Author:
The Grappling with Things series for this academic year was launched at Villa Salviati this week. Thanks to the new bees who came, it was great to get to know you! The team took time to explain the support and methodological guidance the working group is offering to address research issues related to visual and material historical sources. You can find a brief description and the calendar with the upcoming meetings below. We will keep this page regularly updated.
We usually gather once a month on Fridays at 16:00. It is an informal workshop designed to help EUI researchers and fellows work with material and visual sources. So if you have a source that you do not exactly know how to treat, this workshop it made for you!
You can come, bring your source, and we’ll help you grapple with it, whether an object, a piece of cloth, a series of merchandise, printed materials (from stamps to posters), all kinds of visual materials (from drawings to films), or body parts, plants and natural materials, colonial buildings, and so on. Everything is a material and visual source, potentially extremely valuable in an historical argument. You can briefly present (in 10/15min) your source to the group and then with all participants, we help you reflect on the qualities of your source and its interpretative potential.
To do so, there are different ways to make the item 'speak':
1. Describing the item and its former and present environment is usually the first step.
2. Reflecting on how you approach the source, and how the historical actors did, is a key step and more meaningful than you may suspect.
3. The item itself cannot ‘speak’ without its relation to the historical contexts it has been through. Trying to trace back the 'life' of the item, across time and place, is the third step.
4. Building on the previous steps, the final one is to challenge the item's common interpretation and significance.
All this work is teamwork, and the discussion welcomes all backgrounds, expertise and topics.
Calendar of the upcoming Grappling with Things:
December 4th, 16:00–17:30 | EUI, Villa Salviati, Sala dei Livrieri
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January ? | EUI, Villa Salviati, Sala dei Livrieri
If you would like to participate in one of the upcoming sessions, please write to:
visual-material.history@eui.eu
or contact one of us:
Lise.BernardLeterme@eui.eu, Elisabetta.Cavallin@eui.eu, Alexandre.Claude@eui.eu, Solveig.VanniezSalvesen@eui.eu, Laura.GarciaGascon@eui.eu, Veerle.Veerbeek@eui.eu.