ABSTRACT
History represents time and time is present in the materials that historians use. What happens then, when we pay attention to time in the specific context of UK community-based history? As a research process, it deepens understanding of how people comprehend the past, the circumstances in which they produce or encounter history, and the extent to which different ideas about time distinguish academic from grassroots historians. It creates opportunities to mobilise different timescales, a form of agency that reminds us that histories are ‘made’ not ‘found’; grounded in specific power relationships, not neutral.
The chronological frameworks that organise historical knowledge have implications for constructing historical narrative and for addressing difficult histories. The final section of the chapter therefore offers practical suggestions for working explicitly with time, as an approach that can support complex and situated historical knowledge, and that is alert to the ethical dilemmas that arise whenever past, present, and future time collide.
