Abstract:The second report in this series turns to focus on the trace in relation to life-writing and biography in historical geography and beyond. Through attention to tracing journeys, located moments and listening to the presence of ghosts (Ogborn, 2005), this report seeks to highlight the range of different ways in which historical geographers have explored lives, deaths, and their transient traces through varied biographical terrains. Continuing to draw attention in historical geography to the darkest of histories… Show more
“…Walkerdine () concludes Thus, to understand the present of [post‐industrial working‐class] communities we need to understand how that affective history shapes the present and how it is also contained in layers of meaning. (p. 702)Historical geographers are well positioned to contribute to the formulation of the “affective histories” of class and should look to the recent innovations currently taking place within the sub‐discipline, as well as more widely, that seek to re‐enact and reimagine the embodied and affective experiences and existences of people, in this case working‐class people and the workplaces and communities they lived (Bender, ; McGeachan, , ). As already noted, scholars of deindustrialization have already begun to shift focus toward the embodied impacts of deindustrialization through concerns of industrial injuries and disease and often evoke the affective intensities of ruination in terms such as loss, mourning, and alienation.…”
Section: The Importance Of History and Future Directionsmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…seek to re-enact and reimagine the embodied and affective experiences and existences of people, in this case working-class people and the workplaces and communities they lived (Bender, 2010;McGeachan, 2018McGeachan, , 2017. As already noted, scholars of deindustrialization have already begun to shift focus toward the embodied impacts of deindustrialization through concerns of industrial injuries and disease and often evoke the affective intensities of ruination in terms such as loss, mourning, and alienation.…”
Section: The Importance Of History and Future Directionsmentioning
Sections of the post‐industrial working‐class have made a notable return to media and political discourses in the context of the rise of populism across Europe and the United States. These narratives, which exclude women and BAME working‐class people, suggests the (white, male) working‐class are angry and resentful of being left behind by increasingly globalized political economies, nostalgic for the industrial ordering of work, home, and community. It seems that the political and media establishment are, selectively, understanding what has long been realized by researchers of deindustrialization. In the first, this paper surveys and critiques recent discourses on the post‐industrial working‐classes. The paper then traces the development of industrial ruination as an interdisciplinary area of academic focus, highlighting the themes of memory and temporal factors that have come to dominate the literature. The next section reviews contestations surrounding the affordances of landscapes and industrial ruins for the analysis of memory and history. Finally, the paper proposes interrelated ways to advance future study which historical–cultural geographers are well placed to carry forward. Here, I call for greater attention toward the affective and embodied dimensions of classed experience and the intersectionalities of race and gender in working‐class subjectivities. Further, I suggest there is an imperative to a deeper understanding of constitutive “affective” histories to mediate enduring social inequalities and their political and socially divisive mobilizations.
“…Walkerdine () concludes Thus, to understand the present of [post‐industrial working‐class] communities we need to understand how that affective history shapes the present and how it is also contained in layers of meaning. (p. 702)Historical geographers are well positioned to contribute to the formulation of the “affective histories” of class and should look to the recent innovations currently taking place within the sub‐discipline, as well as more widely, that seek to re‐enact and reimagine the embodied and affective experiences and existences of people, in this case working‐class people and the workplaces and communities they lived (Bender, ; McGeachan, , ). As already noted, scholars of deindustrialization have already begun to shift focus toward the embodied impacts of deindustrialization through concerns of industrial injuries and disease and often evoke the affective intensities of ruination in terms such as loss, mourning, and alienation.…”
Section: The Importance Of History and Future Directionsmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…seek to re-enact and reimagine the embodied and affective experiences and existences of people, in this case working-class people and the workplaces and communities they lived (Bender, 2010;McGeachan, 2018McGeachan, , 2017. As already noted, scholars of deindustrialization have already begun to shift focus toward the embodied impacts of deindustrialization through concerns of industrial injuries and disease and often evoke the affective intensities of ruination in terms such as loss, mourning, and alienation.…”
Section: The Importance Of History and Future Directionsmentioning
Sections of the post‐industrial working‐class have made a notable return to media and political discourses in the context of the rise of populism across Europe and the United States. These narratives, which exclude women and BAME working‐class people, suggests the (white, male) working‐class are angry and resentful of being left behind by increasingly globalized political economies, nostalgic for the industrial ordering of work, home, and community. It seems that the political and media establishment are, selectively, understanding what has long been realized by researchers of deindustrialization. In the first, this paper surveys and critiques recent discourses on the post‐industrial working‐classes. The paper then traces the development of industrial ruination as an interdisciplinary area of academic focus, highlighting the themes of memory and temporal factors that have come to dominate the literature. The next section reviews contestations surrounding the affordances of landscapes and industrial ruins for the analysis of memory and history. Finally, the paper proposes interrelated ways to advance future study which historical–cultural geographers are well placed to carry forward. Here, I call for greater attention toward the affective and embodied dimensions of classed experience and the intersectionalities of race and gender in working‐class subjectivities. Further, I suggest there is an imperative to a deeper understanding of constitutive “affective” histories to mediate enduring social inequalities and their political and socially divisive mobilizations.
