Impact case study database
- Submitting institution
- University of Chester
- Unit of assessment
- 25 - Area Studies
- Summary impact type
- Societal
- Is this case study continued from a case study submitted in 2014?
- Yes
1. Summary of the impact
This project examines the legacy of colonisation on the lives of women in Francophone West Africa and traces reasons for contemporary concerns around rising poverty and falling literacy rates in the region. It conserves and publishes an important series of reports known as the Savineau archive which forms the basis of an interactive online platform www.francophoneafricaarchive.org providing resources on colonial and post-colonial history, social structures, cultural diversity and educational policies. These materials respond to a need to de-centre pedagogical practices and public perceptions of the francophone world. They have broadened the content and design of key stage 3 lessons in preparation for ‘A’ level.
2. Underpinning research
Professor Griffiths’ interdisciplinary research into Francophone Africa spans two decades. Its overarching aim is to analyse what makes such spaces politically and culturally unique within the broader context of the postcolonial French-speaking world. Her research examines rising poverty levels and falling literacy rates in Francophone West Africa and questions the underlying causes and potential opportunities to reverse these trends.
Research for the project has been conducted through a three-stage programme involving a) archival research; b) in-country fieldwork; c) data analysis.
Archival research conducted by Griffiths at the French national archives (Paris), the French colonial archives (Aix-en-Provence), the national archives of Senegal (Dakar), Gabon (Libreville) and Niger (Niamey), generated new knowledge on the policy making infrastructure and culture inherited from the French colonial administration (1895-1960) that continue to influence the development landscape in Francophone Africa today (references a, b, e).
Most notable among her archival results was the discovery of a unique set of colonial reports on the impact of colonisation on African women and families in interwar French West Africa. Published on the eve of World War II and subsequently shelved by the incoming Vichy regime, these ground-breaking reports lay unread for sixty years. Rediscovered by the chief archivist of Senegal’s National Archives at the end of the 20th century, they were reviewed by Professor Griffiths who initiated the conservation of the disintegrating archive as a photocopy and then as a digitised version of around 1000 pages of reports and correspondence. The complete archive is now accessible on the project’s digital platform www.francophoneafricaarchive.org alongside translations into English. This is the only open access digital version of the complete archive in the world.
Publications highlighting the importance of the archive to our understanding of development challenges in this region have been produced in English and French including a book-length publication of the overview report, La Famille en AOF: Condition de la Femme par Denise Savineau (reference b).
Fieldwork: In addition to testing the hypotheses generated by archival and desk research that cultural and structural constraints have crossed from colonial to postcolonial policy, the fieldwork addresses gaps in published scholarship from the global North by integrating high quality unpublished research findings from leading Africa scholars (references c and d).
Data analysis. Griffiths’ monograph Globalizing the Postcolony: gender and development in francophone Africa (output c) examines contemporary thinking around gender and development in Africa, looking specifically at how current approaches are informed by the history of gender politics in the region from pre-colonial to postcolonial times. It concludes that the efficacy of standardised, universal development policies in French West Africa is entirely dependent on the unique historical and cultural contexts in which they are implemented. In another recent article (output f) Griffiths demonstrates the potential impact of gender theory on policy-making for human development and gender justice across the former French African empire.
Reviews of publications from the project described it as a ‘triumph of detailed and sound research…impeccably reasoned and convincing…a wonderful resource for anyone interested in issues concerning gender and development (Prof. I. d’Almeida, University of Arizona), ‘timely and meticulously researched…Professor Griffiths has provided and invaluable service to policymakers and students of Francophone Africa’ (Prof P.-P. Fraiture, University of Warwick).
The research has received two AHRC awards, two Nuffield Foundation awards, two Sir Philip Reckitt travel grants and a Global Challenges Research Fund award.
3. References to the research
- Colonial Subjects: gender and race in French West Africa, International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, special double issue, 26, (11/12): 449-594.
- La Famille en AOF: Condition de la Femme par Denise Savineau. Paris : Editions l’Harmattan.
- Globalizing the Postcolony : gender and development in francophone Africa. Lanham, MD.: Lexington.
- Contesting Historical Divides in Francophone Africa. Editor. Chester: University of Chester Press.
- ‘Engendering Humanism in French West Africa: patriarchy and the paradox of empire’, International Journal of African Historical Studies, 46 (3): 353-372
- ‘Gender and Generations: exploring gender at the frontier of the colony’, Chronica Mundi, 13 (1): 155-171
4. Details of the impact
The objective of the project was to inform and shape public knowledge of the French-speaking countries of West and Central Africa (the former French African colonies) with a view to enhancing understanding of the historic challenges that stand in the way of eliminating poverty and illiteracy in the sub-regions and developing more informed and sustainable responses.
