This project was created by a group of History and Art History students who were formed together through the Student Research Portfolio.

Click here to find out more about the students behind Breaking Barriers!

As we turned out to be an all-women group of students, we all found a common interest in feminist history and intersectionality which ultimately led to our focus particularly on working-class figures from the suffragette movement.

This project largely took place in the early months of 2021 meaning that we had to work adapt and find ways to work remotely, ways we did this included:

• A collaborative workspace on OneNote
• Weekly group meetings and Bi-weekly supervised meetings to check in on everyone's progress
• Project management tools such as gantt charts
• Using online archives such as Warwick University's very own, Modern Records Centre
• Finding an online platform to present our research

As arts and humanities students, this project was a valuable insight into how to create a narrative from primary and archival research. Typically, when looking at secondary sources a story has already been presented to you by the author but when piecing together sources such as newspapers and censuses it is up to the researcher to decipher and piece together events which aren’t always that easy when you also have to assess the credibility of these sources. So although our exhibition is heavily story-telling based, we provide credible sources that have informed our narrative.