The Ferguson Centre is partner in the following projects, some of which began as pilot projects funded by the Ferguson Trust.
‘Beyond the Frame: Indian British Connections’ expands and builds on the success of the OU-led and AHRC funded research project ‘Making Britain: South Asian Visions of Home and Abroad, 1870-1950’ (2007-10). This new project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, is designed to maximise public engagement of Making Britain’s research findings. ‘Beyond the Frame’ profiles visual and archival sources in international collections to highlight some of the numerous ways in which South Asians positioned themselves within British society and culture and explores the significance of their impact on British life. It showcases key historical links and cultural exchanges that took place between India and Britain, whilst also exploring some of the tensions that arose from such encounters.
Working in close partnership with the British Library and the British Council, the project will take a new facsimile panel exhibition ‘Beyond the Frame: India in Britain, 1858-1950’ to seven cities in India between November 2011 and March 2012.
Positioned to create productive platforms for knowledge exchange, Beyond the Frame seeks to open dynamic global pathways for cultural dialogue and public engagement. The exhibition tour in India is accompanied by a varied programme of public events and activities which include seminars, school workshops and lectures. In the UK, the project team are producing new interactive online resources for the British Library’s award-winning ‘Timelines’ website and a linked ‘Asians in Britain’ microsite, both of which launch in late 2011 to coincide with the exhibition.
In addition to follow-on funding from the UK Arts Humanities Research Council, the second phase of the project has been enabled by financial support from The Open University and the British Library, through the museum World Collections Programme.
This new phase of the project is led by Principal Investigator and Director, Professor Susheila Nasta of The Open University, with Penny Brook, Lead Curator of India Office Records, British Library, Dr Florian Stadtler, Research Associate (OU) and pioneering historian of Asians in Britain, Dr Rozina Visram.
Aim: This project aims to produce revisions of our understandings of colonial and postcolonial conflicts, particularly by increasing knowledge, and use of, non-European sources.
Membership: Karl Hack, William Sheehan, Hugh Beattie, Georgina Sinclair.
Member actvities:
Karl Hack
Events.
Karl Hack gave a paper to the Royal United Services Institute seminar on 'Hearts and Minds in British counterinsurgency' in November 2007. He initiated and organised an international seminar in Singapore in June 2008 on the 'Asian Cold War', with British Academy funding (2008-10). He then interviewed ex-communist insurgents in Southeast Asia in 2008-2009. In September 2010 he organized an academic-practitioner workshop on 'Negotiating with the enemy', in cooperation with the Institute of Commonwealth Studies in London. This focussed on historical case-studies, with a particular focus on their relevance to contemporary 'Afpak' events. In September 2011 Dr Hack will address an Institute of Historical Research conference on 'British ways in counterinsugency'.
Publications
'The Malayan Emergency as counterinsurgency paradigm', Journal of Strategic Studies 32, 2 (June 2009): 383-414; 'Extracting counterinsurgency lessons: Afghanistan and Malaya, at the RUSI website (Autumn 2009); with Geoff Wade (eds.), 'Asian Cold War Symposium', Special Edition of the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 40, 3 (October 2009); and with Philip Murphy (eds.), Special edition of the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth Studies on 'Negotiating with the enemy' (forthcoming 2011).
Georgina Sinclair has published Home and Away'; the Cross Fertilisation between ‘Colonial' and ‘British' Policing, 1921-1985' Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, Vol. 35 No. 2 (June 2007) pp. 221-238. Sinclair and Chris Williams have an ESRC grant to research global policing.
William Sheehan is Associate Lecturer (Ireland Region) on the Open University's A326 Empire course. His research is into insurgency and counterinsurgency. He has published British Voices: From the Irish War of Independence 1918-1921 (2007) Hearts & Mines: The British 5th Division, Ireland, 1920-1922 (2009), and Fighting for Dublin: The British Battle for Dublin 1919-1921 (2007). His next book will be A Hard Local War: The British Army and the Guerrilla War in Ireland 1919-1921 (forthcoming 2011).
Hugh Beattie is the author of Imperial Frontier: Tribe and State in Waziristan (2002). He gave a paper at the Ferguson-ICS conference on 'Negotiating with the enemy' in September 2010, which will be published in the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History (forthcoming 2011).
