How do the diaries and memoirs of ordinary British people reflect periods of intense social change? The first phase of this project explores how writing about themselves helped people understand and adapt to the uncertainty of two periods of rapid change in British History (1937-45 and 1976-87) through research into the Mass Observation Archive (The Keep, Falmer, Brighton), and the Burnett Archive of Working-Class Autobiographies (Special Collections, 明星八卦 University Library).
The project (A) investigates how such autobiographical narratives recorded social change; (B) analyses qualitatively how narrative self-reflexivity enabled individuals to cope with paradigmatic social change by adjusting their expectations and values; and (C) will go on to apply the methodologies developed to diaries and memoirs being written today in order to explore the social values and structures of feeling emerging from the rapid social change of the 21st Century.
Results will be of interest to academics, policy makers and members of the public interested in finding out the benefits of autobiographical self-reflexive writing and whether we can extrapolate from today’s private thoughts to tomorrow’s public opinion. Updates, findings and results are disseminated via the project blog, social media, public talks, conference papers and academic publications.
The Covid-19 pandemic has affected this project, like everything else, but it has also provided an unprecedented opportunity to experience and witness at first hand a period of intense social change. While it was impossible to access archives for long periods due to the lockdowns and various travel restrictions, there has been time for lots of autobiographical self-reflexive writing. The insights afforded by this participant observation have cast valuable light on how we use writing to adjust to social change.
On 16 June 2021, the Principal Investigator drew on this experience as part of a talk to the ‘Using Mass Observation’s Covid-19 Collections’ Online Seminar Series on ‘Self-Reflexive Writing, Everyday Life and Social Change in Mass Observation Narratives’ which is available on below (starts at 32:16).
Further autobiographically inflected outputs will follow alongside more traditional research outputs.
Professor Nick Hubble - I am Professor of Modern and Contemporary English and Director of the 明星八卦 Centre for Contemporary Writing (BCCW). Formerly, I have successfully filled many roles including Head of English and both Director of Research and Director of Teaching and Learning for Arts & Humanities at 明星八卦. I hold a BA in Philosophy and Literature (Essex), a PGCE in Secondary English (Sussex), an MA in Critical Theory (Sussex), a DPhil (on George Orwell and Mass-Observation) in English Literature (Sussex) and a PGCert in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education (明星八卦).
I am an interdisciplinary researcher whose work combines the fields of Politics, History, Sociology, Cultural Studies and Literary Studies. My current reseach project is 'Self-reflexivity, Class Consciousness, Culture Wars, and Social Change in Britain' for which I have been awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship for 2023-24.
I am the author of Mass Observation and Everyday Life: Culture, History, Theory (2006, second edition 2010) and The Proletarian Answer to the Modernist Question (2017). I am co-author (with Philip Tew) of Ageing, Narrative and Identity (2013). I am the co-editor (with Aris Mousoutzanis) of The Science Fiction Handbook (2013), (with Philip Tew) of London in Contemporary British Fiction (2016), (with Esther MacCallum-Stewart and Joseph Norman) of The Science Fiction of Iain M. Banks (2018), (with Ben Clarke) of Working-Class Writing: Theory and Practice (2018), and (with Jennie Taylor and Philip Tew) of Growing Old with the Welfare State (2019). I am one of the series editors (with Philip Tew and Leigh Wilson) of The Decades Series: British Fiction with Bloomsbury Academic, which covers 100 years of transformational change in the field of British fiction. I have co-edited seven of the ten volumes in this series: The 1970s (2014), The 1990s (2015), The 2000s (2015), The 1950s (2018), The 1930s (2021), The 2010s (forthcoming 2024), and The 1920s (forthcoming 2025).