“…In the case of geography, that involves ‘analysing the relationship between individuals’ continually reconstituted subjectivity, the places in which they dwell, and the spaces through which they move’ (Lester , 1470). In light of calls within the discipline to write ‘life geographies’ (Daniels and Nash , 450) and to ‘cast biography in geographical terms’ (Thomas , 498), historical geographers have recently published a diverse array of biographical scholarship, thoughtfully documented in Cheryl McGeachan's () recent progress report. Much of this has developed in novel and experimental ways, ranging from more‐than‐human geographies (Forsyth ) and medical histories (Moore ) to the role of local lives in the production of geographical knowledge (Matless and Cameron ).…”
Section: Biography ‘Like a Levee’mentioning
confidence: 99%
“…If archives are spaces of a society's collective ‘memory’, so too are they sites of loss, effacement and forgetting, where some voices are silent or silenced. In attending to the incompleteness of archives, metaphors of partiality and absence have become the prevailing motif through which to frame discussions of historical research in geography; the archive is a space of ‘traces’ (McGeachan ; Ogborn ), ‘fragments’ (Till ) and ‘ghosts’ (Edensor ; Mills ).…”
Geographical scholarship has rightly problematised the act of archival research, showing how the practice of archiving is not only concerned with how a society collectively remembers, but also forgets. As such, the dominant motif for discussing historical methods in geography has been through the lens of absence: the archive is a space of ‘traces’, ‘fragments’ and ‘ghosts’. In this paper I suggest that the focus on incompleteness and partiality, while true, may also belie what many geographers working in archives find their greatest difficulty: an overwhelming volume of source materials. I reflect on my own research experiences in the pacifist archive to suggest that the growing scale and scope of many collections, along with the taxing research demands of transnational perspectives, pose immediate practical challenges for geographers characterised as much by abundance as by absence. In the second half of the paper, drawing on recent scholarship in history and geography, I argue that the method of biography offers one possible strategy for navigating archival abundance, allowing geographers to tell stories that are wider, deeper and more revealingly complex within the existing time and financial constraints of humanities research.
“…This raised questions for many academics about the politics of what gets preserved and what is left out (Hodder, ; Edensor, ) and the processes of searching and finding (Lorimer, ). Historical geographers have also engaged substantively with questions of absence in the archive and the need to work with it and/or mere traces of history (McGeachan, ; Mills, ; Ogborn, ). Duncan's () paper on emancipatory historical research was a key intervention in the corpus of historical geography method.…”
It is thirty years since the first call to engage with gender as an analytical category was made in the sub‐discipline of Historical Geography. Significant advances in scholarship have been made in this time, particularly the re‐situation of women in the history of Geography as a subject. This paper looks to the next thirty years in Historical Geography and asks how the sub‐discipline can retain and develop its critical political edge. In the 2017 Women's Marches protestors dressed as suffragettes from the early twentieth century and proclaimed that little had changed in the fight for women's rights. Taking this ‘Victorian present’ as a starting point, this paper explores ways to connect Historical Geography to the gender politics of the present. The paper argues that the sub‐discipline has the methodological tools to use the past as a form of female power to engage with the inequalities that women still face. A sketch of a feminist historical geography of the present is provided using emancipatory and participatory research tools.
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