the ways in which Cold War objects are made to mean something, and the breadth of the emotional register they stimulate.
Our project will therefore:
- be the first critically to take stock of how different institutions in the UK have addressed the fundamental challenge of materialising the Cold War in the context of a museum;
- build on this original knowledge to develop an analytical framework for materialising the Cold War;
- develop new approaches to collecting and display;
- and thus offer a timely conceptual and practical foundation for a developing field.
Our multi-disciplinary research team will comprise Dr Sam Alberti, museologist and senior manager at National Museums Scotland (PI); University of Stirling Cold War historian Professor Holger Nehring (Co-I); two fixed-term researchers, one based at the University of Stirling and the other at National Museums Scotland; and a fractional administrative post at National Museum Scotland to support them. They will work co-productively with curators and learning officers at National Museums Scotland, heritage scholars at the University of Stirling and an existing AHRC CDP doctoral student supervised by the PI and Co-I. An Advisory Board drawn from the project partners and other experts in the heritage and HEI sector will contribute substantively.
Within the museum collections this team will explore, physical traces of the Cold War manifest not only in the devices of destruction that perpetuated the nuclear stalemate, but also in the material culture of readiness and more subtly in the technologies of everyday life. From bombers to radiation detectors to peace badges, pertinent collections are scattered across the sector. As Cold War witnesses decline, there is now a timely opportunity to harness memories associated with these objects, to collect more, and thereby to enhance a broader understanding of the sheer scale of the conflict. This project will develop the first systematic analysis and assessment of Cold War heritage in museums and apply this original knowledge to museum practice.
National Museums Scotland and the University of Stirling will apply these multi-disciplinary methods to co-produce a major exhibition and schools programming, and we will generate innovative resources and outputs for museum users, heritage professionals and academics. In addition, our project partners - Royal Air Force Museums, Imperial War Museums, the Norwegian Luftfartmuseum in Bodo, and the Allied Museum in Berlin - will benefit significantly from our findings and collaboration as they each develop major new galleries within the next decade (one motive in their participation); a powerful legacy for the project.
Framed by this international context, Materialising the Cold War will ask of UK museum objects: why have they been collected? How are they displayed? How have people responded to this 'fearsome heritage' - those who remember the Cold War and those who don't, whether family museum visitors, school groups, or dedicated enthusiasts? Throughout, we emphasise the fundamentally unstable and contested nature of the ways in which Cold War objects are made to mean something, and the breadth of the emotional register they stimulate.
Our project will therefore:
- be the first critically to take stock of how different institutions in the UK have addressed the fundamental challenge of materialising the Cold War in the context of a museum;
- build on this original knowledge to develop an analytical framework for materialising the Cold War;
- develop new approaches to collecting and display;
- and thus offer a timely conceptual and practical foundation for a developing field.
Our multi-disciplinary research team will comprise Dr Sam Alberti, museologist and senior manager at National Museums Scotland (PI); University of Stirling Cold War historian Professor Holger Nehring (Co-I); two fixed-term researchers, one based at the University of Stirling and the other at National Museums Scotland; and a fractional administrative post at National Museum Scotland to support them. They will work co-productively with curators and learning officers at National Museums Scotland, heritage scholars at the University of Stirling and an existing AHRC CDP doctoral student supervised by the PI and Co-I. An Advisory Board drawn from the project partners and other experts in the heritage and HEI sector will contribute substantively.
Within the museum collections this team will explore, physical traces of the Cold War manifest not only in the devices of destruction that perpetuated the nuclear stalemate, but also in the material culture of readiness and more subtly in the technologies of everyday life. From bombers to radiation detectors to peace badges, pertinent collections are scattered across the sector. As Cold War witnesses decline, there is now a timely opportunity to harness memories associated with these objects, to collect more, and thereby to enhance a broader understanding of the sheer scale of the conflict. This project will develop the first systematic analysis and assessment of Cold War heritage in museums and apply this original knowledge to museum practice.
