What We Stand For
People, the Past, and Public Life
PublicPast is an international, interdisciplinary scholarly journal dedicated to exploring the relationships between people, the past, and public life. It provides a platform for research that places ordinary people, their experiences, knowledge, memories, labour, and collective actions at the centre of historical inquiry and public understanding. The journal approaches history not merely as the study of political institutions, prominent individuals, major events, or established centres of power, but as a dynamic process shaped by the participation, struggles, choices, and everyday lives of people and communities.
PublicPast recognises that history is present in the ways people work, migrate, organise, remember, communicate, create, resist, and adapt to changing circumstances. The experiences of workers, farmers, migrants, women, marginalised communities, families, and other social groups are essential to understanding how societies develop and transform. Their contributions may not always occupy a prominent place in conventional historical narratives, yet they are fundamental to the making of economic systems, cultural practices, political movements, social institutions, and collective identities.
The journal seeks to broaden the ways history is researched, interpreted, communicated, and understood. It encourages scholarship that brings historical knowledge into meaningful conversation with public life, connecting academic inquiry with the experiences and concerns of people beyond the university. Its geographical and chronological scope is not restricted to any particular continent, region, country, or historical period.
To learn more about the journal, its publisher and its editor, visit our About page.
Our Aims
What the Journal Seeks to Do
PublicPast aims to make historical scholarship more attentive to the people whose lives and actions shape the world around them. It seeks to encourage research that investigates not only what happened in the past, but also how people experienced historical change, participated in it, responded to it, and gave meaning to it. The journal is guided by the following aims.
Placing ordinary people at the centre of historical inquiry
PublicPast encourages scholarship that examines the lives, experiences, knowledge, and contributions of ordinary people. It recognises individuals and communities as active participants in historical processes rather than merely as recipients of decisions made by political authorities, economic institutions, or other centres of power.
Connecting history with public life
The journal seeks to demonstrate the relevance of historical inquiry to the social, cultural, economic, and political realities that shape people's lives. It welcomes research that illuminates the historical dimensions of public concerns and explains how contemporary societies have been formed through accumulated experiences, struggles, relationships, and transformations.
Broadening historical narratives
PublicPast encourages research that examines experiences and perspectives overlooked, marginalised, or insufficiently represented in established historical accounts. It is interested in the histories of communities, occupations, social groups, and everyday practices, as well as in the ways power, inequality, and social institutions influence whose experiences are remembered and whose are excluded.
Encouraging interdisciplinary scholarship
The study of public life cannot be confined to a single academic discipline. PublicPast welcomes contributions that bring historical inquiry into dialogue with sociology, anthropology, archaeology, economics, political science, geography, literature, cultural studies, and other relevant fields. Interdisciplinary approaches are particularly valuable when they deepen our understanding of people's experiences and their role in shaping society.
Making scholarly knowledge accessible
PublicPast aims to communicate rigorous research to readers both within and beyond academic institutions. It encourages clear, engaging, and precise writing that makes complex arguments understandable without compromising analytical depth, evidentiary standards, or scholarly integrity. The journal views accessibility not as a reduction of academic standards, but as an essential part of communicating knowledge and encouraging wider engagement with research.
Encouraging critical engagement with the past and its meanings
The journal recognises that the past is continually interpreted, remembered, represented, and contested in public life. It encourages scholarship examining how historical knowledge is produced and circulated, how communities engage with their pasts, and how historical narratives influence identity, belonging, public debate, and social understanding.
Scope of the Journal
What PublicPast Welcomes
PublicPast welcomes original research, critical interpretations, and scholarly contributions that examine the relationships between people, historical processes, and public life. Its scope extends across historical periods, geographical contexts, and disciplinary boundaries. The following areas illustrate the journal's interests and are not intended to constitute an exhaustive or restrictive list.
People, Everyday Life, and Social Experience
Research on everyday practices, family and community life, work, education, social relationships, popular customs, and the lived experiences of individuals and groups. The journal is particularly interested in how ordinary activities and experiences contribute to wider historical and social transformations.
Migration, Mobility, and Labour
Studies of migration, displacement, labour, diaspora, occupational communities, and changing patterns of mobility. Contributions may examine how migrants and workers shape economies, transform communities, maintain social relationships across geographical boundaries, and influence cultural practices and public life.
Gender, Caste, Class, and Social Relations
Research examining gender relations, caste, class, social inequalities, marginalisation, and changing patterns of social organisation. The journal welcomes studies of how individuals and communities experience, negotiate, challenge, and reproduce social structures across different historical and geographical contexts.
