This strand invites papers that use social history to recover pasts that have been marginalised or submerged by colonialism. Through it, we aim to highlight work that expands the ambit of social history and unsettles its established boundaries. The call to “decolonise history” has pushed the discipline in a variety of productive directions. New theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches have emerged from the postcolonial world to grapple with the challenges of excavating and eschewing the legacies of Empire on history writing. This strand seeks to showcase the generative diversity of these critical approaches and their implications for how we write, teach, and think about the past.
Rather than being narrowly focussed on the rise and fall of imperial power across the world, the strand seeks to bring into dialogue research that centres subaltern, diasporic, decolonial, Indigenous, and anti-colonial frameworks. This could encompass many topics: histories of transnational solidarities across the global south; histories of borderlands and border-worlds; histories of the radical antiracist politics of diasporic communities; and other subjects that foreground agency, world-making, and resistance. We particularly encourage submissions that centre epistemic justice, non-textual or community-based archives, transnational or intersectional approaches, and critical reflections on the ethics of writing from and about the margins.
Submissions from postgraduate students are particularly welcome.
Strand Convenors
- Aayushi Gupta: ag2152@cam.ac.uk
- Anamika Bhattacharjee: anamika.bhattacharjee@uea.ac.uk
- Jonathan Saha: jonathan.saha@durham.ac.uk