Richard Duckett is a doctoral student under Drs Hack and Mombauer, researching 'Special Operation Executive in Burma, 1941-1945'.
Link to project website
Collaboration with the Institute for the Study of the Americas, School of Advanced Study, University of London.
Jointly directed by Sandip Hazareesingh (Ferguson Centre) and Jean Stubbs (Institute for the Study of the Americas) and coordinated by Jonathan Curry-Machado (Institute for the Study of the Americas). Started March 2007.
This collaborative interdisciplinary research project emerged from a one-year pilot (2007-08) funded by the Ferguson Trust. It is jointly directed by Dr Sandip Hazareesingh (OU) and Professor Jean Stubbs (Institute for the Study of the Americas) and co-ordinated by Dr Jonathan Curry-Machado (Institute for the Study of the Americas).
The project draws together a network of scholars in both North and South who are working on specific commodities (e.g. cotton, sugar, rice, tobacco) and particular regions of the world from different disciplinary perspectives. The project's main aim is to explore the networks through which such commodities circulated and the spatial changes brought about as a result, particularly in societies subjected to colonial rule in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America.
Commodities of Empire was selected as a British Academy Research Project in 2007 for an initial period of six years, establishing the framework for the project's scholarly activities. These include a four-year (2009-2013) international research collaboration between the OU and Wageningen University (Netherlands) on the theme of 'Commodities and Anticommodities' funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). Hazareesingh and Curry-Machado are part of a team of five researchers involved in this collaboration.
The project holds an annual international workshop, and publishes a series of on-line Working Papers that are openly accessible. It is also contributing to developments in Digital Humanities at the OU and is currently working on an on-line research initiative entitled 'Commodity Histories 1800-2000. A Gateway to Digital Resources' which will be launched in September 2012.
Link to project website
The Project: background
Memory – individual and collective – has been central to the processes of redefining and representing identities in post-Apartheid South Africa. In the rush to produce ‘new’ histories, and define a ‘new’ South Africa, the focus upon memory has not only affected how archives are constructed, but also how they are ‘performed’. This project aims to analyse the implications of these processes, and their impact upon cultural practices, including the theatrical, broadly defined.
Link to report on Research activities and current outcomes
Link to project website at Warwick University
This three-year AHRC-funded collaborative project ended in September 2011. Undertaken in collaboration with Annie E. Coombes (Birkbeck College, University of London) and Karega-Munene (United States International University, Nairobi) the research examined the many different ways in which Kenyans are engaging with the past in the present time, and explored recent developments in the state and civil society-led heritage sectors. It has resulted in a co-authored book, Managing Heritage, Making Peace: History, Identity and Memory in Contemporary Kenya, to be published by I.B. Tauris in May 2011.
Link to project website
Collaboration with the Faculty of Humanities, University of KwaZulu Natal, South Africa.
Started January 2006. Coordinated by Duncan Brown, formerly University of KwaZulu Natal, since December 2008 Dean of Arts, University of Western Cape.
This project is concerned with the place and role of religion and spirituality in modes of individual identification and belief, as well as in the structure and functioning of the public spheres of governance and policy-making, in postcolonial societies, taking as its initial focus South Africa. It engages seriously, in both its areas of investigation and its consideration of new methodologies, with the challenge of accounting for the range and power of religious/spiritual discourses which run through individual and communal identification in such societies, while subjecting such discourses to analysis and argument. David Richards, former Director of the Centre, had a significant role in initiating this project.
Link to project outline
Details of publication Religion and spirituality in South Africa New Perspectives, edited by Duncan Brown pdf (3,220 kb)
General research interests: Africa’s subaltern position in the modern world; governance, social peace and human security; post-Cold War weak states and private security; post-9/11 securitization of Africa; human rights, transitional justice and democracy in Africa; nationality, ethnicity, nativism, citizenship and conflict; nexus between security and development; nationalism, nation-building and contemporary politics in Zimbabwe and South Africa.
