Tag Archives: History Classics and Archaeology

The past in the present at international meeting on ancient and medieval Telangana

Dr Rebecca Darley, a lecturer in medieval history from the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology reviews an international conference on the history of Telangana in Hyderabad, India.

In January 2018, researchers from across the world met in Hyderabad, India for the second international congress uncovering the history of ancient and medieval Telangana. The first, held in 2017, had been inaugurated only three years after Telangana became India’s newest federal state and the first new state to be created since India’s independence in 1947.

Though Telangana is administratively a very new state, its claims to an independent identity are rooted in the antiquity and uniqueness of its culture. These conferences, hosted by the Telangana State Department for Archaeology and Museums, now re-named Heritage Telangana, were therefore aimed at bringing together researchers and the public to celebrate and uncover this past. In particular, the focus on the ancient and medieval periods was intended to provide a sense of the depth of this identity beyond the recent rhetoric of an independence campaign which was, for obvious reasons, rooted in modern grievances and modern decisions about how to establish the states of India.

I was very fortunate to have been at the 2017 gathering as well and it was great to meet new people, see old faces and to be back in one of my favourite cities in the world. My own research focuses on discoveries of Byzantine and Roman coins, minted in the Mediterranean region, but exported to south India in the first seven centuries AD. The State Archaeology Museum in Hyderabad has one of the largest collections of these coin finds in India and many were discovered within what is now Telangana. This was the challenge I had set myself; to interpret these ancient finds through the lens of the modern boundaries of Telangana State.

Mine was the first paper after the elaborate and extremely enjoyable opening ceremonies, and it received a very good response. It was a particular honour to be on a panel with P. V. Radhakrishnan and T. Satyamurthy, both senior scholars whose work I have used and admired for many years.

Being the first paper also meant that I was then free to enjoy the rest of the conference – two days of papers and cultural performances. Director of Heritage Telangana, Smt. N. R. Visalatchy has made it her mission in this post not just to raise the profile of cultural heritage in Telangana, but also to expand its definition, and so academic papers were combined with demonstrations of classical dance and folk musical performance. The range and standard of papers was wonderful, as was the public interest shown in the conference. It would be fair to say that academic conferences in the UK rarely attract a substantial public audience, even when they are open and advertised. By contrast, in both 2017 and 2018, the international meetings on Telangana heritage filled an auditorium with a crowd including journalists, members of learned societies, local history enthusiasts, writers and teachers, as well as archaeologists, academics and heritage workers.

Heritage institutions in India, as in the UK, often have to struggle with budgetary constraints, maintenance of buildings which are themselves heritage structures and recording and cataloguing ever-growing collections. The support given by Telangana State to these conferences is, therefore, most welcome and was an opportunity also to see some of the success stories as excavators reported on ongoing archaeological excavations and developing projects.

Hopefully, there will be a chance to meet again in Hyderabad for the third international conference on Telangana Heritage. My own research, in part as a result of this paper, has raised a wealth of new questions about how Roman and Byzantine coin evidence can reveal social practices and state structures in inland India. There remains much more to say and to discover.

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Education Activism Ethics: histories, strategies, economies

This post was contributed by Dr Nick Beech, Ian Gwinn and Calum Wright – members of the Raphael Samuel History Centre.

On 30 June – 3 July 2016, the Centre will commemorate the 20th anniversary of the death of the socialist historian Raphael Samuel, along with the fortieth anniversary of the journal he helped to found (History Workshop Journal), with the Radical Histories Conference.

Read other blogs about the conference here and here

RSHC-logo-long

A strand within the larger conference has been co-convened under the working title of Education Activism Ethics, concentrating on Raphael Samuel’s legacy of ‘history from below’. The aim is to consider the complex relationships operating between academic and ‘extra-academic’ historical research. A key question raised by the strand concerns the present possibilities and limits of working ‘extra-institutionally’ in political, economic, and ethical terms.

Though the strand includes formal academic paper panels, many of the sessions consist of workshops, roundtables, and other discursive formats. The aim of the strand is to consolidate perspectives on working practical strategies and tactics towards autonomous and self-managed education.

Education Activism Ethics explores ways of doing history which move beyond the confines of the academy and engage wider public audiences, and the challenges such approaches entail both in practical and theoretical terms. Guided walks, social media and blogging; free education, social art, DIY practices, and direct political action offer ways for the radical historian to promote forgotten or marginalised histories and to bring these stories to new audiences. But these practices and modes operate within specific conditions and face particular problems. What are the possibilities opened by history beyond the academy? What ethical conditions are negotiated? What politics are constituted? What economies are required?

Historical Research and Dissemination

Some of the contributions in the strand focus on specific historical research approaches, tools and media. On Friday, we have a panel (titled ‘Labour, Class, Community’) providing readings of history that have been produced from historians working closely with communities and social formations in their localities and conditions. On the other hand, a group of historians (Catherine Fletcher, Laura Sangha, and Brodie Waddell) will present different their different perspectives at the ‘Politics of Doing History Online’ roundtable on Sunday morning, examining the specific possibilities (and present limitations) of conducting internet research and dissemination.

These sessions, we hope, will not only introduce us to specific, unique, histories, but raise questions about the contributions that history can make to public consciousness and empowerment. On mid-day on Saturday afternoon a discussion and debate will be held, led by Bill Schwarz, Lynne Segal, and Nick Beech, on the role history plays in public and political discourse, and how historical reason might contribute to a radical politics.

Radical Historical Practice Beyond the Academy

An important question motivating this strand of the conference is how radical history can operate beyond the academic institution. We are excited that a number of different research groups, reflecting a range of constituencies, have responded to our call in this regard. On Saturday afternoon, the People’s Histreh Notts Radical History Group will be providing a workshop ‘Loveable Luddites and Righteous Rioters – Can we be radical historians without pissing people off?’

