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Sam Wetherell, Reflections on ‘British Studies in a Broken World’, July 2017, Twentieth Century British History, Volume 29, Issue 1, March 2018, Pages 156–160, https://doi.org/10.1093/tcbh/hwx046
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Extract
In 2015 the Modern British Studies (MBS) research centre at the University of Birmingham hosted an ambitious and febrile 3-day conference that brought together historians and other scholars to present work and discuss the state of the field.1 MBS 2015 was a productive and exhaustive event, described as the Glastonbury of British history, with five plenary sessions and a tempestuous roundtable finale. The conference was an attempt to weave together the different fragments of the field and work towards building a coherent methodological and political agenda. It came on the back of a 2014 working paper produced by the centre which expressed concern about ‘such a degree of fragmentation that the different sub-disciplines of political, economic, social and cultural history are not sufficiently in conversation with one another’.2 The task of the conference, as highlighted by its call for papers, was to work towards developing a unified set of questions and concerns orientated towards public and political engagement.3 This bold mission became a source of fierce debate throughout the conference.