Call for Papers: For Material Histories Objects and Objectives Conference | 15-16 May 2025 at University of Brighton – deadline closes 21 March 2025
The University of Brighton’s Material History Group (MHG) welcomes participants and presenters to 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, and therefore we welcome proposals for: practical hands-on sessions, such as for example involving papercrafts, yarn arts, quilting, collage, scrapbooking, etc; presentations in the form of video essay or other creative output; more traditional conference methods, with proposals for individual presentations or panels of three or four papers.
Presentation topics may include but are not limited to:
- Guided making workshops which also explore objects’ meanings (between 45-60 mins)
- Visual analysis of objects deemed significant (historically, pedagogically, in research terms, etc)
- Synchronic or diachronic investigation of an object’s changing use and value
- Exploration of specific archives ortheories of the archive
- Creative practice pedagogies
- Consideration of objects as evidence
- Inventories of methods and theories regarding material histories or object-based research
- Object-based outputs of object-based inquiry
Please submit an abstracts of 350 words, three-five keywords and a biographical note of around 50 words to REG-Material-Histories@brighton.ac.uk. The closing date for submissions is 21 March 2025, and participants will be notified of acceptance by 4 April.
Image source: Design Archives – University of Brighton