Our Project

Organisers of social movements use history to inspire and mobilise their members. By making links with the past, they create emotional bonds through imagined connections with activists who came before. This process creates a collective memory, which underpins group identity. 

 

Archiving Social Movements & Building Historical Literacy for a Digital Age seeks to understand how the history of collecting, archiving and curating social movements informs the histories that are available and visible for campaign organisers to use in their creation of group identity.

 

It comes at a time when digital technologies are both providing new opportunities and presenting significant new challenges for social movements and for those archiving the histories of these movements.

 

The project examines how the collecting practices of Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAM) affect the potential for developing collective historical literacy— a community informed about and able to critically engage with history—in the present and for the future.