In this workshop, participants will not only consider the deradicalisation of the past within meleorist, institutional histories, raising the question as to whether the past is pacified, but will also consider the structural conditions in which history is reproduced—the systems of funding, control of public forums, and instrumentalisation of history toward economic or political ends: People’s Histreh ask ‘how can groups and individuals engage in radical history? What is radical about radical history? The stories we investigate? The ways in which we tell them? The reasons why we tell them?’

Radical Histories conference

Radical Histories conference

On Friday morning, a number of DIY arts and cultural practitioners connected with the Limehouse Town Hall, hold a workshop examining the economic, political and ethical questions that have been raised in the project to institute a new civic space in Limehouse. As Elyssa Livergant, convener and facilitator of the workshop state: ‘[Limehouse Town Hall] a former nineteenth civic building is now occupied by a range of creative residents – arts, cultural and community producers with studios who also run varied progressive and ‘radical’ cultural and educational activities for wider communities in Limehouse, East London and beyond. [It] has been user led since 2004 under the umbrella of the charity Limehouse Town Hall Consortium Trust.

The Trust holds a lease for the building from Tower Hamlets Council. Drawing on the heritage of the Town Hall as a civic centre and one time labour history museum, we seek to draw a contemporary parallel for the buildings present use. With the input of current creative residents, Trust members and you this workshop will explore the relationship between the more recent civic history of the building and the role of the arts and culture in contemporary civic life.’

Finally, we also have a workshop, convened by Ian Gwinn, that brings together a number of representatives, from ‘Free Universities’ and other student education activists, from across the UK. Since 2010, the cuts to education funding and trebling of tuition fees have lent new urgency and impetus to the struggle to develop radical and critical alternatives to orthodox educational models. New initiatives have sprung up, advancing a very different vision of the organisation and practice of education. The idea that the purpose of education should be for emancipation and liberation, that it should be run along democratic lines, and that it should equip people with ‘really useful knowledge’, connects these initiatives to a long and rich heritage, from Owenite and Chartist ventures in the 19th Century through to second-wave feminist consciousness-raising groups in the 1970s.

In this session we will explore the kinds of principles, forms and purposes that inform current practice with contributions from members of these initiatives and others. Here a host of issues arise, carrying both practical and theoretical implications for how we go about assessing the prospects for radical and critical education today. These include the structure of pedagogical encounters (curricula, assessment, space), the resources (institutional, material, personal) upon which they depend and how they are secured and enlarged, and the process of contesting dominant conceptions of pedagogy.

There are many other sessions throughout the course of the three days of Radical Histories/Histories of Radicalism that we hope will contribute to a searching investigation on the active, educative, and ethical dimensions of ‘radicalism’ in historical practice and dissemination.

Find out more

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Radical Heritage, Art & Culture: The Work of a Thousand Different Hands

This post was contributed by Dr Claire Hayward, lecturer in History at Farnborough College of Technology, Researcher for Pride of Place and a team member of the Raphael Samuel History Centre

On 30 June – 3 July 2016, the Centre will commemorate the 20th anniversary of the death of the socialist historian Raphael Samuel, along with the fortieth anniversary of the journal he helped to found (History Workshop Journal), with the Radical Histories Conference.

RSHC-logo-long

While the main question of Raphael Samuel History Centre Radical Histories/Histories of Radicalism will be ‘what is radical history?’, the history conference and festival will also ask how heritage, art and culture can be radical. We hope that discussions will raise questions about how radical histories are shared with people from all walks of life, and how they can be made more accessible and both involve and reach radical communities.

Radical Public Histories

The RSHC is ‘devoted to encouraging the widest possible participation in historical research and debate’. The Radical Histories/Histories of Radicalism conference and festival intends to carry on this idea. The conference papers, presentations and performances given over the three-and-a-half-day event will bring histories of radicalism to a broad audience of performers, artists, students, teachers, local community members and historians.

We’ll hear from heritage practitioners, curators and artists on how to access and preserve radical histories. On Friday morning, a panel on commemorating suffrage activism in Parliament will explore radical history in Parliament, and question how we can make radical histories more visible in the present. On Saturday afternoon we’ll hear about radical archiving and archiving radical histories. On Sunday we’ll hear about radical publishing and alternative visionaries like the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift.

Participatory Events

Radical Histories conference

Radical Histories conference

Co-production and participation is at the heart of some of the scheduled events. You can join in a musical workshop and sing late nineteenth century socialist hymns for Jewish immigrant workers during Sunday’s long lunch break. You can also join in walking tours that will take you through radical histories of the East End and Hackney. Performance and art are central themes of the long weekend, and the programme promises to be both enlightening and entertaining.

Stalls, exhibitions, films and other events will take place at lunch during the long weekend. Pride of Place will be there to collect LGBTQ histories. The project is run by Historic England (previously English Heritage) and Leeds Beckett University. It is radical in multiple senses. The project collects and shares histories of radical LGBTQ lives, of radical sites such as queer squats and alternative housing. It is also a crowdsourced project that aims to collaborate with, be informed by and reach as wide an audience as possible. Radical heritage takes on many methods, and crowdsourcing is just one of them. During the lunch time sessions, you can also hear poetry readings, watch screenings and join workshops that bring to life radical voices, histories and ideas.

Revealing Radical Histories

As Raphael Samuel said, ‘history is the work of a thousand different hands’. The Radical Histories/Histories of Radicalism conference and festival aims to show how radical histories are the work of many hands, from many backgrounds, for many purposes. The organisers, speakers, contributors and audience are from a range of different backgrounds, and have a wealth of different experiences and skills. We hope this will reveal radical histories and bring to light radical ideas of how to share them through heritage, art and culture.

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