The co-production of historical knowledge: implications for the history of identities

Abstract

This essay argues that understanding people's lives, emotions and intellectual reasoning is crucial to exploring national identity and that 'the co-production of historical knowledge' provides an approach or methodology that allows for a deeper comprehension of people's self-identities by encouraging a diverse range of people to participate in the research process. We argue that many academic historians have maintained an intellectual detachment between university history and public and community history, to the detriment of furthering historical knowledge. We argue for a blurring of the boundaries between university and communities in exploring modern British history, and especially the history of national identities. It includes extracts of writing from community partners and a brief photographic essay of projects related to exploring identities.Key words: Co-production of research; national identities; communities; public history.The Academy for British and Irish Studies at the University of Huddersfield explores ways in which people identify themselves in relation to the group of islands that lies off the north-west coast of continental Europe. It is a multi-and inter-disciplinary research centre that allows its members to approach research questions relating to national and other identities from a wide variety of methodologies. Because of its catholic and eclectic nature, it has been a conducive atmosphere in which to develop new approaches to historical research.In Britishness since 1870, Paul Ward, one of the founding members of the Academy and co-author of this essay, wrote that 'ordinary people ... played the major part in constructing their own identities' and that due regard needed to be paid in listening to expressions of self-identity in the historical record rather than relying on judgements made by others, often from elite groups in society, to interpret questions of Britishness in the United Kingdom since the late nineteenth century (2000: 4). This was an attempt to consider how to interpret identity not as an academic exercise but as a way of understanding how millions of individuals thought about their social and national context in particular historical circumstances. In his essay on Englishness, written at the start of the Second World War, George Orwell asked 'Are there really such things as nations? Are we not forty-six million individuals, all different?' He answered in the affirmative, suggesting that:

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