In November, Jonathan Moss and Alex Hill presented papers in Montreal at the North American Conference on British Studies. Jonathan took part in a panel examining methodologies for understanding aging in modern Britain, with particular attention to the opportunities and challenges of qualitative longitudinal approaches, including oral history, biographical, and life-course methods. The panel highlighted how personal testimony can illuminate the intersections of social, political, and personal change across the life course. Jonathan’s paper explored the challenges and possibilities of using Mass Observation longitudinally, presenting some early findings from our project.

Alex participated in a separate panel on Visions of the Future in Modern Britain. His paper examined how “ordinary” people made sense of the future between 1940 and 1979, drawing on a wide range of sources including Mass Observation. Here’s the abstract for his paper:

In this paper, I explore how ‘ordinary’ people made sense of the future between 1940 and 1979. I draw on a wide range of sources—Mass-Observation directive responses, transcripts from social science research and radio interviews, and children’s essays—to uncover the vernacular discourses with which people could orient themselves towards change. I argue that many people considered their own personal futures to be projects, determined by their own choices. However, they found it increasingly difficult to project a collective future across this period.

I argue that two narratives of a collective future dominated vernacular politics in the 1940s and 1950s. The first was a populist vision of the future, one that premised its hopes on the political awakening of ‘the people’. This narrative flourished in the political culture of wartime Britain but proved difficult to sustain in the austere politics of the immediate post-war years. The second was a meritocratic and technocratic vision of the future. Here, hope was premised on those with ‘brains’—they were the ones who could plan and manage the future. This narrative continued to flourish into the 1950s. By the beginning of the 1960s, however, hopeful visions of a collective future were in  crisis. Across a range of sources from the period, ‘ordinary’ people can be found expressing profound doubts about ‘progress’. I end the paper by reflecting on where these doubts might have come from, and their broader significance for British politics in the final third of the twentieth century