Student profiles
Bea Tailby Hardstaff
Email: beatrice.tailby-hardstaff@stu.mmu.ac.uk
Thesis Title
Institution
Supervisors
Dr Helene Snee
Professor Heather Shore
Research Summary
I am beginning a collaborative doctoral training partnership with the Working Class Movements Library through the Sociology and Heritage Studies pathways at Manchester Metropolitan University. I will explore how collaborative engagement with class-based heritage might generate resources and tools for contemporary political mobilisation. In turn, these resources and tools might be used by the Working Class Movements Library to reach new audiences and re-interpret the collection to demonstrate relevance to contemporary political issues and contemporary working-class people.
Using Youth-led Participatory Action Research, I will facilitate a group of participants aged 16-18 to create these resources and tools according to their interests and values. Together, we will perform ‘potential history’, a ‘form of being with others, both living and dead, across time, against the separation of the past from the present and history from politics’ (Azoulay 2019: 93). The challenge and excitement in potential history work, of recognising and advocating ‘others’ rights to and in’ those histories, describes the facilitatory role I will take, participant’s interpretation of the Working Class Movements Library collection and the resources and tools produced.
As a collaborative, co-produced project, the research and resources produced will be subject to change and transformation as the collaboration develops and participants shape the project according to their interests and values. I aim to generate knowledge on and analyse how young people respond to and orient themselves in relation to working-class movements, working-class history and politics. Practically, the project will facilitate learning and empower engagement with working-class movements of the past, present and future, and resources will be produced for use in the WCML. Combined, these outputs will demonstrate the growing importance of prioritising collaboration and engagement with politics in heritage and the embodied impact of Youth-led Participatory Action Research. This research will project the voices of young working-class people into the academy and hopefully demonstrate by example the value and importance of embodied and action-orientated ontological research in expanding and diversifying academic research. Applying a broad sociological lens, I hope to generate findings on the impact of the project on young people’s class subjectivities, political identities, and potential activism.
Research Interests
Research Interests:
Heritage Studies
Political and working-class sociology
Cultural studies
Material culture
Archives and libraries
Radical and DIY publishing, printed matter and ephemera
Access to education and education histories
Working-class histories
Queer and crip theory
Publications
Coming soon