First exercise: Leiden Univerity course on Heritage
Sunday, 1 Apr 2018, 17:31
Visible to anyone in the world
Edited by Steve Bamlett, Sunday, 1 Apr 2018, 18:02
i
First, choose a means of representing what ‘heritage’ might mean to me or My Heritage.
ii
Secondly, this medium/media with a text. It can be brief, but should
contain
1. Your thesis,
research question, or topic, shortly introduced
2. Introduction: in
what scientific/historical discourse or context are you putting this? How are you
approaching this topic? Why is it important?
3. Are there heritage
theories that you can exemplify with this heritage? Can you connect it to
discussions, e.g. among our experts or to subjects Sada Mire mentioned?
4. Conclusion:
summarize your project or discussion very shortly and re-connect it to the
research question or topic, posed in the introduction. Are there implications
for the future of this heritage?
The following piece is less an attempt to follow the prescription above but to make reflective links for my own purposes. For me, nowadays, its what I want from learning!
Steve
Like Amy Shrecker, I feel very uncomfortable with the possessive
pronoun here. What I think of as ‘heritage’ is far from singular - it covers many places, nations and cultures
even though the relationship to each is unequal and of varying quality.
Moreover they endure in ways that aren’t always all present to me
simultaneously and can appear separate from each other, or can variously
interact both positively and negatively with each other. It is as if they were
like a palimpsest of laid down experiences that can variously and in different
combinations be called into action to help me act, reflect on myself, my social
roles and my sense of what makes action or reflection meaningful. It relates to
communities whose traditions are nearly always intangible and, when tangible,
far from universal to the whole ‘community’ in which they are found. An
important sense of identity to me is my identification as a gay man and that
in itself is not represented by one kind of discourse or object-set.
(i)
I’m going to represent this sense of fluid and
amorphous heritage by an exercise I did for another course, in which I was
urged to devise a representation of my relationship to my work. That work is as
a part-time lecturer mainly operating at distance from learners in online
settings. It can be accessed here:
This page also gives
access to the analysis I used with this artefact in my Social Research module.
Here, I want to use it rather differently, so on to (ii).
Your thesis, research
question, or topic, shortly introduced
Introduction:
in what scientific/historical discourse or context are you putting this?
How are you approaching this topic? Why is it important?
Are
there heritage theories that you can exemplify with this heritage? Can you
connect it to discussions, e.g. among our experts or to subjects Sada Mire
mentioned?
Conclusion:
summarize your project or discussion very shortly and re-connect it to the
research question or topic, posed in the introduction. Are there
implications for the future of this heritage?
I chose this
collage of images representing me at work – preparing an online ‘room’ for synchronic (and recorded) teaching
purposes. I did it because it illustrates what I mean by the multiplicity and
interactivity of various images from my past and their use in the present, but
also in terms of the different kinds of space which form ‘my’ heritage. This
includes notional online cyberspace interpreted by metaphors from other spaces –
rooms, whiteboards, markers, highlighters and so on. Pictured entering an
online room to prepare it variously interacts with the solid physical room I
enter to start that work.
But that 'room' contains multimodal objects which open up
other cultural spaces and places. Either that or objects that inhabit space to change it in ways that, at some
level, I have, at some past point, desired. By saying this, for instance, I mean the
ways I have placed photographs or art by friends' children or in reproduction in certain spaces
picked with varying degrees of acknowledged intentionality.
This placing
sometimes means, as in all palimpsest structures – or archaeologies – places where
I have placed images on top of or obscuring other objects. I am very aware of
this as I look around the room now, although I’m also aware that some objects
have stayed where they are. The book combinations on the shelves has changed as
have some objects, although a poster I bought in Leningrad (before the fall of
the Soviet Union) represent Mir (peace) ironically as a young soldier holding a
wild flower in his hand and by his eyes STAYS. Its meaning has probably changed
for me a little though, although it represents a trip I made with my partner
thirty years ago, now (after legalisation in 2006) my husband, on a train-linked trip to Moscow and Leningrad.
Memories change in
ways that act like palimpsests too. The object may have had its original
meaning obscured by what now is its purpose in the present (my politics have changed somewhat as has the left (with which I still identify) in general) as if it had been
layered over by another version of itself.
