One-day Symposium | 5 June 2025 | University of Oslo
The Private Side of Politics in British History
Call for Papers, deadline – 30 April 2025
Contemporary understanding of politics is Britain is heavily shaped by notions of mass democracy and coverage of politics in the mass media, as well as attempts to make governance more transparent, such as with Freedom of Information Act 2000. Politics is therefore commonly framed as something which is or should be a public activity, and it is usually perceived as such, with political debates and campaigning being carried out openly in public, whether in Parliament, across the media, or in other public forums.
However, this conception of politics is tied closely to political, social, and media changes across the past few centuries, with older modes of politics having been much more private and opaque in nature. Moreover, many aspects of politics continue to remain confined to more private realms, whether this concerns the engagement of individual citizens with politics in their private and domestic lives, or broader dynamics of political networking, mobilisation, financing, or, indeed, corruption. Recent news stories and media and political talking points have centred on some of the private or secret aspects of political life which have been heavily criticised, such as so called ‘dark money’ which funds various think tanks, pressure groups, lobbyists and politicians, or events like the ‘Partygate’ scandal which marred Boris Johnson’s time as Prime Minister. There are also questions as to the nature of the private and public spheres in a digitized age, and how the internet has reshaped public engagement with politics – something which has echoes with earlier examples of media innovation and their impact on political activity.
This symposium aims to explore different ways the private side of politics can be conceptualized, and how historians can work to overcome the methodological difficulties inherent in analysing important topics which were kept private or secret.
We are open to papers from any time period in British history which discuss topics such as:
- The interplay between the public and the private faces of politics.
- The methodological issues inherent in exploring the private or hidden aspects of politics.
- How notions of the private and the public in politics may have evolved or persisted over time.
- Whether there any key moments of change in this dynamic.
- Whether important continuities in political behaviour be observed across the early modern period into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, or even into our own digitized age.
Please send abstracts of up to 200 words to a.m.ackerley@ilos.uio.no by 30th April.
This will be a one-day Symposium will take place on Thursday 5th June 2025 at the University of Oslo, at Niels Henrik Abel’s house. Funding to cover travel and accommodation is available for 2 postgraduate researchers or early career researchers. Please signify on your proposal if you would like to be in consideration for the funds.
Image: Wiki Commons