{"id":702,"date":"2024-01-31T19:10:28","date_gmt":"2024-01-31T19:10:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/history\/?p=702"},"modified":"2024-08-31T17:05:52","modified_gmt":"2024-08-31T16:05:52","slug":"global-challenges-history-policy-practice-a-new-departure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/history\/2024\/01\/31\/global-challenges-history-policy-practice-a-new-departure\/","title":{"rendered":"Global Challenges: History, Policy, Practice \u2013 a new departure"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

On 6 January 2020, protestors stormed the Capitol in Washington, DC. As an American citizen watching from afar, I felt powerless to do anything about the rending of the American body politic that was occurring. A year after these events however, as Congress began its investigation<\/a> into the attempted insurrection, I was invited to submit a statement for the official record<\/a>, placing the spread of the misinformation that had helped trigger the attack into historical context.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was asked to provide policy recommendations which could help prevent such an event happening again. This was not an unusual request for select committees to make \u2014 those occupied with policymaking are regularly drawn to history to glean lessons of value from the past to inform their actions in the present and the future. But for an academic historian, providing such recommendations involved crossing a professional line.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For decades, it has been common for historians to reject the idea of learning lessons from the past, seeing such a pursuit as subsuming the exploration of the past to the needs of the present. This \u201cpresentism\u201d has been disparaged as a flattening of the past<\/a>, a narrow-minded pursuit of the similar at the expense of the different, and \u2014 against the logic of history itself \u2014 a preference for the recent due to its perceived greater relevance. Furthermore, presentism is sometimes suspected of imposing contemporary sensibilities on the analysis of the past, blocking self-criticism, and failing to consider the present as an outcome of long-term historical processes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These opposing views, between the contemplative academic approach to history per se<\/em>, and the active, applied version desired by policymakers, have meant that there has long been mutual incomprehension and a lack of collaboration between academic historians and practitioners. In recent years however, the anti-presentist consensus among professional historians has begun to erode, with a growing number of scholars expressing concern with the underlying conservatism of history\u2019s self-imposed neutrality in the face of growing global challenges.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Just as I felt a personal and professional responsibility to utilise the past to engage in the contemporary debate regarding America\u2019s political stability, the volatility of contemporary affairs — the brutality and aggression of warfare, the failure to address climate change, and the refugee crises that have resulted from both of these things — alongside new challenges to long-established human rights, have prompted calls for the historical discipline to reclaim its political responsibility<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Southampton\u2019s new Global Challenges: History, Policy, Practice MA<\/a> represents the history department\u2019s own engagement with this recent turn. Constructed to train postgraduates from a wide variety of disciplines how to use history to inform approaches to global challenges, designing the course has forced us to ponder how best to avoid the pitfalls of presentism while at the same time being present orientated.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/a>
A still from the promotional video for the MA Global Challenges: History, Policy, Practice. Watch the video here<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

A good place to start was defining what a historical lesson can be. While context can confer a certain temporal sophistication, it offers no grand conceptual scheme for universal application. Human existence is too complex and diverse to ever repeat, yet it does often rhyme, moving in uniformities and patterns that can be studied and applied. So, while direct historical comparison rarely helps, considered historical analogies, which highlight structural similarities as well as differences, can be more fruitful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As well as requiring an understanding of the context within which challenges emerged, sustainable problem solving also requires a foray into the future to predict how proposed solutions will play out. While it may seem counter-intuitive that a discipline predicated upon looking backwards can equip someone to look forwards, speculation is a natural component of historical research.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Writing history is an act of reconstructing the past from the long-distance perspective. It is a disciplinary approach that involves not simply reliance on archival records, but also an act of imagination, informed by the best available evidence. And this imagination can be turned forwards as well as backwards. \u201cGood historians\u201d, wrote the historian EH Carr<\/a>, \u201chave the future in their bones.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is not to suggest that knowledge of the past can unravel the secrets of what is to come. Instead, as the scholar Arthur J. Schlesinger Jr<\/a>. warned, it forces us to understand \u201cthe extreme difficulty, the intellectual peril, the moral arrogance of supposing the future will yield itself so easily to us.\u201d Thus, history\u2019s greatest lesson is its unpredictability. So, more modestly, the relationship between past, present, and future can only ever be a projection of the continuities and patterns that a knowledge of the past enables us to construct. Any chronology is an imagined journey from a past to a future, and by bringing to bear such self-reflexivity in our exploration of both past and present, we can display foresight, urge prudence, and temper hubris.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Global Challenges: History, Policy, Practice is a new departure for the department, and a course which reflects the times we live in. Just as professional historians are increasingly unwilling to sit on the sidelines in neutrality while events unfold in unsatisfactory ways, so too we have found that our students are increasingly keen to use their degrees to try to make a difference. Engaging with contemporary issues such as current wars, the climate crisis, flows of migration, and shifting identities and rights is not purely the purview of social scientists and engineers. The humanities, in particular history, have a lot to offer in the pursuit of solutions. So, this course captures our shared desire to utilise history to intervene and effect change.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you have any further questions about the degree course, please feel free to contact me. (c.fuller@soton.ac.uk<\/a>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/code><\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
On 6 January 2020, protestors stormed the Capitol in Washington, DC. As an American citizen watching from afar, I felt powerless to do anything about the rending of the American body politic that was occurring. A year after these events however, as Congress began its investigation into the attempted insurrection, I was invited to submit a statement for the official …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3740,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-702","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-notes-from-the-archive","column","threecol"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9DnLX-bk","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":46,"url":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/history\/2018\/01\/31\/how-a-history-of-conquest-shapes-the-present\/","url_meta":{"origin":702,"position":0},"title":"How a History of Conquest Shapes the Present","author":"Charlotte Riley","date":"31st January 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"One of our modern history lecturers, Dr Charlotte Lydia Riley, has written a piece with Professor Gurminder K. Bhambra about the legacies of the British empire in modern British culture. What do we mean when we talk about \u201cempire\u201d? We use the narratives of imperialism to describe everything from British\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Comment and debate"","block_context":{"text":"Comment and debate","link":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/history\/category\/comment-and-debate\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/history\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/236\/2018\/01\/1705-1-Cover-web-240x300.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":873,"url":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/history\/2025\/10\/17\/dr-charlotte-riley-wins-prestigious-prize\/","url_meta":{"origin":702,"position":1},"title":"Dr Charlotte Riley Wins Prestigious Prize","author":"Craig Lambert","date":"17th October 2025","format":false,"excerpt":"History\u2019s Charlotte Lydia Riley has won a very prestigious award from the American Historical Association. The prize is for her the American edition of her book,\u00a0Imperial Island: An Alternative History of the British Empire\u00a0(Harvard University Press, 2024). The prize is the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize for an author\u2019s first book\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Notes from the archive"","block_context":{"text":"Notes from the archive","link":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/history\/category\/notes-from-the-archive\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/history\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/236\/2025\/10\/image-2.png?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":837,"url":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/history\/2025\/08\/27\/why-japanese-american-memories-of-us-internment-during-the-second-world-war-are-stirring-up-protests-in-2025-a-piece-in-the-conversation-by-dr-rachel-pistol\/","url_meta":{"origin":702,"position":2},"title":"Why Japanese American memories of US internment during the Second World War are stirring up protests in\u00a02025 (a piece in The Conversation by Dr Rachel Pistol)","author":"Craig Lambert","date":"27th August 2025","format":false,"excerpt":"The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement unit (ICE) is detaining thousands of people on orders of the Trump administration. 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