Radical and Popular Pasts conference report

Public history can mean many things to many people but as the radical and popular pasts conference showed public history includes the way in which the past is represented in the present, the form this takes and the process that lead to the making of history.

Report of Radical and Popular pasts. Public history conference Saturday 17th March 2007

Public history can mean many things to many people but as the radical and popular pasts conference showed public history includes the way in which the past is represented in the present, the form this takes and the process that lead to the making of history.

As the conference proceedings exemplified, some of the most engaging & thoughtful work on the past today has been created not by professional historians but by artists, film makers, community activists and people making their own history.

In his analysis of the portrayal of the past in his own films, Ken Loach explained his subjects were chosen for their relevance to the contemporary world. This framework governed his choice of deciding �what do you say?� and �what do you tell?� He emphasised the collaborative nature of his projects including the scriptwriter, production workers and �amateur� actors. Shakespeare�s histories were constantly debating political issues such as the nature of kinship; in his films he attempted a similar approach showing that ideas were part of political change � not just action � and that this needed to be depicted and respected.

Workshop presentations included an oral history project in Liverpool; radical republican images on tailors� wall hangings of the 1840s; critical approaches to Holocaust education; an artist�s exposition pf her childhood memory of her father�s tales of imprisonment in Burma in the war; and the work of radical film makers such as Philip Donnellan, Kevin Brownlow and Peter Watkins.

In the concluding plenary session Turner prize winner Jeremy Deller discussed his work both on folk art & popular culture and his documentary of the re-enactment of the Orgreave battle in the miners� strike of 1984 -5. This performance art was a way of bringing the events back into the nation�s history. It was not, he argued, a cathartic experience for the miners who engaged in the artwork; rather it showed the importance of this radical past in the present.

Please send ideas for future conferences � and suggestions for the Saturday public history discussion group to Hilda Kean - hkean@ruskin.ac.uk

Date: 2 January, 07

Time: Meet 10.30 for coffee. Starts 11am to c.1pm

Venue: Ruskin College, Walton Street, Oxford, OX1 2HE

Contact: Please send ideas for future conferences � and suggestions for the Saturday public history discussion group to Hilda Kean - hkean@ruskin.ac.uk