The traceable impact of the research is channelled through face-to-face events backed up by digital resources to encourage further engagement, comment and reflection on the project’s platform www.francophoneafricaarchive.org
This multi-page interactive open access site incorporates archives, data, research project summaries and findings, UK national curriculum teaching resources for presenting the French speaking world (language, history, geography), activities for younger learners and materials of interest to individuals, community groups and academic and professional associations.
Key targets for impact are:
Schools
Scholars and researchers
Civil society
Policy-makers and development professionals
Schools
To date the project has focused on providing teaching materials that meet the new curriculum requirements for AS and A level French introduced in English schools in September 2017. These require teachers to introduce students to French-speaking cultures beyond France. Teacher education events delivered in the University’s Faculty of Education and Children’s Services enabled 58 teachers and trainee teachers to explore materials on the project platform. This led to the resources being trialled and taught in French classes. Events were held in June 2017, December 2017, December 2018, July 2019 and December 2019. Participants shared lesson plans and comments on materials on designated sections of the website which was praised as ‘ very accessible’, ‘ excellent’ and another noted ‘the information will be very useful in explaining the cultural impact of France abroad and how post-imperial Africa has retained such strong ties with France’, another concluded ‘I will definitely use the context in language classes and some of the audio-visual material as a base for language teaching’.
- Scholarship and Research
The unique collection of archives on the impact of colonisation on women and families, known as the Savineau Report, is now being used around the world for teaching and research. As the archival resources on the digital platform are open access and presented in user-friendly and annotated forms, it is rare for users to contact the project director directly. However, the platform has recorded over 5000 visits to the conserved material between July 2018 and July 2019. Comments appear in the ThinkSpace from global users and researchers who do make contact include postgraduate students from Lyon 11, Harvard, Chicago and Portsmouth using the materials for their PhDs, and scholars including Marie-Paule Ha in Hong Kong University and Tony Chafer at Portsmouth integrating resources into their research and/or teaching.
Three scholarly training events about the project and the site have been delivered by the project director to the University of London PhD training series (8/12/18), the University of London Senate House Library (16/11/18) and the national institute of Modern Languages Research (7/6/17).
Participants provided feedback on the site regarding its usefulness as ‘ a wonderful resource’ highlighting the ‘usefulness of cross curricular links in teaching MFL ’. The platform was also presented to Africa scholars at Université Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar, Senegal in November 2019.
- Civil society
Impact on civil society is delivered through interactions with:
- African opinion makers (academics, writers, artists, journalists, community activists); - Audiences in the global North (UK, Europe and USA) – Civil society organisations.
Insights gained from meetings with critics, analysts and activists in four countries of Francophone West Africa over a period of 15 years have been integrated into a series of public lectures including:
2017-19 – Annual lecture delivered for the University Centre Shrewsbury public lecture series
2018 – Migration: a story of two artists Round table chair and presenter, Gallery of African Art,
London
2018 – Gendered Pasts and Gendered Futures: a French African Experience public lecture University of Arizona, USA.
Regarding civil society organisations, we aim at establishing an agreement with African Voices Forum to provide online visual and textual resources for their educational activities.
4) Policy makers and Development professionals
The project’s findings and the challenges facing gender and development in Francophone Africa were foregrounded to Ministers of State, presidential advisers, heads of government services and UN agencies and diplomatic missions in West and central French-speaking Africa over the space of forty meetings.
5. Sources to corroborate the impact
Feedback from teacher training events (30 survey responses)
The website platform has been visited 5,080 times by 1,804 visitors (highest number from USA followed by France) as of 1/07/19 https://www.francophoneafricaarchive.org/
Feedback from University Centre Shrewsbury public lectures (12 responses)
Public impact comments from 2018 Gallery of African Art event (20 responses)
Government of Mali website (screenshots)
Twitter @FArchive
Blog comments on website ThinkSpace (5 comments)
- Submitting institution
- University of Chester
- Unit of assessment
- 25 - Area Studies
- Summary impact type
- Societal
- Is this case study continued from a case study submitted in 2014?
- No
1. Summary of the impact
Public perceptions of East Germany have long been shaped by dominant tropes such as political oppression and key moments that received international coverage, such as the fall of the Berlin Wall. Dr Richard Millington’s research offers new insight into life in East Germany by exploring lesser-known historical events from the perspectives of the very people that lived through them, and through cultural representation that challenges official narratives. By disseminating his findings in public spaces, he has informed understanding of the lived reality of East Germany and, ultimately, suggests a new way of looking at an often-ignored period.
