Full-Time AHRC-fundedPostgraduate Studentship in History/Museum Studies

'The public history of criminal justice in the United Kingdom.'

FURTHER PARTICULARS

This three-year, full-time funded studentship tenable from January 1st 2007, run by the History Department of the Open University and the Galleries of Justice museum in Nottingham. It is financed through a Collaborative Doctoral Award from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

The proposed project involves an analysis of the gap that exists between academic understandings of British criminal justice history, and the way that this topic is often presented in museums and other visitor attractions. This gap will be examined in the written section of the thesis, and addressed by means of a temporary exhibition at the Galleries of Justice.

This studentship will initially be based at the History Department of the Open University. The successful candidate will therefore be based at Milton Keynes for their first year, but at the Galleries of Justice in Nottingham for the second and third years.

This is a re-advertisement, following our failure to find a suitable candidate for the studentship this summer.

Partner Institutions

The European Centre for the Study of Policing

The Open University's European Centre for the Study of Policing (ECSP) has a long-standing interest in public history. This has comprised: the 1989-1990 ESRC-funded survey of police archives (Emsley and Bridgeman, Guide to the Police Archives of England and Wales (Police History Society 1990)); ongoing involvement of Centre staff with the Police History Society; the 2003 survey of police archiving policies (Williams and Emsley, 'Beware of the Leopard' in M. Proctor, (ed.) Political Pressure and the Archival Record, (American Society of Archivists, 2006)), and the 2004 'Heritage and History of the UK Criminal Justice System' conference, the papers of which were published as Giving the Past a Future: Preserving the Heritage of the UK's Criminal Justice System (Francis Boutle, 2004), edited by Chris Williams.

The ECSP has existed within the History Department since 1992. It is the most prominent group in the UK for the study of police history, and is affiliated to the GERN (Groupe Européen de Recherche sur les Normativités). It holds quarterly seminars on police history, and has a varied and growing archive of primary sources, including that of the Association of Chief Police Officers, which is currently being indexed. Owing to the number of OU staff who have researched British policing policy and history over the last two decades, the OU library is very well stocked with relevant books and journals.

The International Centre for Comparative Criminological Research

The ECSP is one of the component research clusters in the ICCCR. The ICCCR was founded in 2004, and is one of the Open University's designated research centres. The Centre aims to bring together contemporary practice-based research and critical policy analysis with an awareness of historical and social context. It is both cross-Faculty and interdisciplinary. Its research is aimed at academic, policy and practitioner audiences. It brings together acknowledged experts within the field of criminology from a number of different disciplines: History, Social Policy, Psychology and Law. Centre members also have strong research interests in historical, contemporary, and emerging forms of governance and strategies of policing and regulation. A key concern of the Centre is to analyse how the meaning of crime, policing and criminal justice is embedded within changing local and international, historical and cultural contexts.

The Galleries of Justice

The NCCL (National Centre for Citizenship and the Law) Galleries of Justice (GoJ) is a registered independent museum housed in the old Shire Hall and made up of a range of Victorian courtrooms, an eighteenth-century prison and an Edwardian police station. The site is used as a learning resource for schools, colleges and universities, families and outreach projects aimed at young person’s groups and the socially excluded, for which the GoJ won the Gulbenkian Award in 2004. The museum has collections of national importance that relate to policing, the law and probation, and is also home of the HM Prison Service collection. The GoJ's total collections resource is in the region of 25,000 items not including the library stock.

Project Outline

Background

The issues of crime and its control occupy a huge portion of contemporary public discourse. Much of this debate anchors itself in an interpretation of the past, which is often unrecognisable to specialists working in the area: see for example Geoffrey Pearson's bookHooligan: a History of Respectable Fears (Longman, Harlow 1980), which shows among other things the failure to appreciate the long history of the clash between 'reformers' and 'conservatives' in the prison service. There is a lack of fit between the 'received wisdom' of many public commentators and the now-firm conclusions of historians researching in the field, on issues including (but not limited to) the competence of police before 1829, the development of imprisonment, and the overall level of violence in society.

