Introducing the Team: Linda Fleming
Last to join the team, I'm a Research Associate based at the University of Glasgow and am responsible for undertaking research on pageants from Orkney to em... quite a lot further south! I came to the Redress of the Past project from another funded research programme at the University of Edinburgh that looked at the history of community policing in Scotland. Although I've ranged widely across the social and cultural history of modern Scotland over the past twelve years, my most enduring interest has been in the history of communities - of places and their peoples - and how the past informs perceptions of these in the present. I'm interested too in how attachments to the past construct shared identities at a local level. I also like a good yarn! The stories that are told about communities and by individual members about their feelings of attachment to particular places have always fascinated me. This interest started during my doctoral studies when I tried to understand why the nature of the once notorious Gorbals area of Glasgow had such a prominent part to play in popular historical accounts of immigrant Jews who settled in Glasgow, and why this oft-condemned place still loomed so large in the consciousness of the Glaswegian Jewish community many decades after dispersal from the Gorbals. Pageants are for me, a particularly vivid form of storytelling so from my first experience of looking at pageant literature I was hooked! Yet before starting on this project, I had no idea that they had once been so popular and widespread. Nor that so much effort had gone into writing and producing these events by a diverse range of people.