2. Underpinning research
Thirty years after East Germany’s demise, there is still a lack of nuanced understanding in the UK of the communist regime and everyday life under its rule. Ignorance of East Germany has most recently been exemplified by political and media comparisons of the UK’s Covid-19 lockdown restrictions with the repressive measures implemented by East Germany’s Ministry for State Security ( Stasi) to eliminate political opposition. Such comparisons reveal that the public narrative of East Germany in the UK is of a Big Brother-style dictatorship in which all freedom of thought and action was stifled. There was, however, much more to life in East Germany than the Stasi, the Berlin Wall and barbed wire.
Richard Millington is Senior Lecturer in German at the University of Chester where he has taught since 2014. Millington conducts research into East Germany, with the aim of developing a more nuanced understanding of the regime.
A key focus of Millington’s work has been the uprising of 17 June 1953. On this day, over 500,000 citizens demonstrated against the regime before the intervention of Soviet tanks and troops. Employing oral history and archival research, Millington examined citizens’ memories and awareness of the unrest, in opposition to official narratives. Millington shed new light on how East Germans remembered the uprising and the extent to which the dictatorship was able to shape their memories, thus drawing broader conclusions on the reach of state power. Millington has published the findings of his research. A book chapter [A] in 2011 showed that the regime convinced citizens that the uprising was a taboo and should not be spoken about. A peer-reviewed article [B] in 2013 showed that East German authors and filmmakers who depicted the uprising were able to slip details of the demonstrations past the censors and provide citizens with more information than government propaganda. A peer-reviewed article [C] in 2020 revealed how post-1990 narratives of 17 June 1953 place it within a broader German tradition of resistance to dictatorships. Millington’s most extensive exploration of the topic came in the form of his 2014 monograph State, Society and Memories of the Uprising of 17 June 1953 in the GDR [D].
Millington’s current project investigates ‘everyday crime’ in East Germany as a means of elucidating the nature and functioning of everyday life there. In March 2019, Millington was awarded a British Academy Small Research Grant for this research.
Millington has published two peer-reviewed articles on this subject. The first [E] in 2017 analysed the regime’s discourse on the phenomenon of criminality as it appeared in the print media. This article showed that the regime constructed legitimacy for its political project in citizens’ minds by claiming that only communism could keep them safe from crime. The second article [F], published in 2020, examined the regime’s official narrative of crime and found that its political interpretation of the cause of crime hindered its attempts to address the real roots of the problem.
3. References to the research
Richard Millington, ‘Remembering the uprising of 17 June 1953’, in 20 Years On: Remembering the German Democratic Republic, ed. by David Clarke and Ute Wölfel (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 157-169.
Richard Millington, ‘The Limits of Control: The “Public Discourse” about the Uprising of 17 June 1953 in Novels and Films in the German Democratic Republic’, German History 31 (2013), 42-60, https://doi.org/10.1093/gerhis/ghs122
Richard Millington, ‘The Anniversary Politics of 17 June 1953 since 1990’, German Life and Letters 73 (2020), 401-19, https://doi.org/10.1111/glal.12274
Richard Millington, State, Society and Memories of the Uprising of 17 June 1953 in the GDR (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)
Richard Millington, ‘"Crime has no chance": The Discourse of Everyday Criminality in the East German Press, 1961-1989', Central European History 50 (2017), 59-85, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008938917000036
Richard Millington, ‘State Power and ‘Everyday Criminality’ in the German Democratic Republic, 1961–1989’, German History 38, (2020), 440-60, https://doi.org/10.1093/gerhis/ghaa048
4. Details of the impact
Millington has used a variety of means to broaden the extent of his research impact to create beneficiaries beyond an academic audience.
In 2017, Millington created the EastGermanyOnline (@DDROnline) Twitter account to share research. The account has 11,306 followers. Beneficiaries include educators who employ the account as a teaching aid. One such beneficiary, a teacher of Advanced History, evidenced the nature and extent of the impact thusly: ‘I blend your tweets into my curriculum in many ways, history, economics, popular culture and sports. We use [the tweets] in our class discussion’. The account inspires learning. An MA student noted the extent of the impact: ‘I use the tweets in guiding my reading for my MA in History, from simply reading the articles/links you post, to following on from these and looking up areas of interest’. Beneficiaries also include podcast creators who cite EastGermanyOnline as a source of inspiration for content creation. The Cold War Conversations podcast (with over 200,000 downloads/month) stated ‘[@DDROnline] made me realise that there was an audience for @ColdWarPod’. Millington also uses the account to create impact amongst beneficiaries through debate. In 2019, he asked whether East Germany was just a ‘Stasiland’. 7,500 users saw the tweet and 22 engaged in the debate, interacting with other users, and enhancing their knowledge of the subject. [1].
