This thesis documents mourners’ experiences of funerals in contemporary Britain, and considers the implications of these for an understanding of funerals’ social significance. It represents the first time that experiences of these people, who attend funerals but do not contribute to their planning, have been taken into account in an analysis of funerals in contemporary Britain. The data on which the thesis draws have been generated in collaboration with the Mass-Observation Project, a long-running, large-scale qualitative writing project based at the University of Sussex. Participants in the project are self-identified ‘ordinary people’ who were asked to write in detail about the most recent funeral they had been to, as well as the best and worst they had ever attended. These data were analysed thematically. The thesis argues that the three previously identified ‘authorities’ over death and dying of religion/tradition, professional/expert, and individual/self do not fully account for mourners’ experiences of funerals. By examining the ‘doing’ and ‘displaying’ of family at funerals, the thesis demonstrates that for mourners, the family constitutes a further authority over the funeral. Among other themes, the significance of speakers at the funeral and of mourners’ own authenticity are drawn on to then argue that Davies’ theorisation of funerals as ‘words against death’ needs to take account not only of what is done at funerals but who does it; that funerals are also ‘people and their relationships against death’.

Dans le Royaume-Uni de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, malgré une économie de guerre conditionnée par la production en charbon, l’industrie houillère est le premier secteur en grève. Les 3 473 grèves minières qui éclatent entre 1940 et 1944 constituent près de la moitié des grèves britanniques. Accusés de saper l’effort national, les mineurs se heurtent aux impératifs du patriotisme et à la politique de coopération nationale des institutions syndicales. À rebours des approches hors sol des mobilisations qui ont longtemps dominé l’historiographie, nous proposons d’explorer ces grèves from below, saisies sur le vif et ancrées dans le quotidien des communautés minières. Nous nous intéressons à la manière dont le conflit entre patriotisme et justice sociale se manifeste, à la mine comme au pub. Nous proposons en outre une étude nouvelle du décret 1305 interdisant les grèves. Où observe-t-on le heurt entre les grévistes et le droit ? Comment les grévistes sont-ils jugés (ou non) ? Comment, en retour, les mineurs jugent-ils le droit, y résistent ou le contournent ? Les grèves sont donc aussi saisies comme lieu où s’éprouve l’univers normatif des acteurs, ébranlé par l’irruption de la guerre. Les principes du juste salaire, en particulier, sont à réinventer – dans les grandes vagues de grèves du printemps 1942 et de l’hiver 1944, dans la grève emblématique des mineurs de Betteshanger, comme dans les soulèvements plus méconnus des pit boys gallois. La thèse montre notamment que les bouleversements des hiérarchies de statut et de genre provoqués par le conflit jouent un rôle central dans les revendications salariales des grévistes. Elle le fait à travers une ethnographie historique qui conjugue : une revisite historienne des enquêtes de terrain entreprises par le Mass Observation durant la guerre ; une exploration de leurs conditions de production (collectif, dispositif et pratiques d’enquête) ; et un retour contemporain sur ces terrains à travers une enquête orale menée auprès de mineurs et de Bevin Boys. En cela la thèse se veut également une contribution à l’histoire du Mass Observation (1937-1949), ce singulier collectif de recherche extra-universitaire et autodidacte qui constitue un épisode négligé de l’histoire des sciences sociales britanniques. / During the Second World War, coal was essential to Britain’s war effort. Yet, in 1940-1944, the coal industry accounted for almost half of all strikes. Surprisingly, industrial relations studies have given little attention to the way ‘ordinary miners’ thought about militancy in wartime. Using thickly-textured empirical studies, this thesis unveils how these strikes were experienced and legitimized by the miners. It aims to explore these strikes from below, grounded in the daily life of mining communities. It asks: how did the conflict between patriotism and social justice express itself, both in the mine and at the pub? A central focus of the thesis is on the way the war disrupted the normative worlds and moral economy of miners on strike.A first important avenue of research is centered on Order 1305 which outlawed strikes and criminalized strikers. This thesis starts by providing a detailed analysis of the ways Order 1305 was used and of the difficulties encountered by the ministries in prosecuting strikers. Using a little-known Mass Observation survey, it then provides a reassessment of the January 1942 strike at Betteshanger Colliery, Kent, which has come to symbolize the failure of Order 1305. It then turns to another untapped source: that of the protest letters sent to the Ministry of Labour and the Home Office in the aftermath of the Betteshanger miners’ trial. This thesis then examines how the cry for fair wages became a burning issue for miners in wartime. It highlights the important role played by changing status and gender hierarchies in these claims. In this section, the thesis first turns to the 1942 strikes and to the South Wales pit boys’ strikes. It then pays particular attention to the comparisons made by striking miners with the munitions workers’ high wages. A new perspective on this issue is provided by the survey undertaken by Mass Observation in Blaina and Nantyglo, two Welsh mining towns where miners and munitions workers were close neighbours. They reveal how, within the mining communities, these claims for “fair wages” were connected to issues of consumption, morality, gender, and respectability. Finally, the thesis argues for the need to include Bevin Boys into our understanding of the 1944 Porter Award Strikes. This thesis offers a “historical ethnography”, combining the following features:: first, an analysis of Mass Observation mining surveys; second, a study of the research design and methods of these wartime surveys; third, 43 oral history interviews conducted with miners and Bevin Boys in the very mining communities studied by Mass Observation. In that sense, this thesis also contributes to the history of Mass Observation (1937-1949), which still constitutes a neglected episode in the history of British social sciences.

In 2020, several Nordic archives and museums sent out ”question lists”, questionnaires, to collect the public’s experiences of the Covid-19 pandemic. The collections resulted in an incomparable collection of contemporary cultural history about the Covid-19 pandemic. The aim of this thesis is to follow the creation of this collection. The thesis is defined through three research questions: one asking about the initial creation of the collection projects, one about the implementation, and one about what will happen to the resulting collection as an archival material. The study is based on previous research about Nordic contemporary Mass-Observation projects and question lists, as well as health narrative studies and research about Covid-19 experiences. Aspects of the previous research are used to create a theoretical framework, based around the concept of actors in accordance with Giddens structural theory (Johansson 2003:422). The three primary terms that are used in the analysis are dialogue, (immaterial) monument, and post-custodial archives, all retrieved from previous research in the field. The empirical data is collected through semi-participatory observation and documentation of the question lists, as well as interviews with responsible personnel at the institutions. The analysis is divided into three chapters, based on the three research questions. The first chapter thus concerns the initial creation of the collection projects, with regards to the design of the question lists, and the institutions’ thoughts and aims with the projects. The term dialogue is used to analyse the interaction between and within the institutions during this process. The second chapter studies the implementation of the actual project and includes an analysis of the question lists themselves as well as the digital interface through which they are made accessible to the public. Here, too, the term dialogue is used, to analyse how the answers are made in the interaction between the institutions and the public. The third chapter studies the institutions’ plans and hopes for the collected experiences, with regards to future research projects and exhibitions as well as archiving. Here, the term monument is used to illustrate the value and usage of the overall collection. Post-custodial archives are also used to highlight discussions about how digital archival collections should be archived and made accessible. The thesis closes with a final discussion chapter, which expands on the questions about what the purposes of these kinds of collections are, as well as about what role and place archiving should have in the creation and implementation of these kinds of Mass-Observation projects. This is a two years master's thesis in Archival science.