Planned Impact
The fundamental impact of our project lies in encouraging the co-production of Cold War knowledge between professionals, academics, museum users and other audiences. We seek to enable museum audiences to engage with questions of identity and authenticity, and their own relationship to history through objects. We contend, and our audience research will test, that the experience of Cold War heritage will be different when incorporating the many walks of life that the conflict pervaded. This will change how our users frame their own experience in a world of heightened international tensions that many have characterised as a new Cold War, and contribute to a public history of a period of history of which personal experiences are fading.
We will achieve this impact via four multi-platform routes:
- In our qualitative user evaluation of existing displays at National Museums Scotland, RAF Museums and Imperial War Museums (Work Package 3) we will target mixed family groups to encourage intergenerational dialogue around material culture and engage in knowledge transfer with enthusiast communities, especially around stored collections. We will also involve digitally active online users. Furthermore, by impacting upon other museums' practice, their user communities will also benefit from the findings of the MCW research.
- Taking our lessons learned from this evaluation, we will stage a major multi-disciplinary exhibition on the Cold War at NMS in Year 3 that will engage audiences in a reflective fashion (within WP4). Visitor surveys during the time of the exhibition will not only provide reflective feedback on our own work and previous evaluation, but will also feed into collection development and practice at NMS.
- To raise awareness of the Cold War among school pupils (and their teachers) we will contribute sessions devoted to the Cold War to the National Museums Scotland schools programme for upper primary school and senior secondary pupils, including under-represented groups. The content of these sessions will also be available to schools elsewhere via the learning departments in our partner organisations. (This pathway will also be enabled by WP4.)
- For museum and heritage professionals in the UK and Europe we aim to show how to use a range of collections to engage audiences with the Cold War. In particular we seek to impact upon museum practice by joining up disconnected museum areas, technical, military or social history (WP5). Professional impact in particular will benefit from meaningful two-way skills transfer between the museum and higher education sectors via workshops, a toolkit, and other digital outputs. These skills will include, for example, collections management approaches, ethnographic research methods, and visitor feedback gathering.
We will thereby use material culture to offer new understandings of the Cold War to public, school and professional communities. The legacy of the project will include contributions to major redevelopments at the partner museums and a new permanent display in Scotland at the National Museum of Flight.
We will achieve this impact via four multi-platform routes:
- In our qualitative user evaluation of existing displays at National Museums Scotland, RAF Museums and Imperial War Museums (Work Package 3) we will target mixed family groups to encourage intergenerational dialogue around material culture and engage in knowledge transfer with enthusiast communities, especially around stored collections. We will also involve digitally active online users. Furthermore, by impacting upon other museums' practice, their user communities will also benefit from the findings of the MCW research.
- Taking our lessons learned from this evaluation, we will stage a major multi-disciplinary exhibition on the Cold War at NMS in Year 3 that will engage audiences in a reflective fashion (within WP4). Visitor surveys during the time of the exhibition will not only provide reflective feedback on our own work and previous evaluation, but will also feed into collection development and practice at NMS.
- To raise awareness of the Cold War among school pupils (and their teachers) we will contribute sessions devoted to the Cold War to the National Museums Scotland schools programme for upper primary school and senior secondary pupils, including under-represented groups. The content of these sessions will also be available to schools elsewhere via the learning departments in our partner organisations. (This pathway will also be enabled by WP4.)
- For museum and heritage professionals in the UK and Europe we aim to show how to use a range of collections to engage audiences with the Cold War. In particular we seek to impact upon museum practice by joining up disconnected museum areas, technical, military or social history (WP5). Professional impact in particular will benefit from meaningful two-way skills transfer between the museum and higher education sectors via workshops, a toolkit, and other digital outputs. These skills will include, for example, collections management approaches, ethnographic research methods, and visitor feedback gathering.
We will thereby use material culture to offer new understandings of the Cold War to public, school and professional communities. The legacy of the project will include contributions to major redevelopments at the partner museums and a new permanent display in Scotland at the National Museum of Flight.