The traditional approach to the writing of criminal justice history in the UK was to celebrate institutions and to see their development as a steady and teleological rise from incompetent roots towards the present, punctuated and illustrated by the adoption of increasingly powerful technology. This approach as applied to policing was first systematically criticised by Cyril Robinson in 1979 (‘Ideology as history: a look at the way in which some English police historians look at the police’ Police Studies, Vol. 2, No. 2, 35-49). A comparably teleological approach which uncritically identifies humanitarianism as the motor for change in prison conditions was exposed by Ignatieff's A Just Measure of Pain (London: Macmillan, 1978), yet it is this motif which is still dominant in much of the practice of public history within museums of policing, of the courts, and of punishment, despite the existence of an academic critique of such usage (for which see T. Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 153-155).

Aims

The major aim is to help move the public history of crime, policing, the courts and punishment in the UK into a more critical mode, questioning and rethinking when necessary.

Objectives

The main objective, therefore, is to develop a theoretical framework within which the public history of criminal justice can be assessed and if necessary criticised. This framework ought to be of use to curators in the area as well as academics, and hence its dissemination is also a key objective. This will be assessed through an examined thesis (c. 50,000 words long) and a 'worked example': an exhibition at the GoJ which will cover a single topic of criminal justice history, and seek to reflect as closely as possible the historical research into the area. Ideally this exhibition would be able to transfer later to a suitable temporary public location in Milton Keynes. The thesis could contain an analysis of the way that this topic is covered elsewhere in the museum sector: it should analyse and justify the process whereby the exhibition was conceived, designed, written and presented. As a companion to the exhibition, a catalogue will be produced which can be archived electronically by the ECSP and the GoJ, and serve as a record. This need not have the sophistication necessary to be considered as a mirror or online version of the exhibition.

Intellectual issues to be addressed

Intellectually, the student will need to confront the problem of how closely a museum installation can reflect a broadly accepted academic consensus, given the bounds of: commercial considerations; available material for exhibition; space; and the need to limit the number of authorial and interpretative voices in order to communicate directly with the general public. It is likely that a successful project will be one that also considers the way that knowledge about the past is developed and presented, and the extent to which it can (or ought) to be relevant to the present. Thus it is likely to deal with the roles of: the structure of information in academic and popular history; 'common knowledge'; and existing representations of the topic in fiction and the mass media. There are no definite right answers to these questions, (although there are wrong ones) and the extent to which they can be arrived at will be a good measure of how successful the research project has been.

Working methods

The precise interpretative framework which the student will use will be worked out by the student in conjunction with the supervisory team, but ought to be compatible with the accepted methodologies of academic history and of museum studies, and take into account the social and political context of public history. The student may well choose to visit other museums as part of the project, to assess the way that they are presenting this topic. The main research tasks the student needs to carry out are as follows. First, they must select an issue in criminal justice history (broadly defined as encompassing crime, policing, the courts, and punishment) to examine, ideally over a reasonably long chronological period. Then, they must survey both the research literature and the way that this issue is being presented in the museum sector. Finally, they must curate an exhibition on this issue at the GoJ, describing and justifying in their accompanying thesis the way that this process was carried out.

Timescale

During first year, the student will be physically based at the Open University at Milton Keynes. This period will largely be taken up with research training and initial familiarisation with the relevant secondary literature. If the student has a museum studies background, this secondary study is likely to be more heavily weighed towards criminal justice history, and vice versa. Supervision meetings with GoJ staff in attendance will ensure that the project is achievable within their needs, and the student will be able and expected to visit the GoJ to familiarise themselves with it.

During the second year, the student will be based at the GoJ in Nottingham, and will be able to other visit and study museums including the GoJ, paying close attention to the distance (if any) between the message of the exhibition and the current best research into the subject. This aspect of the project is likely to be interpretive only: it will not require any systematic research into public responses to exhibits. The existence of the MLA-supported Crime and Punishment Collections Network will probably aid this activity. The GoJ and the ECSP are both founder members of this network, and Chris Williams is a members of its executive committee. In this year their training will focus on curatorial and archival practice at the GoJ, and is likely to be less formal than that delivered at the OU. They will continue the process of gathering evidence for their personal development portfolio.

During the third year, the student will continue to be based at Nottingham, and will work on writing up the thesis and putting together the exhibition. The archives and artefacts collection of the GoJ offers an exceptionally large arena for the student to choose their topic. In addition, they might choose to draw on the resources of the archive of the ECSP, which include the records of the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO), film material, and police-related archival material from the nineteenth century. The exhibition itself will open in the summer of 2009, three months before the expected submission date. At a mutually convenient time, it will transfer to a suitable venue in Milton Keynes. Additional funding permitting, it could later be developed into a smaller travelling exhibition which could 'tour' OU regional offices and other venues.

