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Ms Jessica Douthwaite

PhD candidate
University of Strathclyde
Participates in 1 Session
I began an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award, entitled ‘Voices of the Cold War in 1950s Britain’, in October 2014. As a partnership between IWM and the University of Strathclyde, my research investigates the experiences of the Cold War by ordinary British people in the 1950s through oral history testimony. In doing so, it will give voice to routine engagement with predominant Cold War themes. The research will interrogate how Britons felt towards the Cold War in their everyday lives. I am particularly interested in experiences of how emotion impacts on individual and collective political engagement. Previously I studied a master’s in International History at London School of Economics and BA in History at the University of Sussex. Having worked in education and museums I am fascinated by life story collections beyond academia, in community and public engagement; as a result I also sit on a Board of Trustees for a London-based oral history charity called Eastside Community Heritage. Prizes 2015: First prize in the Social History Society Postgraduate poster competition. Conference organisation February 2015 – present: member of conference organising committee, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council: What's it Worth? The Value and Potential of the CDA, 27 July 2015. Papers • June 2015: Modern British History Network annual conference ‘…When one side’s got it the other side has to have it… What did ‘Cold War’ mean in everyday life 1945-62? • September 2015: University of Essex, Popular Myth & Memory conference ‘Montage in oral history: listening for emotions through collaged events’. • November 2015: University of Strathclyde humanities research seminar ‘Ideals and inheritance: being an ‘ethical’ woman in the past and present’. • March 2016: EUROPEAN Social Science History conference ‘An ‘age of fear’? Deciphering untold emotions in oral histories’. Publications 2017: co-authoring chapter with Jonathan Hogg. ‘Memory and oral history’ in Using Primary Sources, University of Liverpool e-textbook.

Sessions in which Ms Jessica Douthwaite participates

Tuesday 7 June, 2016

Time Zone: (GMT-05:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada)

Sessions in which Ms Jessica Douthwaite attends

Friday 3 June, 2016

Time Zone: (GMT-05:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada)
17:00 - 19:30 | 2 hours 30 minutes
Festive Event

Welcome addresses and cocktail, followed by the Concordia Signature Event "The Garden of the Grey Nuns". As the opening ceremony and cocktail take place in the former Grey Nuns' Motherhouse, recycled into campus residence and reading rooms by Concordia University,  delegates will also have the possibility to discover the video Three Grey Nuns (3 minutes, by Ron Rudin and Phil Lichti. Three Grey Nuns recount their memories of communal life in the Grey Nun’s Motherhouse.  Built...

Saturday 4 June, 2016

Time Zone: (GMT-05:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada)
9:00 - 10:00 | 1 hour
Public event
Simultaneous translation - Traduction simultanée

What if we changed our views on heritage? And if heritage has already changed? While, on the global scene, states maintain their leading role in the mobilization of social and territorial histories, on the local scale, regions, neighbourhoods and parishes have changed. Citizens and communities too: they latch on to heritage to express an unprecedented range of belongings that no law seems to be able to take measures to contain, often to the discontent of...

11:00 - 12:30 | 1 hour 30 minutes
Changes in Heritage (New Manifestations)Notions of HeritageIndustrial HeritageOral History
Changes in heritageNew manifestations of heritageNotions of heritage

Industrial heritage in Britain has tended to be romanticised in museum ‘cathedrals’ and ‘theme parks’ (like Beamish), with workers’ lived experience subordinated to the machines, buildings and physical artefacts that dominate these spaces. Here workers’ lives are more often than not celebrated rather than critically reconstructed and interpreted. The politics, class relations and struggle, violence, poverty and murkier side of working life is increasingly being neglected as the past is san...

11:00 - 17:00 | 6 hours
Heritage Changes the Social OrderHeritage Changes Politics
Heritage changes politicsPolitical uses of heritageUses of heritageHeritage and conflicts

Heritage practices often lead to social exclusion. As an "Authorized Heritage Discourse" (AHD) (Smith 2006) may define what is considered to be heritage, a certain set of social values can come to exclude other values. By formulating heritage policies which reproduce the existing AHD government may further such exclusion. Every now and then AHDs are challenged, leading to what political scientists like Ross (2007; 2009) call "cultural contestations" between groups. These are surrounded ...

