This article introduces a new source - student graffiti - to university historians who wantto reconstruct the cultural history of student life. It shows how students at Utrecht Universityused graffiti to construct identities for themselves and their peers. These playfulgraffiti games have two important characteristics: (1) Graffiti do not simply describe theworld; rather they actively shape reality by constructing hierarchies among groups andborders between groups. (2) Graffiti are materialsemiotic writing practices, in whichmeaning is communicated through texts, images and symbols, as well as through writingmaterials, colours and the physical surface on which the texts or drawings are scribbled.University historians who want to use student graffiti should take these performative andmaterial aspects into account.
The Birth of Sustainable Development: Towards a History of SustainabilitySustainable development is one of the key political issues on the international agenda. The concept emerged in the 1970s and was shaped by nature conservation experts who worked for international organisations like IUCN and UNESCO. These experts developed and introduced three influential albeit different interpretations of sustainability ‐ focusing on the preservation of ecosystems, social equity and participation, and the conservation of biodiversity. In the 1980s and 1990s, these competing definitions struggled for hegemony and, in due course, all found their way to the international agenda. This article shows that the sustainability concept as we know it today is not stable, but rather the result of a complex evolution and a decades-long struggle.
The study of history currently witnesses two markedly different material turns. Some historians are using material artefacts as alternatives to textual sources. Others draw on ‘new materialism’, a new tradition in thought that originated in the field of gender studies. Both groups are trying to move beyond the cultural turn, which has dominated the study of history since the 1980s. However, the first group merely extends the programme of the cultural turn into new domains without rejecting its methods or epistemological foundations. The latter group, on the other hand, provides a new cultural theory. This article demonstrates that the ‘new’ in new materialism is not so much an increased engagement with the material world, but rather a new conceptualization of developing theory and reading texts, which cuts through established dichotomies between matter and meaning or culture and the social. In doing so, a new materialist history can solve some of the problems associated with the cultural turn and the turn to material artefacts.
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