The following are contributions made by postgraduate researchers:
Commencing my PhD at Brighton in 2022, The Centre for Memory, Narrative and Histories (CMNH) felt like the obvious home for my research. As a filmmaker, I am perpetually thinking about memory and narrative and the ways in which they impact and inform my practice. The interdisciplinary nature of CMNH is one of its key strengths, the fact that one can be exposed to and influenced by researchers working across such diverse subject areas, yet with a common interest in the cultural significance of the past and the ways in which narratives and histories are devised and disseminated. The richness of such a unique and valuable research centre cannot be underestimated and its loss would be dire for our community.
CMNH was the reason that I chose to pursue a PhD at the University of Brighton. I had started my doctoral research at King's College London, but did not feel that it particularly suited me as a historian. I attended the CMNH's PGR conference in 2018, and was immediately inspired by the exciting, interdisciplinary research of the contributors. I decided to transfer to Brighton, and CMNH has been a fundamental part of my experience at the university. It has provided me with a sense of community, which helped to mitigate the loneliness of doctoral research. It has also allowed me to play an active role in many stimulating events. During my PhD, I helped to organise a workshop series, as well as the PGR conference in 2021. In many ways, CMNH has been central to my development as an academic, and I am very sad to think others will no longer have the chance to benefit from it.
The Centre was profoundly important to my work as a PhD student and researcher, and continues to offer a model for me of collective, political and exciting academic research. There are some straightforwardly intellectual reasons for this. A shared commitment to thinking about the politics of the past in the present, and of historical representation’s role in that relationship, tied together a lot of the work being done there across a wide range of temporal and spatial contexts. The Centre’s openness to methodological and theoretical variety was also really useful for me as I started my PhD. And a general enthusiasm within the Centre for oral history and particularly oral history that deals with questions of memory, subjectivity and narrative was crucial to my own thinking throughout my time at Brighton.
But outside of those specifics, I think the most important thing about the CMNH for me was an atmosphere or a texture or a structure of feeling. As graduate students we organised events, reading groups and conferences, all made possible by incredible administrative support that I probably took for granted at the time before realising how unusual it was elsewhere. We were encouraged to participate actively and collaboratively in how the Centre worked, again something that’s probably more unusual than I realised at the time. We were taken seriously and encouraged to bring our own research and thinking to bear on how the CMNH operated. All of this contributed to the feeling of participating in a shared and collective project, and a warm, generous, collaborative approach to academic work and academic life.
Taking part in various reading groups but notably the one on temporality that’s now developed into a book; organising events and international conferences, notably for me the one with Berber Bevernage; inviting people to participate in the always-lively and exciting seminar series, with Nadine El-Enany’s paper on colonialism and bordering a recent highlight; all of these were critical to my development as a researcher and now as a lecturer. The Centre provided a unique space for this kind of work and for the sociality that underpinned it, and any serious commitment on the part of the university to helping PhD students develop would recognise this.
As with the Humanities programme as a whole, the Centre represents an alternative model for critical and collective academic research and teaching that’s being dismantled by an instution that is unwilling to understand the importance of this alternative. I remain incredibly grateful for the ways in which the CMNH shaped me as a historian and an academic, and hopeful for the continuation of its useful work inside or outside of the University of Brighton.
The CMNH has given me a space to develop my research and find a community that harness the work that I do, ensuring family histories are explored and documented.
In 2018, I began my PhD Research at the University of Brighton (UoB). I chose to carry out my research in this institution because of the reputation of the Centre for Memory, Narrative and Histories (CMNH). The CMNH is entirely unique in its approach in researching memory studies and cultural histories. This is true for both within the UoB and its other research centres, but also on a national level. This is particularly the case in relation to its strand on The Northern Ireland Troubles, which is one of the few centres in England dedicated to exploring the conflict and the significant reason I chose to do my research here.