Economy, Work, and Community Transformation
Studies of economic change that place people and their activities at the centre of analysis. These may include labour and livelihoods, remittances, informal economies, agricultural communities, trade, local markets, industrialisation, and the social consequences of economic development. PublicPast is interested in how people contribute to economic transformations and how those transformations reshape everyday life.
Public Memory, Identity, and Historical Consciousness
Research on collective memory, historical consciousness, community identities, oral traditions, commemorations, contested pasts, and the public interpretation of historical events. Contributions may explore how societies remember, reinterpret, preserve, or forget particular experiences and how these processes influence present-day relationships and identities.
Politics, Citizenship, and Collective Action
Studies of social movements, popular participation, protest, community organisation, citizenship, political engagement, and the relationship between people and institutions. The journal welcomes research that examines how individuals and groups influence political processes, challenge established arrangements, and participate in shaping public life.
Culture, Literature, Media, and Representation
Research examining literature, cinema, visual culture, popular media, performance, and other forms of cultural expression as sources and sites of historical meaning. The journal is interested in how cultural practices represent ordinary people, communicate historical experiences, and influence public understandings of society and the past.
Archaeology, Heritage, and Material Culture
Studies of archaeological evidence, monuments, museums, archives, historical landscapes, material culture, and heritage practices. PublicPast welcomes research that examines how people create, use, interpret, preserve, contest, and transform relationships with material remains and inherited cultural environments. It particularly encourages approaches that consider community participation, public access, and the social significance of heritage.
Education, Knowledge, and Public Understanding
Research on historical education, public communication, knowledge production, community learning, and the circulation of ideas. Contributions may examine how historical and social knowledge is produced, taught, shared, interpreted, and used by different publics.
Digital Public Life and Contemporary Historical Questions
Studies of digital platforms, online communities, public narratives, and changing forms of communication where these illuminate historical processes or the public interpretation of the past. The journal also welcomes historically informed investigations of contemporary issues when they demonstrate a clear connection to the journal's broader concerns.
These areas may overlap. PublicPast encourages contributions that cross conventional disciplinary boundaries when doing so provides a richer understanding of people's lives, historical experiences, and participation in society.
Our Approach
Our Approach to Scholarship
PublicPast values scholarship that combines a clearly defined research question with rigorous evidence, critical analysis, and an identifiable contribution to knowledge. It welcomes diverse methodologies, including archival research, oral history, ethnography, archaeological investigation, quantitative analysis, comparative research, and interdisciplinary approaches, where appropriate to the subject under investigation.
The journal does not require every contribution to focus exclusively on ordinary people, nor does it exclude the study of institutions, political authorities, influential individuals, or structures of power. Rather, it encourages authors to consider how these subjects relate to people's experiences, agency, participation, and everyday realities.
A central consideration is the relationship between the subject of a submission and the public-centred concerns of the journal. Merely mentioning a community or referring to public relevance is not sufficient. Contributions should demonstrate how their research helps readers understand people's lives, their participation in historical processes, the social significance of the past, or the ways knowledge about history and society is produced and understood.
PublicPast welcomes scholarship from established researchers, early-career academics, and scholars working across disciplines and geographical contexts. All submissions are expected to meet the journal's standards of originality, research integrity, evidentiary support, and scholarly quality. Article types, word limits, citation style, and the peer review process are set out in our Submission Guidelines.
For Readers and Authors
Scholarship for a Wider Public
PublicPast believes that historical knowledge should not remain confined to academic institutions or specialised scholarly conversations. Research can contribute to a broader understanding of society when it is communicated clearly, engages meaningfully with people's experiences, and demonstrates why its findings matter.
The journal therefore encourages authors to write in a manner that is accessible to informed readers from different backgrounds. Unnecessary jargon, unexplained specialist terminology, and unnecessarily complicated prose should not obscure the significance of research. Accessibility, however, does not mean sacrificing complexity, critical interpretation, or scholarly precision. It means presenting well-supported arguments in ways that invite readers to engage with them.
Through this approach, PublicPast seeks to foster a scholarly space in which rigorous research and public understanding reinforce one another.
At its core, PublicPast understands ordinary people not simply as witnesses to history, but as participants in its making. Their labour sustains economies, their movements transform societies, their memories shape collective identities, and their actions influence the institutions and cultural practices through which public life unfolds. By bringing these experiences into scholarly discussion, the journal aims to expand our understanding of the past and its continuing significance for the present.
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