I have now posted the program for Active History: History for the Future.  I would also like to take this opportunity to encourage people to register for the conference, as we have limited space at Glendon and we will need to cap registration at 100 people.

We will be accepting proposals until the 10th of April.

Margaret Conrad’s 2007 CHA Presidential address seems like a good place to begin a discussion on what is Active History. Feel free to leave your comments.

“In a context in which history is increasingly commodity and spectacle, it becomes necessary for academic historians to generate a dialogue with the public about the uses and abuses of the past. This is not always a pleasant conversation, but it is one of the obligations of scholars in a democratic society who have the privilege of dealing in the coin of knowledge and ideas. As former CHA president Jean-Claude Robert argued persuasively in 2003, it is incumbent upon us as university professors also to be public intellectuals.(ft.37) We have been too long focused on honing our professionalism and too little involved in the wider world where many people have a curiosity about the past and a passion for historical research equivalent to our own. What is unworthy, for example, about being a genealogist, an amateur historian, or what academics sneeringly call an “antiquarian”? Surely, we all work in the same corner of the knowledge vineyard and have a lot to learn from each other. American historian Carl Becker made this point in his much-cited article, “Everyman His Own Historian,” published in 1932,(ft.3 in which he reversed the charge of relevance. Academic historians, he argued, needed to adapt their knowledge to the necessities of the present rather than “cultivate a species of dry professional arrogance growing out of the thin soil of antiquarian research.” Touché.” (Margaret Conrad, Public History and its Discontents or History in the Age of Wikipedia, 11-12)

For the full-text see: http://cha-shc.ca/english/info/Conrad_CHA_Address.pdf

I was taking a quick look through the back issues of the Radical History Review today and came across an older issue with a great forum called: Reflections on Radical History (Winter 2001). Those of you at a university should be able to access the forum through your libraries. This forum is similar to a recent issue of Left History (Vol. 11, no. 1, 2006) that asked the question “What is Left History?”. We are hoping to start a similar discussion on this website about what is Active History or what is a history for the future. If you have some thoughts about what active history is or what it should be please send them to us through the Organizers page. This blog should provide an opportunity to both start the discussion in the months leading up to the conference and to allow those who cannot make it to Toronto in September to contribute.

Today we received the support of two more organizations:

University of Toronto Aboriginal Studies Program

Centre for Aboriginal Initiatives, University of Toronto

Active History: History for the Future has been made possible with the generous support of a number of organizations:

The History Department of York University

The History Department of the University of Toronto

The Avie Bennett Historica Chair in Canadian History

The Department of Canadian Studies at Glendon College

The Caledon Institute of Social Policy

The Centre for Ethics at the University of Toronto

I have created a permanent page with our Call for Presentations in both English and French (see the link above). We are also sending the CFP out across lists serves in the next few days. Please forward this information to anyone who might be interested.

We look forward to receiving your proposals. Please feel free to contact us for further information.

Glendon College, York University, September 27-28^th 2008

Call for Presentations

Active History: History for the Future is a two-day symposium designed to bring together university-based and community-based historians interested in assessing the ways in which historians engage with communities beyond the academy. Given that historians are also inevitably community members, it is important to consider not only the ways in which our work is taken up by the media, the courts, and so on, but also how we engage with and are responsible to communities in our research. How do, and how can, historical investigations of the past transform both historians and communities in the present and for the future?

The organizers define active history variously as history that listens and is responsive; history that will make a tangible difference in people’s lives; history that makes an intervention and is transformative to both practitioners and communities. We seek a practice of history that emphasizes collegiality, builds community among active historians and other members of communities, and recognizes the public responsibilities of the historian.

The purpose of Active History: History for the Future is to make connections and to foster the development of working relationships among people doing active history within and between the many historical subfields. In this spirit, the symposium will provide an opportunity for graduate students and junior scholars interested in pursuing historical projects that will make an imprint beyond the academy to connect with and learn from colleagues who have been engaged in such historical pursuits for a long time.

Symposium Themes:

• The relationship between active history and activism
• The relationship between history and public policy
• The relationship between active history and public history
• Methodological, ethical, and historiographical issues in active history
• Early models and past experiences of active history: history workshop, community history, oral history, experiential history, movement history, progressive public history
• Creating active archives
• Active history and relations of power
• Showcase of current active history projects
• Active history and new technology
• History for the future

Histoire engagée: l’histoire pour l’avenir

Collège Glendon, Université York, 27-28 septembre 2008

L’objectif d’Histoire engagée : L’histoire pour l’avenir est de discuter des rapports entre les historiens dans les institutions – comme des universités – et les communautés extra-universitaires. Étant donné l’inévitable inscription communautaire des historiens, il est important de non seulement considérer notamment leurs rôles auprès des médias et des tribunaux, mais aussi leurs responsabilités auprès des communautés dont ils sont redevables. Comment les études historiques peuvent-elles transformer les historiens et les communautés dans lesquels ils s’insèrent dans le présent et dans l’avenir ?

Nous employons une définition large de l’histoire engagée. C’est l’histoire qui est à l’écoute des communautés et qui est réceptive envers elles; une histoire intervenante pouvant transformer à la fois les historiens et les communautés. Nous plaidons pour une pratique de l’histoire collégiale, participant à la vie communautaire et reconnaissant les responsabilités publiques de l’historien.

Le but du colloque est d’améliorer les relations entre les individus pratiquant l’histoire engagée dans différents champs de recherche historiques. Dans cet esprit, l’atelier fournira aux jeunes chercheurs la chance de discuter avec des chercheurs d’expérience desquels ils pourront retirer un apprentissage important pour leurs projets d’études respectifs.

Thèmes de l’atelier:

• Les rapports entre l’histoire engagée et l’activisme.
• Les rapports entre l’histoire et l’élaboration de politiques.
• Les rapports entre l’histoire engagée et l’histoire publique.
• Les enjeux méthodologiques, éthiques, et historiographiques dans l’histoire engagée.
• L’histoire de l’histoire engagée : les History Workshop, l’histoire communautaire, l’historie orale, l’histoire engagée, l’histoire des mouvements.
• La création des archives engagées.
• L’histoire engagée et les rapports de force.
• Les projets en cours en histoire engagée.
• L’histoire engagée et la technologie.
• L’histoire engagée et l’enseignement.

• L’histoire pour le futur.

Symposium Outcomes:

Our hope is that this two-day symposium will serve as a basis for future collaboration between historians engaged both inside and outside the academy. An active history working group might be one way of manifesting this. We would also like to collect submissions for a special issue of a journal (perhaps Histoire Sociale/Social History), which examines the relationship between environmental, social, and Aboriginal histories, to name a few subfields, and current policy debates in these areas. Additionally, in order to ensure the dissemination of conference outcomes beyond the academy, we are partnering with the Caledon Institute of Social Policy (www.caledoninst.org), which has expressed an interest in publishing pieces from the conference.