Digital History cartoon

Here's a silly video I've made for the digital history students:


DomoNation.com: digital history cartoon by knavickas


Like it? Create your own at DomoNation.com.

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radical walking and the problem of the flaneur

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On Friday 17 February, I gave the opening talk at the Radical Walking conference, part of the Radical Voices season at Senate House Library.



The audience were a good mix of academics, postgraduates and activists, including people from the Loiterers Resistance Movement group of Manchester and Croydon Modernist Society.

The speakers included the inspiring David Rosenberg of East End Walks , Michael Eades of the Bloomsbury in a Box project, and Blake Morris, discussing the Walking Library for Women project. These were the most activist and 'applied' projects of radical walking.

I and Rosenberg in particular spoke about why walking - using the eyes of history to examine the traces and parallels in the past - is an activist practice, and one connected directly with politically activist histories. Morris picked up on this also, observing how when on a walk of suffragette London, his group tried to find monuments to any women en route and failed to find any.

The other speakers focus…
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I'm currently working on various seminar papers, and the mood among many historians is that we need theory back in history. James Vernon made an impassioned plea for a return to theory in his plenary lecture for the 2011 Social History Society conference. Basically his message was 'what are we afraid of?' A focus on empiricism has meant we have lost sight of the big ideas, and the big frameworks that shape history. The SHS used to have a theory strand for its conference, but we dropped it a few years ago because the number of papers offered was in decline. In response to Joyce, however, the SHS has reintroduced the 'theory and methods' strand for the next conference. Perhaps this is a sign that theory is back on the agenda.

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The latter…
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