The supervision will be shared between the members of each institution, with the OU supervisors taking the lead role in the preparation of the thesis, and the GoJ supervisors the lead role in the preparation of the exhibit. Necessary research expenses will be covered by the OU.

Training

Initial training needs assessment, and training in generic research methods (some of which will involve transferable skills) will be carried out through the OU's standard postgraduate training scheme, largely during the first year, although the student will subsequently retain access to training resources at the OU if necessary. They will also be able to consult other OU academics with relevant experience, such as Dr Yvonne Jewkes (Social Policy Department) who co-edits the journal Crime, Media, Culture, and Professor Tony Bennett (Sociology Department), author of The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics.

The History Department has four full-time PhD students and around 20 part-time PhD students. The research student will have (shared) use of an office in the Arts Faculty at Milton Keynes. The office contains computing equipment, and the student will also be allocated a laptop computer. The University provides a generic postgraduate student induction programme, and in addition to this the Arts Faculty runs a series of training and induction sessions, covering such matters as:

  • Collecting source material for research, planning and arranging visits to archives, retrieving materials, managing data about sources, and records management;
  • Project planning and management, topic framing, definition and scheduling of research programmes;
  • Use of libraries (including the OU library), and introduction to digital resources and bibliographic management and software;
  • Attending academic conferences, presenting papers, and networking;
  • Wider trends in Arts scholarship, and the social and political contexts of research.

The Arts Faculty follows Quality Assurance Agency criteria for postgraduate programmes, which involve an initial assessment of training needs, the drawing up of a training and development plan, and the regular review of this plan. The History Department runs a regular Departmental Seminar, at which PhD. students and members of staff present their latest research.

Training in transferable skills specific to the project will be largely delivered at the GoJ. Training provision from both institutions will be integrated into a single process of training needs assessment, delivery, and evaluation, handled by the student and the supervisors acting jointly, and recorded in a single integrated portfolio of evidence.

Plans for dissemination

The student will be expected, as is normal for OU research students, to give a paper at one of the ECSP's regular police history seminars. We anticipate that in addition to the thesis and the exhibition, the student will be in a position to write up the project in the relevant academic history (Crime History and Societies), criminology (Crime, Media, Culture), or museum studies journals. The higher dissemination priority, though, will be to communicate with the public history sector via the Crime and Punishment Collections network, and through articles in Museum Practice and the Museums Journal. If the student wishes to convene a small conference to coincide with the launch of the exhibition (Autumn2009) then the ECSP will be willing to give administrative and financial support to this.

Wider Benefits

If this project is successful, its main immediate benefit will be to the museums sector as a whole. In addition the project ought to help to enhance appreciation by academics of the potential benefits of a more intensive engagement with the public.

The project will break new ground by being the first systematic study concentrating on the presentation of criminal justice history, and the 'hands-on' element should give it added currency and ensure that it is relevant to, and informed by, the realities of curatorial practice.

Project Supervisors

The supervisorsat the OU will be Clive Emsley and Chris A. Williams.Dr Williams edited and contributed to Giving the Past a Future: Preserving the Heritage of the UK's Criminal Justice System (Francis Boutle: London, 2004). He is engaged with public history in general through his ongoing role as originator and academic consultant for the OU/BBC Radio 4 series 'Things we forgot to remember'. He has written several articles on the history of policing in the UK and beyond.ProfessorEmsley is the author of numerous books and articles on the history of crime and policing, including The British Police: a Social and Political History (Longman, 2nd ed. 1996) and Crime and Society in England (Longman, 3rd ed. 2005). He is a member of the advisory board of the Metropolitan Police Museum, the academic council of the Société Nationale Histoire et Patrimoine de la Gendarmerie Nationale, and is the academic advisor to the Police History Society.

The supervisor at the GoJ will be Beverley Baker. Ms. Baker has experience supervising a full time researcher, funded through SIS (Nottingham Trent Univeristy) to research the content of the Rainer Foundation archive. This charts the history of the London Police CourtMission (precursor to the Probation Service) as well as various reform and industrial schools including the School of Discipline established by Elizabeth Fry in 1825. The research led to a number of papers presented at various academic conferences including SOLON’s 'Behaving Badly' conference at the GoJ in 2001.