Research Activities
Material History: Objects and Objectives
Grand Parade, University of Brighton, 15-16 May 2025
The University of Brighton’s Material History Group invites you to participate in a conference on the topic of Objects and Objectives. The MHG is located within the University’s School of Art and Media, which has a long and esteemed history of colleagues conducting practice-as-research and research-informed teaching. The MHG builds on these foundations and is particularly interested in research that begins with and is conducted via objects and archives, whether by making, analysing, curating or teaching with them. We recognise that both the questions and answers that objects provoke as historical artifacts can be useful in furthering knowledge; as Peter N. Miller has noted,
There is more depth to the use of objects as evidence than we might think, and a more sophisticated inventory of approaches and arguments on which to draw than we might imagine. (History and Its Objects, 2017)
Of what tactics and methodologies would this ‘sophisticated inventory’ consist, and what aims or purposes occasion the use of objects – from the humble, everyday and ephemeral to the rare, costly and unique – as the foundations of ways of teaching and researching?
While much emphasis today in terms of creative pedagogy is given to the possibilities of the digital, this conference aims to look in depth at the possibilities of the analogue to this end please find below an overview of the conference along with a detailed programme of events.
Registration is £50 for waged and £20 for unwaged/student participants, and this will include all conference materials plus refreshments at coffee and tea breaks, and lunch both days. There will also be a reception on the evening of 15 May 2025.
Should you have any queries please email. REG-Material-Histories@brighton.ac.uk
