EVENT: SAM PGR Methods Programme 2024 -Next session is ‘Shaping a space of understanding’: applying Histoire Croisée methodology- Julia Winckler on Friday 17th May 2024, 4.00pm   

SAM PGR Research Culture Events- Our SAM PGR Methods Programme 2024 will continue on Friday 17th May 2024 at 4pm on:Teams ‘Group-School of Art & Media PGR Students’ Team Code: umsgg23

This talk introduces histoire croisée methodology, developed as a relational practice by Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann (2004, 2006). Julia will describe how she worked with this methodology across two recent research projects. The method provides a conceptual framework, as it is concerned with understanding cultural histories and experiences through acts of framing that ‘shape a space of understanding’ (2004: 39). Source material including photographs and written documents are explored through visual analysis, archival research, and reflective practice in order to investigate inter-crossing viewpoints (regards croisés, a sub-category of histoire croisée). By combining past and present perspectives and exploring overlapping histories and temporalities, archival material can be enriched, and a multiplicity of perspectives are brought to bear on questions of place, experience and time. One consequence of using histoire croisée to frame research is that it acknowledges plurality, intersection, and convergence in active, dynamic ways. Relationships and interactions, for example between macro and micro histories, can be investigated through one another. This process evokes and works with the past in order to create new meanings and insights in the present.

Writing sample from Lou Taylor and Julia Winckler (2024).

Image: Pearl Polly Binder 1936 by Edith Tudor Hart.

Posted on behalf of Paul Sermon – Doctoral Studies Lead, by Karen Gainsford.