Portsmouth turns 100 as a city in 2026, and this PhD project will dig through local archives to find the voices that have been left out of that story—then work with community groups to turn those overlooked records into new films and soundtracks. The problem is that official archives tend to preserve the perspectives of the powerful. The records of Portsmouth’s African Women’s Forum, for example, or other marginalised groups, are often absent or silent. This project fills that gap by deliberately seeking out underrepresented material and co-creating new archival holdings with the communities themselves. If successful, the research will change what ends up in the archive—and who gets to shape the city’s public memory. The films and soundtracks produced with community groups will become permanent holdings at the Portsmouth History Centre, meaning future researchers, school groups, and residents will encounter a more complete record of the city’s first century. The project also generates methodological insights into how archives and creative practice can work together, which could influence how other cities approach their own centenary commemorations.
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This PhD generates new knowledge through a combination of archival research and practice-research co-creation with community groups to reflect on 100 years of Portsmouth’s city status in 2026. Through research of documents, images and films in the archives (Portsmouth, Hampshire, and Wessex Film and Sound archives), their curation into new films with original soundtracks made with community groups (e.g. Portsmouth’s African Women’s Forum), the project will generate new archival holdings that will address underrepresented or ‘silent’ voices within the archive. In the process, new knowledge about the meanings and representations of city status and methodological insights will be generated at the intersection of archival and practice-research methodologies. The project will benefit from and contribute to the outreach work of the Portsmouth History Centre, at the same time as contributing to a wider accessioning project. The project has been conceived collaboratively and will benefit from supervision from expert staff at the Portsmouth History Centre and at the University of Portsmouth. The knowledge generated through the hybrid archival-creative research process will be documented in a thesis that will dialogue with the films and the soundtracks produced with community groups to reflect on broader notions of cities, their representations and meanings for communities, practitioners and archives.
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