Looking Back, Going Forward: Education and the Making of Public[ly] Engaged Histories

Abstract

This article documents the emergence of the “participatory turn” in Public History in the UK, as academics in the humanities and social sciences have been encouraged to work more closely with communities, and to engage in research collaboration and coproduction to produce “public[ly] engaged history”. In the first part of the article UK case studies related to education, formal and informal, are presented to illustrate this shift in research focus. In the second part of the article, the authors argue that this “participatory turn” in Public History is not a new phenomenon, but dates to the History Workshop movement of the 1980s and earlier. In the final section of the paper, the article addresses the question of why such collaborative work in the past has been forgotten and what this means for the future of publicly engaged history.