CALL FOR PAPERS:
Materiality and the materials of research:
theory and practice in the humanities
24 June 2011 The Open University, Milton Keynes
A one-day seminar exploring current approaches to working with material culture
Proposals for 20 minute discussion papers, drawing on current research, that address questions of method and theory in relation to the study of material culture in the humanities, are invited by Friday 29 April 2011.
The status of material culture, in which we include the visual, varies between and within humanities disciplines. Literary scholars have engaged more closely with the ‘history of the book’ to co-produce new accounts of book culture that integrate or foreground aspects of the material, physical, or topographical presence of the media that supports the text.
Book historians have developed distinctions between the work (intellectual product) and the text (physical form), and art history and archaeology frame their disciplinary practice and identity in part by their distinctive material cultural repertoires. How far have other disciplines worked through the implications of materiality for their research? Away from the technical, conservation understandings of materials science, how much about the materiality of our research materials and the consequences of materiality /immateriality is ignored, undervalued, or misunderstood?
This one-day current research seminar invites contributions addressing some of the following questions:
* Archaeologists create their material data, historians go to museums and galleries: perspectives on where to start with object research
* What are the issues around questions of authenticity, copies, transfers and selective survival of material culture for humanities researchers?
* The relationship of making to materiality, historically and as a possible research tool for hands-on researchers?
* How can lost material culture be rematerialised to enhance research, rather than as a theatrical prop?
* Are the historical applications of material culture research quantitatively constrained? If so, does that matter?
Correspondence to: s.west@open.ac.uk
Seminar convenors: Dr Sara Pennell, Humanities Dept, Roehampton
University and Dr Susie West, Dept of Art History, The Open University