To get rid of this unique and important research centre on a whim of this current management’s rash and short-sighted cuts would be a devastating loss and an insult to the work of the CMNH which has established its incredible reputation internationally.
Since starting my doctoral studies, the people, research and events that I have had the privilege to engage with in the CMNH have transformed my thinking. My professional development has in large part been through the CMNH and the opportunities they have afforded me.
This has been through the numerous international events I have co-organised including workshops, seminars, and conferences. It has also been in my capacity as PGR Representative and Social Media Assistant, where I got to see the hard work and dedication required to keep the CMNH functioning.
The work of the CMNH has shown me what it really means to work collaboratively, to widen access and engagement to research, and to promote radical critical thinking.
There are numerous heart-felt reasons as to why I have been shaken by the announcement of the CMNH's closure – not to mention losing a sense of academic and social belonging. I could write about all these reasons, but for now I want to talk about the unique type of collaborative work in the centre that is sensitive to the community context. I can exemplify the centre's work in this capacity, through the example of a collaborative Ph.D. that I have been part of for four years.
What was the partnership?
I am in the final stages of a collaborative doctoral award between the University of Brighton and Falls Community Council in West Belfast – one of the worst affected areas of the Northern Irish Conflict. The partnership was set up to investigate and evaluate the role of a community oral history archive called Duchas, which was set up in the peace process as a way of helping Nationalist communities to deal the ongoing legacies of conflict. The partnership facilitated me access to an archive containing over three hundred histories. I was also embedded within the community for the duration of the project.
Why is the partnership crucial to the centre?
The partnership evokes the centre's commitment to community-focused research. My association with Falls Community Council was also made possible because of a much longer collaboration between Professor Graham Dawson, the former director of CMNH and Claire Hackett, a memory activist working on the peace process in West Belfast. They began to work together in the year 2000, working on issues related to memory, oral history and community peacebuilding in and around the interface areas of West Belfast. It was through their long-term commitment to work with each other that trust was built and the idea of an embedded studentship was formed – following many other outputs. This is one example of the centre's commitment to critically engaging with memory cultures and community peacebuilding practices in Northern Ireland. Such a process is needed, as my supervisor Graham Dawson has said elsewhere: “If academic scholarship […]is to become 'really useful knowledge', it will do so in dialogue, based on shared authority, with the understandings and priorities of historically and geographically grounded practitioners, to support and deepen the transformative promise of this community-based peacebuilding activity.”
I was a master’s student at The University of Edinburgh when I first heard about the Centre for Memory, Narratives and Histories. My lecturers at Edinburgh advised me of the Centre’s outstanding reputation and critical work in the fields of oral history, Irish history, and memory studies. I applied to undertake my doctoral studies at Brighton purely on this basis, along with the chance to be supervised by two of its founders: Professor Graham Dawson, and Professor Lucy Noakes.
From the moment I arrived at Brighton in 2015, to the moment I left in 2020, the Centre of Memory Narrative histories provided me with an irreplaceable home for thinking, for friendship, and for collaboration. It’s culture of collectivity, openness and theoretical and methodological exploration was foundational to my thinking and my intellectual development as a scholar. I learned to appreciate the interconnectedness and mutuality of research and to build the confidence I needed to begin to publish, and make my own hopeful contributions to a broader, collective conversation.
The centre provided me a space of solidarity and possibility at a time great uncertainty, and within an academic landscape that felt increasingly subject to enclosure. The depth of care, guidance and supervision I received within the CMNH as a student was the only reason I was able complete my PhD with no corrections in 2020. It has played a formative role in everything I have written, presented and shared as a scholar to date. It is the reason I now hold a permanent lectureship.
After leaving Brighton, I remained a member of the CMNH and continued to work with colleagues on many new exciting collaborative projects and publications. The CMNH, as the radical imaginary of a home, has truly travelled with me. The closure of the CMNH is an act of de-recognition and erasure. It represents the denial of a future of enlivening intellectual work collective exploration to so many future generations of students.