Hosted by the Raphael Samuel History Centre
When?: 3.00 – 4.00pm, Wednesday 16th October 2019
Where?: Birkbeck University of London, Dreyfus Room, 28 Russell Square, London WC1B 5DQ
All welcome, no need to book.
This workshop features talks by two early career researchers, Peter Jones and Charlie Taverner, whose own work demonstrates the value of radical walking for understanding place and locality from the point of view of ordinary people (women, the poor, vagrants and street traders). Their papers will address problems and affordances of walking methods that seek to recover lived experience of the past from places where material remnants and human memories have been eradicated. Through the pragmatic consideration of the planning and execution of radical walks, the intention is to spark conversations about an agenda for active engagement with place and locality, which is embedded within the praxis of historical research.
How can walking productively inform the work of historical scholarship? Can the modes of investigation employed in research-led walks advance our understanding of human and non-human processes in the landscape and generate alternative histories that challenge the rigid itineraries of historical scholarship?
Peter Jones will be speaking on ‘Hugging the Pavementless Roadside’: Precarious Lives and the ‘Taskscape’ of Radical Walking. Peter is Assistant Lecturer in Cultures of London at the New College of the Humanities and until recently was Early Career Lecturer in Urban History at the Institute of Historical Research. This experience across literary studies and historical research translates into his work as Editorial Fellow at History Workshop Online and as Vice-President of the Literary London Society. Peter co-ordinated ‘Stray Voices’, a School of Advanced Study-funded research network which explored the unsettled history of homelessness: https://strayvoices.blogs.sas.ac.uk/
Charlie Taverner will be speaking on ‘Eating, walking and talking: how historians experience the pre-industrial city’. Charlie is a social historian of food and cities. He recently submitted a PhD thesis on early modern street sellers at Birkbeck, University of London. Currently he is the Economic History Society‘s Anniversary Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research. Previously he worked as a journalist, specialising in business and agriculture.
