Call for Co-ordinating Centres to Commemorate the Centenary

of the First World War&

the Care for the Future Theme

Theme Leadership Fellow:Professor Andrew Thompson

University of Exetera.s.thompson@exeter.ac.uk

Project Co-ordinator

Ms Christine Boyle

c.boyle@exeter.ac.uk

Care for the Future: Thinking Forward through the Past

The relationship between the past, present and future shapes our understanding of the world around us. Whether it is the perceived consequences of past events, the urgency of present concerns, or the challenges of real or imagined futures, the structures of time intersect with and inform our sense of ourselves in myriad ways.

Care for the Future: Thinking Forward through the Past affords an opportunity for researchers in the arts and humanities to explore the dynamic relationship that exists between past, present and future through a temporally inflected lens.

Care for the Future: Sites of Engagement

5 major sub-themes:

• Questions of temporality and history

• Cultural notions of the future

• Environmental change and sustainability

• Inter- and cross-generational communication, justice and

exchange

• Trauma, conflict and memory: transitions to new futures

Trauma, conflict and memory: transitions to new futures

Woodward, Caring for post-military futures: alternative development futures for former military sites in the UK

Image: Simon Burchell, Wiki Commons

Exploring ‘What does it mean to come to terms with the past’? • Reproduction of past conflicts

across generations and the dynamics of cultural memory

• Reconciling of competing memories of past traumas, and how (far) individuals and societies are able mourn, forget and forgive.

This sub-theme also includes issues of restitution, reparation and reconciliation, and their effects on how aspects of our past are invoked and interpreted, as well as the ways in which the past is politicised for the purposes of shaping different and alternative futures.

Exploratory awards

Image: http://ww1intheclassroom.exeter.ac.uk/

‘How is the First World War taught in English schools, and what does that mean for English cultural memory of the war?’

The First World War in the ClassroomDr Catriona Pennell, PI

‘What makes a centenary different to any other commemoration?’

The Significance of the CentenaryDr Joanne Sayner, PI

Image: Screenshot, Google image search, ‘Centenary’

Care for the Future links to call

• Contribute to AHRC’s Care for the Future Theme, i.e. through critical reflection on issues such as processes of commemoration, cross-cultural and contested perspectives on the past, the evolution and transmission of cultural memory and heritage.

• Foster two way dialogue between academic and public historical research related to the First World War.

• Reflect on the purposes of centenary commemoration - what is being remembered, for whom and why?

• Explore the different histories embedded in heritage.

Care for the Future links to call

• Whose voices are heard in commemoration and whose are not? The selectivity of cultural memory, the diversity of perspectives on the war from different types of community, including when and why commemoration can become difficult and divisive.

• How the impact of the war itself, as well as its longer-term legacies, are understood by the individuals and communities affected by it.

• When and why commemoration can become difficult and divisive.

• What can we learn from the way the centenary is marked across different communities and countries?