Conor Kilroy
When I began my Experiential Learning internship at Deindustrialization and the Politics of Our Time (DePOT), I was unsure how the historical knowledge I gathered in the classroom could be applied to a job. However, the abilities I had honed by learning, reading, and writing history turned out to be extremely useful in the workplace. From the attention to detail that must be applied when drafting lengthy papers and bibliographies to the assiduousness practiced during research, the skills to become a successful historian are the same skills that are instrumental within the workforce.
My responsibilities at DePOT mainly concerned public engagement with the historical narrative of deindustrialization. As such, I drafted newsletters, maintained and curated DePOT’s social media presence as well as its website (deindustrialization.org), and assisted in coordinating roundtable discussions between historians and the public. Though there were times when I felt unsure about how to do the tasks assigned to me, I felt assured that I would be able to accomplish my goals thanks to the skills that allowed me to prosper as a history student. Additionally, my supervisor and Associate Director of DePOT, Lauren Laframboise, was an incredibly kind and dedicated manager that patiently answered all my questions but, more importantly, gave me the space and agency to flourish as a communications coordinator.
Admittedly, I knew little about tweeting, website designing, and newsletter compiling; and the prospect of doing all three seemed somewhat daunting. Yet, my love for history and narrative – how it is crafted, disseminated, and entrenched – gave me the wherewithal to understand and embrace the importance of communications work, particularly within history. There is, at times, an unfortunate distance between academic history and how the public remembers historical events due to the latter often disagreeing with or feeling overwhelmed by the former’s academic nature. However, DePOT’s goal is to examine the historical roots of deindustrialization through lived experience and a comparative perspective. By examining the historical causes of, responses to, and effects created by deindustrialization, DePOT manages to bring both the academy and public together by using an approach that is dynamic and consensus-based instead of oppositional and exclusivist. I believe that in some small way, I was encouraging debate between public and academic research, not to provoke but to complexify historical narratives that embraced the grey areas between memory and official histories. In so doing, the challenges that I faced, particularly my angst when it came to making public tweets or newsletters that I had a hand in writing, were overcome by the feeling of purpose I felt in helping bridge public and academic discourse.
Like any story, history faces interpretation and argumentation. My greatest “Aha!” moment was when I understood the necessity of communicating Public History as a means to foment discussion. Instead of working to discourage debate, as a communications coordinator, I worked to bring people from all backgrounds to participate and become agential actors of their histories through roundtable discussions and engagement. History became a forum wherein, to highlight its richness, there needed to be compromise, contestation, and dignity instead of uniformity, passivity, and elitism. Instead of deferring to the formal institutions of history and the hallmarks of the historian’s craft, like the archive, DePOT’s mandate and my goal to communicate centred around how to best situate regional and local experiences of historical phenomena within a larger framework, like deindustrialization. Oral history and public memory are ancillary devices to official histories, and we attempted to communicate how all three diverged, agreed, and, more importantly, what steps were necessary to find a consensus amongst them that nurtured further research.
To any student or faculty member that might be interested in such an experience, I would say that the skills I have developed during my time at DePOT and through Experiential Learning have given me practical and useful insights into the world of communications. If I had to use one word to describe what familiarizing myself with communications tools and navigating the workforce has given me, I would have to say that this process has given me confidence. I am confident that breaking out of my comfort zone and being vulnerable is not terrifying. It is exciting, especially when I am overcoming obstacles and learning invaluable skills. Furthermore, I am confident that my experience has made me a better communicator, not just of history, but of my abilities, inabilities, and knowing when to ask for help from others. My time at DePOT was fantastic not because it was familiar work but precisely because it was all so unfamiliar and challenging, albeit in an environment where help was always available.
This article was written by Conor Kilroy and edited by Juan Espana.
