By Catherine Clarke
The IHR’s Centre for the History of People, Place and Community is offering four paid Research Internships, in partnership with the Museum of Youth Culture, as part of the project ‘Setting the Record Straight’, funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund. These are an opportunity for early-career researchers to produce a short research output for online publication, working remotely with digital collections and resources.
The IHR’s Centre for the History of People, Place and Community brings together academics, heritage professionals, community groups, creative practitioners, and all those interested in people, places and their stories. Its aim is to promote inclusive, imaginative approaches to making history.
Museum of Youth Culture is a new emerging museum dedicated to the styles, sounds and social movements innovated by young people over the last 100 years. The Museum is working to open a physical space in London by 2023.
Championing the impact of youth on modern society, the Museum of Youth Culture is formed from the archives of YOUTH CLUB, a non-profit Heritage Lottery- & Arts Council-funded collection incorporating over 150,000 photographs, ephemera, objects, and oral histories celebrating youth culture history. From bomb-site bicycle racers in post-war 1940s London, to the Acid House ravers of 1980s Northern England, the Museum of Youth Culture records and empowers the extraordinary stories of growing up in Britain.
For the National Lottery Heritage Fund project ‘Setting the Record Straight’, Museum of Youth Culture are seeking to challenge traditional narratives around youth culture and instead develop inclusive, diverse stories that champion the everyday experiences of being young, free from stereotypes of subcultures or media hype and anxiety. The Museum also hopes to model ways in which their online archive can be used as a rich primary resource for research. For the Centre for the History of People, Place and Community, this collaboration with the Museum of Youth Culture is an opportunity to explore different kinds of community and to foster exciting new research.
Funded by the ‘Setting the Record Straight’ project, the IHR’s Centre for the History of People, Place and Community will host four paid Research Internships. Each Intern will work remotely on the Museum of Youth Culture’s online collections, to produce a short research output. Interns will have full access to the Museum of Youth Culture archive and ‘Grown Up in Britain’ crowdsourced collections, as well as support of the Museum of Youth Culture team, and mentoring from senior academics in the IHR.
How to apply
Applicants should propose a short piece of research, based on Museum of Youth Culture’s online collections. Internships should be complete, with outputs delivered, by 1 September 2020, and will be publishedon the Museum of Youth Culture website, with links from the IHR site. The bursary for each Intern is £600. This should to translate to around 8 days work: please be realistic about what you can achieve in this time. Proposed research should:
- Demonstrate the value of the Museum of Youth Culture collections as a primary research resource
- Support the ‘Setting the Record Straight’ goal of devolving and diversifying narratives around youth culture by using personal stories and individual records
- Where appropriate, interpret Museum of Youth Culture collections and records within wider historical and critical contexts
- Be in an appropriate format for the research: formats such as online articles, podcasts, and video will be considered (but applicants must have the capacity to produce these independently, to publication standard)
- Be presented in a style accessible to a wide general (non-specialist) audience
Developing your proposal, you may want to look at:
- Museum website with archive collections, academic texts, public submissions and free activities and resources
- Archive website that houses all Museum of Youth Culture collections
- Google Arts & Culture platform with selected curated stories
To apply, please download, complete and return this application form by 7 May 2020.
Professor Catherine Clarke is Director of the Centre for the History of People, Place and Community at the IHR, and Professor of History at the University of London.
*Main blog image: Photo credit, Carolynne Cotton, Youth Club Archive