Organisations
- National Museums Scotland (Lead Research Organisation)
- Leeds Beckett University (Collaboration)
- IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUM (Collaboration)
- The Open University (Collaboration)
- Royal Air Force Museum (Collaboration, Project Partner)
- Imperial War Museum Duxford (Project Partner)
- Allied Museum Berlin (Project Partner)
- Norwegian National Aviation Museum (Project Partner)
People |
ORCID iD |
Sam Alberti (Principal Investigator) | |
Holger Nehring (Co-Investigator) |
Publications
Nehring, H.
(2023)
Reconstructing the Nuclear Peace [Review of Susan Colbourn, Euromissiles, Princeton University Press 2022]
in Current History
Douthwaite, J.
(2022)
New world order [letter to the editor]
Gledhill, J.
(2022)
Concrete Cairns: Bunker museums and Cold War memory on Britain's peripheries
Douthwaite, J.
(2022)
Where does one era end and the other begin? Teaching the Cold War through a Second World War context
in SATH Yearbook
Douthwaite, J.
(2022)
Viewing museum objects through a Cold War lens - eye-opening possibilities
Douthwaite, J.
(2022)
The Many Faces of the Cold War
Nehring, H.
(2022)
War Time: Layers of History in Russia's War against Ukraine
in Labour History Review
Alberti S
(2021)
The Cold War in European museums - filling the 'empty battlefield'
in International Journal of Heritage Studies
Description | Influence on museum documentation practice |
Geographic Reach | National |
Policy Influence Type | Contribution to new or improved professional practice |
Impact | National Museums Scotland has changed its documentation practice as a result, broadening the curatorial and audience understanding of the Cold War and its impact. Public users of the museum database can make connections and find out more about the Cold War. |
URL | https://www.nms.ac.uk/explore-our-collections/search-our-collections |
Description | Influence on the Collection Development Strategy of National Museums Scotland |
Geographic Reach | National |
Policy Influence Type | Contribution to new or improved professional practice |
URL | https://www.nms.ac.uk/about-us/our-organisation/policies-and-reports/collections-policies |
Description | Global Nuclear Histories book series |
Organisation | Open University |
Country | United Kingdom |
Sector | Academic/University |
PI Contribution | Holger Nehring has accepted the offer to serve on the academic advisory board for the new book series 'Global Nuclear Histories' (published by McGill/Queen's University Press and edited by Luc Brunet (Open University), Eirini Karamouzi (Sheffield) and Toshihiro Higuchi (Georgetown). |
Collaborator Contribution | Exchange of ideas and knowledge deriving from global nuclear history. Potential venue for publications from our project. |
Impact | None so far. |
Start Year | 2023 |
Description | Imperial War Museums |
Organisation | Imperial War Museum |
Country | United Kingdom |
Sector | Public |
PI Contribution | Materialising the Cold War has a partnership with Imperial War Museums (IWM) embedded in the project architecture. |
Collaborator Contribution | IWM provide advisory board members, expertise, loans, images and access to collections & audiences for the core research. They host Research Fellow Jessica Douthwaite during the project. |
Impact | Planned professional workshop October 2023. |
Start Year | 2021 |
Description | Leeds Beckett University Centre for Tourism and Hospitality Management |
Organisation | Leeds Beckett University |
Country | United Kingdom |
Sector | Academic/University |
PI Contribution | We have contributed advice on Cold War museum practice to the 'Remembering the Cold War: Nostalgia and Experiences of Cold War Tourism' (funded by BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grants Award), including contribution to a workshop in February 2023.The two projects will share data. |
Collaborator Contribution | Researchers on the 'Remembering the Cold War: Nostalgia and Experiences of Cold War Tourism' have advised our project on Cold War tourism and shared their experience of audience research. The two projects will share data. |
Impact | We presented at a workshop in February 2023; they have contributed an abstract to our conference/book, 'Cold War Museology'. |
Start Year | 2021 |
Description | Royal Air Force Museums |
Organisation | Royal Air Force Museum |
Country | United Kingdom |
Sector | Charity/Non Profit |
PI Contribution | The project provides enhanced understanding of Cold War collections, displays and audiences. |
Collaborator Contribution | RAFM provide advisory board members, expertise, loans, images and access to collections & audiences for the core research. They host Research Fellow Jessica Douthwaite during the project. |
Impact | -- |
Start Year | 2021 |
Description | 'Artefacts and Advocacy' keynote at annual 'Artefacts' symposium at the Deutsches Museum, Munich |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | Materialising the Cold War project promoted via an object study in the keynote at the annual Artefacts symposium of research-active science and technology curators at the Deutsches Museum, Munich |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
