Three of our past and present editors reflect on the ways in which History Workshop Journal has influenced and inspired their practice during their time on the History Workshop collective.
Beckie Rutherford
The clear vision and vibrant sense of purpose espoused by the History Workshop Journal editors from its earliest days was enormously inspiring to me when I began considering what my distinct contribution to History Workshop could look like. In the first HWJ editorial (published in Spring 1976) the editors wrote: ‘we believe that history should become common property, capable of shaping people’s understanding of themselves and the society in which they live.’ I was eager to pay homage to this radical ambition when planning my own series of articles and podcasts focused on disability history.
Reimagining Disability both showcases and celebrates the methodological, geographical and temporal scope of current research into disability history. Its main objective is to shift our attention away from the medicalisation of disabled people’s bodies and explore the richness of their lives as social, political, cultural, and economic agents. Like the original HWJ editors, I was determined to exercise ‘boldness in extending the boundaries of enquiry’ and to make ‘a greater effort to achieve clarity of presentation.’ Both these aims seemed especially critical to historicising disability, a subject which is too often restricted by medicalising frameworks and shrouded in misinformation. I hope that the series has demonstrated above all, the imaginative and diverse nature of the disability history currently being produced both within and outside the academy.
More recently, my role in coordinating the Celebrating HWJ 100 series gave me the perfect excuse to comb through the journal’s archive year by year. I was delighted to discover an article called ‘The Gertrude Tuckwell Collection’, published in March 1978 in the fifth issue of HWJ. The author is Jenny Morris, who at this point was a non-disabled woman completing a PhD on women and labour in the late nineteenth century. A few years later Morris became a wheelchair-user and has since become a pioneer of feminist disability studies in the UK. Her writing has been central to my own research into disabled women’s history and she appears (second from the left) in the main image that accompanies the introduction of Reimagining Disability. When choosing this image, I had no idea that Morris’s voice was already embedded deep within the HWJ archive. The serendipity of it was a poignant reminder of how important it is to feel connected to the radical thinkers who have gone before us.
Vivien Chan
When I first started developing my series From Place to Place, I was struggling with how best to frame the concept of itinerance not only as a historical subject but also as a way of being and doing. Reading the first manifestos, and getting to know more about their collective organising brought me back to the core of what it means to research ‘itinerantly’. To be itinerant is not to be alone, but rather about finding a space for collective knowledge-making outside of the academy. As Sally Alexander and Anna Davin expressed in their Feminist History editorial in the first issue, ‘history is too important to be left just to the professional historian.’
As a historian who often teaches and engages with non-historians (and even more frequently, acting in a non-professional historical capacity myself), this sentiment still resonates with me. Working with art and design students to interpret and disseminate histories through different mediums, connecting and collaborating with independent researchers to make histories for public audiences, and exchanging with all different kinds of people who teeter on the edges of academic institutions, has always inspired me to think outside of the box when ‘doing’ history. History Workshop Journal has helped me to place this way of working front and centre in my practice, rather than understanding this work as the fun, but extra-curricular ‘side hustle’.
In hindsight too, it has strengthened my understanding of itinerance as a methodological approach against today’s precarious condition. Thinking about how History Workshop as a collective movement went from being based at Ruskin to an itinerant event (and then the continuous experimentation with new mediums since, including the digital platform we now have helped to build) is all the more moving with the ongoing attacks against humanities, universities, and access to knowledge the world over. We ‘professional historians’ may soon be without a vocational ‘profession’ in academia; how then, do we buttress ourselves to do this work outside of traditional institutions? I hope that From Place to Place offered a small, but optimistic, demonstration of the kinds of radical work that can be done alongside (whether within and on the peripheries or, indeed, outside of) the academy, and the potential for the kinds of histories we can tell in doing so.
I write now from a year-long postdoctoral fellowship, for which I’m grateful to be able to explore and expand the histories I want to share, and the ways I can do this work. My time at History Workshop has taught me so much about how to be a multifarious historian, and how to turn my focus to the meaning of history-writing rather than any particular professional position or acknowledgement. To have played a small part of this historic collective has been a huge gift, and I look forward to seeing the direction the next one hundred issues will take. Congratulations, History Workshop Journal!
Marral Shamshiri
My research and practice as a historian and educator has been shaped by the history and spirit of the History Workshop movement. Before joining the editorial team, I was drawn to the popular, radical initiative to democratise history beyond the university led by the British New Left in the 1960s, and its intellectual project of writing and doing history from below. Our work at History Workshop digital magazine today resembles a contemporary iteration of that tradition, using new tools and mediums. Now as an editor, a question that guides me is, what histories can we write for below? In particular, what kinds of histories and stories might be useful for radical social movements and political struggles today, to overcome the enormous challenges that we face?
To this end, I am developing a series that explores the unrealised horizons of political possibility in past social movements and struggles in their attempts to overcome various forms of domination. In the History Workshop Journal spirit of boundary-pushing approaches to history rooted in present-day political concerns, I have found that a rethinking of both space and time can open up new possibilities for doing radical history today. Radical geographers, with whom HWJ was in conversation, showed us that space is open-ended, not bounded, and always becoming. For the future to be open to new political possibilities, our understanding of time must also be open-ended, neither fixed nor determined. To me, this means that for studying social movements and struggles in history, rather than just write them (and their often defeats and failures) into the historical record, we focus not merely on what happened, but on what could have been. This approach to history resists the foreclosure of the radical horizons and utopian futures once envisioned and fought for, and insists on reactivating the ‘unrealised emancipatory potential’, in the words of Gary Wilder, of those progressive alternatives that did not come to be.
In a time of fascism, genocide and ecological destruction, it feels more urgent than ever to add to the inventory of diverse past struggles and attempts at fighting back on multiple fronts. My series aims to bring together examples of diverse political and social movements – tactically, ideologically, geographically, historically – and their attempts at overcoming various forms of domination using the tools available to them. Hope and imagination is a starting point, but it is not enough. I am interested in the practices, the organising, the tools, the strategies and tactics used in the efforts made collectively and from below. The purpose is to rigorously examine the past for the ways in which domination has been (and therefore can be) overcome, to knit together different struggles and histories that are often divided by arbitrary disciplinary, historiographical or subject specific boundaries. It aims to help us understand the challenges that may lie ahead, the roads once travelled or missed, and the ones we might carve out and take, in trying to overcome the many obstacles we face. In the spirit of extending the boundary-pushing ethos of HWJ, it is ultimately a history for below, and a history for our future.