13:30 - 15:00 | 1 hour 30 minutes
Heritage Changes the Local Societies
Heritage changes the local societiesheritage and mobilityPost-colonial heritageGlobal vs local

Many people are actively using working class heritage as a resource to reflect on the past and the present, and there is a growing tendency for the heritage of working class people to be interpreted and presented to the public in museums and heritage sites—see for example the Worklab network of museums. Working class communities and organizations also play active roles in creating a memory of their own past, and mobilizing this to sustain political action in the present. Drawing on scho...

18:30 - 20:00 | 1 hour 30 minutes
Public event
Simultaneous translation - Traduction simultanée

Most of what we experience as heritage emerges into conscious recognition through a complex mixture of political and ideological filters, including nationalism.  In these processes, through a variety of devices (museums, scholarly research, consumer reproduction, etc.), dualistic classifications articulate a powerful hierarchy of value and significance.  In particular, the tangible-intangible pair, given legitimacy by such international bodies as UNESCO, reproduces a selective ordering of cul...

Sunday 5 June, 2016

Time Zone: (GMT-05:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada)
9:00 - 12:30 | 3 hours 30 minutes
Heritage Changes the Living EnvironmentIntangible HeritageMuseums

We would like to propose a session, building on the one we ran at the 2014 CHS conference in Canberra, on how emotion and affect feature in the fields of heritage and museums studies, memory studies, public history, heritage tourism, studies of the built and urban environment, conservation, archives and any field of study that deals with the emotional impact and use of the past in the present. There is an increasing interest in how emotion is a form of judgement on things that affect ou...

19:00 - 21:00 | 2 hours
Public event

Directed by Tom Fassaert and presented by Marc Jacobs. ___ Doel, a Belgian village near the Dutch border, is disappearing quickly and deliberately. Not because of the four old nuclear reactors on its territory, but because the Flemish government decided that the village might block projects for new docks for the Antwerp harbour, plans developed since the 1960s. In the 21st century this process of officially encouraged depopulation is coming to an end: 2500 inhabitants i...

Monday 6 June, 2016

Time Zone: (GMT-05:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada)
9:00 - 10:30 | 1 hour 30 minutes
Heritage Changes PlaceCo-Construction and Community Based HeritageIndustrial HeritageOral HistoryUrban HeritagePublic event
Heritage changes placeCo-construction of heritageCommunity-based heritageHeritage makers

In recent years, there has been a great deal of debate surrounding so-called ruin gazing and the politics of representing industrial or urban ruination. Recent years have seen photographers, artists, film-makers, urban explorers, scholars and others flood into newly deindustrialized areas to record signs of ruins and abandonment, prompting a public backlash against the hipster commodification of misery. Some have gone so far as to call the voyeuristic appeal of industrial or urban ruinatio...

13:30 - 15:00 | 1 hour 30 minutes
Research-Creation Installation or PerformanceHeritage in ConflictsOral History

Around the globe the planning of large-scale memorial-museum projects concerned with violent histories are frequently marred by conflict, omission, and competitions of victimhood. This problem also extends to scholarship on genocide and memory. “Moving memory” is a collaborative multi-sited research exhibition about the Armenian and Roma genocides that proposes creative solutions to these museological and scholarly conflicts around commemoration. Our multi-sited event includes two pr...

Tuesday 7 June, 2016

Time Zone: (GMT-05:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada)
7:00 - 9:00 | 2 hours
Public event

(Guided visits to Two Exhibitions, Centre d’histoire de Montréal- bilingual) – The Centre d’histoire de Montréal presents Dans le Griff that takes visitors into the neighbourhood of Griffintown, as depicted through the lives and memories of the Mercier family. Their life stories will take us down the streets of an industrial sector that has undergone quite the metamorphosis. Griffintown is one of the oldest industrial and working-class neighbourhoods in Montreal. In the forefro...

15:30 - 17:00 | 1 hour 30 minutes
Heritage Changes the Policies
Heritage changes the policiesHeritage policiesGlobal vs local

What is the future of the UK and what is the role of heritage in this shifting political landscape? How have debates on heritage in the UK changed since the influential critiques of Hewison and Wright in the 1980s? How can those engaged in Critical Heritage Studies in the UK negotiate the difficult relationship between academic critique and sector relevance? How do current debates in the UK relate to and differ from those in Western and non-Western contexts? This workshop will bring ...