Project 1: Book Do 'Zimbabweans' Exist? Nation-Building, Violence, and Citizenship
Project 2: Book Grotesque Nationalism in Africa: Essays on Zimbabwe
Project 3: Future research The Social Context of ‘Hotspots’ of Conflict and Violence in Africa
Whilst there has been much research over the years in the general area of autobiography and life-writing, the focus in the main has been on texts emanating from the West. Following a successful series of research seminars held at the Institute of English Studies in 2005, I edited a special issue of Wasafiri on the theme of postcolonial life-writing covering perspectives from Africa, the Caribbean, South Asia, the Middle East and Europe. Subsequently my individual research has focussed on the work of a Caribbean writer currently living in the US, Jamaica Kincaid. Since her migration to the US in 1966, her enigmatic portraits of ‘self’, ‘family’ and ‘history’ have often blurred the traditional lines between autobiography, fiction, non-fiction and memoir. Drawing on recent theories of postcolonial ‘life-writing’, my forthcoming monograph Jamaica Kincaid: Writing a Life will unravel the complex aesthetic and subversive political strategies Kincaid has invented in the past forty years to continue to write a life. As she once said: ‘I did not know then that I had embarked on something called self-invention, the making of a type of person that did not exist in the place where I was born’ (Kincaid, 1997)
To be coordinated by Francoise Ugochukwu. The objectives are:
a) to evaluate the current use of film and video documents from contemporary Nigeria as a unique context for cultural exchange and language reinforcement in the use of English and heritage languages among diasporic communities in the UK. This will involve collecting comprehensive data on the reception of those films by immigrant communities and the British public in different parts of the UK, and assess its impact on viewers' daily lives.
b) to bring the NVFP to the attention of the British academic sector and promote research on this developing production and its reception. This will be done through publications, and the development and regular updating of the revamped project website, housed by the Open University Ferguson Centre and launched during the 2006-2007 NVFP pilot project. The revamped project website will enable the team to reach out to a substantive number of researchers and support ours and related collaborative projects across continents. It will enable researchers, students - including the Open University postgraduate student body - and the general public to familiarise themselves with the NVFP, reference and browse through the growing number of documents available and pursue their research. This is expected to boost the Open University Ferguson Centre's current research interests in diasporic studies, cross cultural identities, citizenships and heritage studies and its links to the Oecumene project and the
Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance (CCIG).
c) to build a comprehensive database and archive here in the UK in order to promote research on this developing production which will offer a welcome pendant to existing research on Bollywood and facilitate comparative studies. The UK archive on Nigerian films, started on a small scale in 2006 and housed in the Ferguson Centre, Open University, Milton Keynes, is the only one of its kind in the country at the moment. Situated close to London, it will enable researchers, students - including the Open University postgraduate student body - and the general public to familiarise themselves with
the NVFP, reference and browse through the growing number of documents available and pursue their research. The close links between the Ferguson Centre, the University of London and SOAS will attract postgraduate students to our archive and events, boosting the research on the NVFP. The project website, that already offers regular updates and an asynchronous conference facility, will enable the Centre to reach out to a substantive number of researchers and support ours and related collaborative projects across continents.
d) To encourage a fruitful intercultural dialogue among the general public: the Ferguson Centre's partnership with the British Film Institute, the Nigerian High Commission in London and the NIDOE (Nigerians in Diaspora Organisation, Europe) will facilitate the dissemination of our findings through a blog, programmed public lectures and workshops. This type of events, already tested during the 2006-2007 pilot period, has the potential of bringing together a wide range of interested persons from both the academic and media sectors and the general public, developing and sustaining
continuous interest in the researched field.
e) To contribute to the wider dissemination of information on the NMPI both in the UK and the rest of Europe, and generate new collaborative projects at the national and international levels, consolidating current North-South collaborations and facilitating research on NMPI. This project will benefit from the P.I.'s intercultural competence and long-standing research links with Nigeria and from the wealth of contacts built through previous and current other research projects. These will ensure successful dissemination of data gathered through current research affiliations, workshops, papers and publications.
Link to blog
Link to Archive projects page
Agikuyu Community Peace Museum, Nyeri, Kenya (2010), Managing Heritage Project. Photo: Heather Scott
Elder Paul Thuku, Agikuyu Community Peace Museum, Nyeri, Kenya (2010), Managing Heritage Project. Photo: Heather Scott
Ground floor, Agikuyu Community Peace Museum, Nyeri, Kenya (2010), Managing Heritage Project. Photo: Heather Scott