Description | 'Curating Lively Practices' seminar at the University of Glasgow |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | Regional |
Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
Results and Impact | Museum studies seminar around the Cold War as Difficult Heritage at the University of Glasgow |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
Description | BBC 3 Free Thinking episode |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A broadcast e.g. TV/radio/film/podcast (other than news/press) |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Media (as a channel to the public) |
Results and Impact | BBC Radio 3 broadcast for programme 'Free Thinking'. Dr Jessica Douthwaite contributed her research expertise to a panel of historians, an artist and author, Ian McEwan, to discuss experiences of the Cold War and the Cuban Missile Crisis in Britain. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
URL | https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001c05p |
Description | Blog for National Museums Scotland Website |
Form Of Engagement Activity | Engagement focused website, blog or social media channel |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
Results and Impact | In May 2022 Dr Jim Gledhill published a blog entitled 'Breaking the Ice: When Hugh MacDiarmid Met Yevgeny Yevtushenko' via the project section of National Museums Scotland's website. The blog used archive photographs from the Michael Peto collection held at the University of Dundee Library. The story of MacDiarmid and Yevtushenko's meeting at the former's home in the Scottish Borders in 1962 will feature in the project's forthcoming exhibition on Scotland and the Cold War to be held at the National Museum of Scotland in 2024. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
Description | Online Talk for the Gairloch Museum |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | Regional |
Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
Results and Impact | I gave an online public talk for the Gairloch Museum on the theme of 'Scotland and the Cold War' on 19 May 2022. The talk provided a general historical overview but also incorporated some of my research on the Museum building and associated history of Anti-Aircraft Command in Scotland. It contributed to the Museum's public programming for the temporary exhibition of Alex Boyd's Tir an Airm ('The Land of the Army'). My presentation added to local audience knowledge but also attracted interest from elsewhere in the west of Scotland. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
Description | Presentation to European Cold War Heritage Network Webinar |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | Dr Jim Gledhill gave a presentation on the 'Materialising the Cold War' project to the European Cold War Heritage Network webinar on 17 November 2022. This was the third webinar in an embryonic international heritage network connecting practitioners and others with an interest in the Cold War across Europe. My participation came about as a result of working with colleagues from Historic Environment Scotland and Historic England on our project and will be followed by further participation in the Network and hopefully collaboration on the forthcoming interdisciplinary workshop at the University of Stirling in 2024. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
Description | Presentation to members at a professional workshop |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | National |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | Presented an overview of our research findings to a group of professionals from the heritage industry in the UK and some professionals from the private sector. The talk specifically focused on the relationship between museological research on museums material and built heritage - specifically Cold War-era bunkers and their usage. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
Description | Site tour for National Museums Scotland Board of Trustees |
Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an open day or visit at my research institution |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | Local |
Primary Audience | Supporters |
Results and Impact | The Board of Trustees of National Museums Scotland visited the National Museum of Flight and received a tour of collections relevant to the Materialising the Cold War prohect |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
Description | Technical Industrial Artefacts as Sources for Technical & Industrial History webinar, University of Évora, Portugal |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
Results and Impact | Post-graduate seminar, University of Évora |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |