The community history hub is a new endeavour for the Faculty of History, and began with the appointment of Dr Priya Atwal as the Faculty’s first Community History Fellow in 2020. But community history is not, of course, a new area of study. There are many community history groups in the city and county, and we are proud to be working with and learning from them.

We are delighted that our first partnerships were with the Afrikan Caribbean Kultral Heritage Initiative, Everyday Muslim, and the Museum of Oxford – we look forward to collaborating with many more partners in future as the work of our hub grows. We are also grateful to the local colleagues, students, faculty members, and alumni who have supported the initiative, many of whom have already been involved in community history work.

We are committed to forging mutually beneficial partnerships, and to that end we will follow the principles of Common Cause (www.commoncauseresearch.com), in particular: partnerships must strengthen community projects; they must be reciprocal and involve fair knowledge exchange; the time and expenses of community partners must be fairly paid for; there must be transparency about the grounds on which partnering relationships are entered into, and there must be a commitment to sustainability and legacy.

We very much hope that this community history initiative will provide new ways of understanding history, and also new ways of doing history – in partnership, with community historians setting the research agendas.