Professor Ian Grovenor, University of Birmingham and Birmingham City Council, Knowledge Transfer Partnership
The living stories found in local archives hold an important key to understanding urgent social issues surrounding identity, citizenship and belonging. By engaging with city archives and library resources, we can make discoveries about ourselves that allow us to become better informed and empowered in our understanding of history.
In this context, 'Birmingham Stories' is a collaborative project between the Library and Archive Services at Birmingham City Council and Ian Grosvenor, Professor of Urban Educational History at the University of Birmingham, which intends to extend an awareness of the diverse histories of the city, in its many voices and cultures, by making research on archive collections available to the wider public.
Birmingham Stories has organised an informative series of presentations and workshops in local community libraries based on research at Birmingham University. These sessions have been aimed at those who would like to know more about the history of Birmingham and its many communities. The workshops have also made available a number of useful resource guides that provide information as well as practical advice. Both the workshops and the resource guides are based on a wide range of socially significant archive collections held by Birmingham Libraries and Archives Service. The workshops and resource guides cover the ten following themes and areas of research:
- Travelling Communities: Voices from the Margins
- Urban Childhoods: Contexts, Cultures, Images
- Visualising Birmingham: Reframing the Photographic Collections of Birmingham
- Radical Religions: Exploring Birmingham's Faith Diversity through the Archives
- Researching Race History in Birmingham
- Refugee Movements: From the Eighteenth Century To Today
- Migration Stories: the Making of Modern Birmingham
- Slavery and Abolition: A Guide To Birmingham's Resources
- Women's Rights: Tracing the Struggle in Birmingham
- The Civic Gospel: Networks for Social Change
The project talks, discussions, presentations and workshops have been based in Birmingham’s community libraries and other local heritage venues. At the same time, Birmingham Stories has also held workshops for archive practitioners who would like to become better informed about research into the collections that Birmingham holds and their true historical and community potential. Raising awareness among users and heritage practitioners in this way will result in wider promotion of archives and dissemination of research ideas that are central to our understanding of ourselves, issues around identity and social justice in a culturally diverse society. Finally, in order to underline the importance of Birmingham Stories in national and international debates about identity, the project will culminate in a workshop conference on the subject of public history.
More information can be found on the Connecting Histories website.
Image © Birmingham Archives and Heritage.