The Living Histories section of the Arts Media and Culture program of FASoS invites you to:
The Walking Seminar: Living histories in emergent Anthropocene landscapes
Lecture by A/Prof Nick Shepherd, Aarhus University
Wednesday 4 October 2023, 15:30-17h
The last few years has seen an uptick in walking-based projects in a number of academic disciplines and fields, including anthropology, history, sociology, cultural geography, heritage studies, arts-based research projects, and the like. This talk and discussion will describe the origins and some of the conceptual thinking behind the Walking Seminar Project, begun in Cape Town in 2012 and now run as a global north/ south comparative project. Drawing inspiration from decolonial thinking and from contemporary debates around the Anthropocene it addresses the questions: What does it mean to think about the body as a kind of archive? How do we engage with notions of landscape as archive? What does it mean to engage the concatenating crises of the climate emergency from within the ‘white cube’ of the seminar room? How does the practice of walking open out to different—perhaps more implicated—understandings of research and the process of knowledge production.
A/Prof Nick Shepherd is a researcher based at Aarhus University (Denmark) and the University of Pretoria (South Africa). Trained as an archaeologist, part of his work is on histories of practice in African archaeology, thinking from a specifically decolonial perspective. More recently he has been working on climate emergency issues and the politics and poetics of water, working from a critical heritage studies perspective. Here’s a link to his most recent publication.
Wednesday 4 October 2023, 15.30-17h,
Spiegelzaal, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences,
Maastricht University, Grote Gracht 90-92,
Maastricht (ask for directions at the reception.)
AMC’s Living Histories section focuses on knowledge of the material and immaterial traces of the past in the present and how it can help us tackle present and future societal challenges. Living Histories refers to the analysis of how representations of history are produced and contested in the public domain. AMC research contributes to making history available and relevant today by focusing on issues related to heritage formation and conservation. We have special expertise in the theory and ethics of the conservation of contemporary art, the role of monuments and buildings in memorial practices, cultural landscapes as heritage, and cultural education through participation.
