"As Fifty Years ago so Today, the Uncovering of a Richer and Fuller History is Inextricably Linked to the Continuing Struggle for a Better World"

In this interview, Prof. Timothy Ashplant reflects autobiographically on the intersecting effects – on his chosen research topics, and methodological approaches – of his social location (within successive educational institutions, in a first booming and then de-industrialising Britain), his professional position (working in a Polytechnic/"New Univer-sity"), and the knowledge exchanges arising from his involvement in successive and over-lapping (formal and informal, national and then international) scholarly networks. A member of the post-war "baby-boom" generation, whose student years included the multi-ple upheavals of 1968, he became and remains a member of a political and cultural gener-ation whose concerns – a desire to democratise society and remove (multiple) social and economic inequalities – shaped the matrix within which he formulated historical questions. He traces the impact on his research themes and methods of the transitions from labour to social and cultural history; the development of interdisciplinary approaches; and a grow-ing focus on the construction of class, national and gendered subjectivities, theorised through psychoanalytic concepts and investigated through the analysis of ego-documents. He concludes by evaluating both the defeats and the achievements of his generation's am-bitions, and the continuing relevance of the questions which British social and cultural historians have explored to current crises in Britain and elsewhere in Europe.