Oral history and intergenerational perspectives of the UK School Meals Service, 1950-2005
This seminar paper explores intergenerational perspectives of school meals in post-1945 Britain. It draws on a new set of oral history interviews we have conducted as part of the ESRC-funded project ‘The School Meals Service: Past, Present – and Future?’ In interviews, participants speak to the perspectives of both children and adults, as they reflect on their experiences of school food during childhood, but also on the experiences of their own children and schoolchildren more broadly over time. In this paper we reflect on some of the challenges facing historians working with accounts narrated from different perspectives across the life cycle, particularly when they are shaped by the experiences, both real and imagined, of family members and children past and present. Considering how these issues are shaping our analysis, we ask how far the experiences of school meals can transcend generations, and what this reveals about the complex interplay of memory and temporality in oral history.
Dr Isabelle Carter is an oral historian with research interests in place, inequalities and everyday life. She is currently working as a Research Associate on the ESRC-funded project 'The School Meals Service: Past, Present - and Future?'. Isabelle has published in Urban History and Oral History.
Dr Heather Ellis is a cultural historian at the University of Sheffield researching the history of education and knowledge. She is a Co-Investigator on the ESRC-funded project ‘The School Meals Service: Past, Present – and Future?’ (Grant No ES/X000737/1). She is the author of Generational Conflict and University Reform: Oxford in the Age of Revolution (Brill, 2012) and Masculinity and Science in Britain, 1831-1918 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and co-edits the journal History of Education.
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