Optimizing My Project Outline

Coming back to the outline for my current project. Seen with some distance after a first inquiry into primary sources and many discussions I am considerably optimizing the outline. I was troubled, because many people told me that surface mining was not “sexy”. Well, it isn’t necessarily. But if you are intrigued by the relation between practices and materiality it is just a great example to highlight the many facets of that relationship. Therefore, I am repackaging my project - it works quite well so far.

Landesarchiv NRW Pt. II

After three days in the Landesarchiv NRW I feel like I got a good first glimpse at the work to come. It is really possible to read documents on surface mining and quarries in order to find hints at practices in their relation to materiality. It is still a bit of a hodgepodge with a lot of arbitrary discoveries, but I am sure that over time I will be able to agglomerate so many bits and pieces that a well rounded picture will emerge. Still, a lot of work ahead…

Landesarchiv NRW

I am again probing into archives for my new project for a couple of days. This time I spend the short week in the Landesarchiv NRW in Düsseldorf. After a long time, I have to read 19th century handwriting again. It takes a while to get used to it again but my ability to read it clearly improved over the 6 hours I tried deciphering correspondence about quarries. I am quite happy with what I found so far. It seems like materiality, the link I am interested in, was very much absent in the correspondence but very present in the logic of problems and solutions devised. There is always this blank you can literally feel when reading the documents around which the discourse is structured.

Osborne: Security and Vitality

Todays text for our reading group at the Centre for Urban History: Thomas Osborne, Security and Vitality: Drains, Liberalism and Power in the Nineteenth Century, in: Andrew Barry et.al. eds.: Foucault and Political Reason. Liberalism, neo-liberalism and rationalities of government, 99-121.

Reading British analyses of Victorian policy really gives me a new understanding of “liberalism”. This dualism of Governmentality and Privacy permeates much of 19th century British history in a way that I had neither been familiar with in German nor in US scholarship.

Besides, Osbornes piece is great because it role played by material infrastructures in mediating between govenmentality and privacy. I love the idea explored here that sewers, as an example, established the desired public health - as a precondition for individual and social prosperity - without intervention into the private sphere through surveillance.

Getting the BIG PICTURE

The discussions at yesterdays reading group on materiality were really getting me think about the big picture again. We had been reading the introduction to David Blackbourn’s “The Conquest of Nature”. He touches on a lot of essential questions relating to why and how to engage in environmental history. Even though he only hints at many things, his book is a great point to start thinking about new and necessary research.

History and Natural Sciences

The first session of our Reading Group on “Materiality and Urban History” last night went well. For me, the discussion really showed how hard it is for historians to find a way to meaningfully relate to natural science. You can either view it from a kind of history of science perspective and highlight the natural science as a social construct - or you can take “natural laws” as a basis for historical research on environmental issues. Both points are valid - but in practice it will be hard to navigate between these two extremes which in a way are mutually exclusive.

Reading Group “Materiality”

Just talked to my PostDoc colleague Dan Horner here at the Cnetre for Urban History on initiating a small reading group on “materiality”. There are some great text out there that are worth reading. My favorite - in a way - still being Ted Schatzki’s “Nature and Technology” in the History and Theory from 2003. It has many problems, but it still is extremely inspiring. Unfortunately one of my other favorites of which at least some chapters relate to materiality, Karl Schloegel’s “Im raume lesen wir die Zeit” is only available in German. But there will be enough to  read and I am actually very excited that I don’t seem to be the only person who wants to inquire into the fild of “materiality” and find out what it has in store for historical research.