Affective History, Working-Class Communities and Self-Determination

Using a concept of affective history, this paper explores the common creation of everyday being-ness, producing common meanings that may have existed and been passed down over hundreds of years. Indeed, some of those meanings clearly become potent symbols binding us together. Thus, common meanings, held for many hundreds of years can have an effect in relation to the construction of communal beingness in the present. Applying this approach to research in working-class communities with a history of suffering or displacement, often understood by agencies as ‘hard to reach’, demands that we take a creative approach to research. Methodologically, this work came out of listening to a fragmentary history of movement and exclusion that emerged out of attending to the collection of often small, anecdotal, details in conversations and interviews. This approach is explored with reference to using a co-production research framework.