Our students have worked with organisations across South West England, nationally, and internationally, to develop innovative projects and acquire employability skills and professional contacts.
These have included:
to gather and preserve first-hand accounts of life as a naval officer cadet between the 1930s and 1980s.
The interviews they planned and conducted helped to grow this archive which explored the early life of future British Royal Navy Officers.
For some students, this experience grew into longer-term connections. For example, in his third year, Ciaran Bishop went on develop an oral history of submariner life. In interviews with Royal Navy Submarine Commanders, he tracked technological change from diesel to nuclear propulsion and Cold War to post-Cold War submariner roles. He also interviewed the first female officer to serve on a RN Submarine.
"The making of the recordings were a mutually beneficial experience [for submariners and students]. I know that each of the ex-submariners taking part enjoyed the moment and were very complimentary about the students who guided them through the whole experience. Thank you for keeping the recordings safe for us. I know that it is a comfort to many of those who took part in the project that their interviews will be kept for posterity under the stewardship of the [Royal Navy Museum]."
People from the Plymouth area brought in artefacts from World War I. Our students, using a method of oral called 'object-driven life story interviews' to develop a full digitised record of the artefact, its value, and especially memories surrounding it.
The objects ranged from collections of medals, documents and photos, to uniform caps and trench art.
The Transnational Oral History Symposium and Masterclass is an international research event started in 2016 that live-streams in real-time research papers given by leading scholars and postgraduate students situated on opposite sides of the Atlantic, including the University of Plymouth and the University of Lethbridge's Centre for Oral History and Tradition (COHT) in Canada.
The event aims to generate transnational dialogue and shared scholarly focus by overcoming distance through web technology.
To capture this experience in words, images, and all manner of expressions for future researchers, as well as generate discussion now on how to process this event, University of Plymouth History students are collecting a diverse range of stories from their own communities: care homes, the NHS, mobile hair-dressers, family members, tattoo artists, to mention a few.
Once processed, we will add these to the innovative international digital archive, the ‘Journal of the Pandemic Year: An Archive of COVID-19’, where together, we can help to narrate our shared global experience of the Pandemic.
Share your story with the Journal of the Pandemic Year and hear other people's pandemic stories.
The project has opened opportunities for students to conduct preliminary data-analysis on the use and evolution of different public platforms in the virtual (self-) representation of military life more generally and PTSD specifically.
(Post-traumatic stress disorder – Digital story-telling project)