An offshoot account, @17Juni1953live, was created in 2018 to display ‘real-time’ tweets from participants in the 1953 uprising to the account’s 950 followers. This drew on Millington’s primary research. Feedback from beneficiaries commented on the extent of the impact: ‘I hadn’t heard of this uprising before. I have been inspired to learn more about the uprising and East Germany’; ‘Your account provided details I was unaware of and encouraged me to think about the uprising in a different way’. The project led to the discovery of new photographs of the uprising. A German man saw publicity about the project and came forward with the pictures. The photographs have since been donated to a German historical foundation. Furthermore, the project inspired the Battle of Barnet committee to create similar narratives of the battle from different perspectives, in co-operation with Barnet Museum [2].
Millington has further disseminated his research via podcasts and radio programmes. In 2018, he spoke about 1953 on the Cold War Conversations podcast. This episode has been downloaded 5,300 times [3]. Beneficiaries include Dr Kelly Hignett at Leeds Beckett University who advises students to listen to this episode for her ‘Communist Eastern Europe’ undergraduate module [4]. In 2019, Millington discussed the Berlin Wall on the Australian ABC radio series ‘Rear Vision’. The series had over one million downloads in 2019 [5].
In 2018, Millington published an article in History Today (monthly circulation approx. 18,000). ‘Day of Dissent in the DDR’ was named one of the ‘Best Articles of 2018’. Dr Kelly Hignett also advises students studying Communist Eastern Europe to read this article. [6, 7]. In 2020, Millington published ‘Who’s afraid of the Stasi?’ and contributed to the column ‘Could the Soviet Union have survived?’ [8].
School pupils and the general public count amongst the beneficiaries of Millington’s impact. In 2019, he spoke to GCSE and A-Level students at The Bishops’ Blue Coat school. All pupils commented that they learned much from the talk and were inspired to find out more. The German teacher at the school also benefitted from the talk, incorporating it into his curriculum. In 2020, Millington gave two public lectures on East German nostalgia. The first - for Chester’s U3A - has been viewed 378 times and was described as ‘fascinating’ and ‘thought provoking’. The second – for Chester’s Constituency Labour Party – was attended by 20 people and has been viewed 29 times on YouTube. The majority of the feedback received demonstrated enhancement of audience knowledge and inspiration to learn more about East Germany [9].
Millington’s efforts to create and enhance understanding of life in East Germany are also evidenced by his staging of the exhibition ‘Totally East: Life in East Germany’, held at the University of Chester in 2018. Created by the Foundation for the Study of the Communist Dictatorship in East Germany, it presented photographs of everyday life in East Germany. Visitors also gained additional insight into this subject thanks to Millington’s organisation of a display of East German vehicles. The majority of the feedback showed that visitors had gained new insight into life in East Germany and changed their views of what it had been like [10].
5. Sources to corroborate the impact
EastGermanyOnline: https://twitter.com/DDROnline; correspondence with followers.
Volksaufstand des 17. Juni 1953: live: https://twitter.com/17Juni1953live; https://17juni1953live.wordpress.com; correspondence with followers.
Cold War Conversations: https://coldwarconversations.wordpress.com/episode6/; correspondence with @ColdWarPod
Correspondence with a History Lecturer, Leeds Beckett University
‘Rear Vision: The Making and Breaking of the Berlin Wall’, https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/rearvision/richard-millington/11645924 ; correspondence with ‘Rear Vision’ producer.
‘Day of Dissent in the DDR’, History Today, https://www.historytoday.com/archive/feature/day-dissent-ddr
History Today ‘Best article’ list: https://www.historytoday.com/history-matters/best-articles-2018
‘Who’s afraid of the Stasi?’, History Today, https://www.historytoday.com/archive/behind-times/who%E2%80%99s-afraid-stasi#:~:text=The%20sinister%20reach%20of%20East,Stasi%20is%20still%20with%20us; ‘Could the Soviet Union have survived?’, History Today, https://www.historytoday.com/archive/head-head/could-soviet-union-have-survived
‘Ostalgie’, For the Many Mondays: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5q_UYuNuyHY
‘Totally East: Life in East Germany’ exhibition: https://www1.chester.ac.uk/news/east-german-life-in-focus-photographic-exhibition
- Exhibition visitors book.