1. Conducted extended oral history interviews (c. 2-4 hours each) with 50+ participants across Algeria and France.
2. Completed archival work: French Ministry of Education, UNESCO, libraries of the University of Algiers, Faculty of Law, Centre de Recherche en Economie Appliquée pour le Développement, the Algerian National Library and the Glycines/ Centre d’Etudes diocésain.
3. Built networks within and beyond Algeria (and including across Europe), to set, and disseminate, a research agenda for conducting research on post-independence histories, including:
• Co-organised an international conference: ‘The Algerian War of Independence: Global and Local Histories, 1954-62, and beyond’ at the University of Oxford in May 2017.
• Co-organised, with the Centre d’Etudes Maghrébines en Algérie (CEMA) and Malika Rahal, my mentor at the IHTP-CNRS, an international conference: ‘Students, universities and knowledge production in the Maghrib’, held in Oran, Algeria June/July 2018, successfully applying for $20,000 of funding from the American Institute of Maghribi Studies (AIMS). As a result of this, I have initiated a number of co-publishing opportunities with participants based in Maghribi universities. This includes a 10,000-word entry (forthcoming 2020) for the Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of African History (Oxford University Press) on ‘Women in Northern African History’ with Kmar Bendana (Université de la Manouba, Tunis) and Fadma Aït Mous (Université Hassan II, Casablanca).
• In August/September 2019, I was selected to participate in a two-week long Transregional Academy in Beirut (funded by the German Forum Transregionale Studien and the American University in Beirut) on the theme ‘Fragment–Power–Public: Narrative, Authority and Circulation in Archival Work’, within the framework of the research programme Europe in the Middle East-The Middle East (EUME). As a result of these networks developed in the course of this MSCA project, and with a view to take forward the work of the project beyond its lifetime, I am now co-organising a seminar series for 2020 on ‘A Global History of the Present Time: the 1980s in and seen from the Global South’ with EUME in Berlin and the IHTP in Paris. A key aim is to use ever-improving video conferencing technologies to enable genuinely transnational seminars, without the visa, cost or carbon footprint implications.
4. Wrote and produced a series of documentary shorts – ‘Generation independence’.
• This consists of series of 20-minute documentary portraits of men and women from across Algeria (all former students) talking about the 1960s and 1970s and notably moments in which an individual life story intersected with the processes of post-independence state-building – the construction of monuments, bringing air traffic control into Algerian hands, operating energy infrastructure.
• Uploaded on to a website and connected to social media, the documentaries seek to prompt discussion and the sharing of new testimony. All documentaries are subtitled in Arabic, English and French, seeking to foster cross-generational discussion in a context in which the older generation is much more Francophone and the younger generation much more Arabophone.
• I was able to shoot a pilot episode of the series using some of the MSCA funding for Research, Training and Networking. I then successfully secured additional funding to (a) cover the costs of professional filming and editing and (b) to pay for three young Algerian artists to produce an artistic response to the interviews (see photos for examples) via the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council impact and engagement scheme (AH/S013172/1).
5. Completed a book manuscript (currently under review) for Palgrave Macmillan on ‘The Algerian War/ Algerian Revolution’, which builds upon principles and knowledge developed in this project on writing multidirectional histories which bring the macro and mic