To the other side
of where I sit are photos, put into one frame following the funeral of my
mother of a holiday to Blackpool as a child in the Huddersfield ‘Wakes Week’
(the common annual holiday given in working-class districts by the factories in
which my mother worked). The same shelf that holds that picture-holder allows it jostle with photographs of me (now an out gay man and somewhat then
alienated from my parents) holidaying in Tunisia as well as mementoes of past
pets (the present one – now enfeebled by arthritis can be heard climbing the
stairs to achieve some closeness she wants for reasons best known to her).
And there is also
personal and impersonal clutter – debris from the signs by which I attempt to
make room for new books to fill new learning needs by dispatching ones less
present to me through EBay at give-away prices. In this room the books are
really mixed – behind me books on online teaching and art, to my left
philosophy and classic (the latter two being in part debris from recent online
course I have studied) but which have left a nearer sense of the presence of
other parts of a heritage – of Classical Greece for instance.
Sometimes debris
from the past – a kind of unsorted waste from throughout my 64 years – also tells you a lot about what
heritage might be. Just above my comfortable line of sight are a set of ‘digital
stop-clock’ timers I used to use when I taught experimental methods in schools
for Psychology foundation courses. I notice that I look again, resolve to
recognise their total obsolescence and throw them away – but I don’t (and deep
down know I won’t) because these too are part of the heritage, serving to
remind me that I once switched from over-exclusive study of the arts alone to
sciences – and I catch sight of my model skeletons and ‘brains’ (all used in
present teaching on mental health in online synchronous & asynchronous
interactions).
It is the nature of
heritage as represented by my collage that I could go on infinitely perhaps, so
I won’t.
I have tried to
argue that cultural heritage and identity have an uneasy relationship in which
cultural objects and intangible practices often interact and sometimes don’t do
so – but lie dormant (perhaps temporally forgotten or otherwise obscured or
buried. Heritage might be called a kind of data mining.
First exercise: Leiden Univerity course on Heritage
i First, choose a means of representing what ‘heritage’ might mean to me or My Heritage.
ii Secondly, this medium/media with a text. It can be brief, but should contain
1. Your thesis, research question, or topic, shortly introduced
2. Introduction: in what scientific/historical discourse or context are you putting this? How are you approaching this topic? Why is it important?
3. Are there heritage theories that you can exemplify with this heritage? Can you connect it to discussions, e.g. among our experts or to subjects Sada Mire mentioned?
4. Conclusion: summarize your project or discussion very shortly and re-connect it to the research question or topic, posed in the introduction. Are there implications for the future of this heritage?
The following piece is less an attempt to follow the prescription above but to make reflective links for my own purposes. For me, nowadays, its what I want from learning!
Steve
Like Amy Shrecker, I feel very uncomfortable with the possessive pronoun here. What I think of as ‘heritage’ is far from singular - it covers many places, nations and cultures even though the relationship to each is unequal and of varying quality. Moreover they endure in ways that aren’t always all present to me simultaneously and can appear separate from each other, or can variously interact both positively and negatively with each other. It is as if they were like a palimpsest of laid down experiences that can variously and in different combinations be called into action to help me act, reflect on myself, my social roles and my sense of what makes action or reflection meaningful. It relates to communities whose traditions are nearly always intangible and, when tangible, far from universal to the whole ‘community’ in which they are found. An important sense of identity to me is my identification as a gay man and that in itself is not represented by one kind of discourse or object-set.
(i) I’m going to represent this sense of fluid and amorphous heritage by an exercise I did for another course, in which I was urged to devise a representation of my relationship to my work. That work is as a part-time lecturer mainly operating at distance from learners in online settings. It can be accessed here:
https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/viewpost.php?post=198558 (opens in new window)
This page also gives access to the analysis I used with this artefact in my Social Research module. Here, I want to use it rather differently, so on to (ii).
I chose this collage of images representing me at work – preparing an online ‘room’ for synchronic (and recorded) teaching purposes. I did it because it illustrates what I mean by the multiplicity and interactivity of various images from my past and their use in the present, but also in terms of the different kinds of space which form ‘my’ heritage. This includes notional online cyberspace interpreted by metaphors from other spaces – rooms, whiteboards, markers, highlighters and so on. Pictured entering an online room to prepare it variously interacts with the solid physical room I enter to start that work.
But that 'room' contains multimodal objects which open up other cultural spaces and places. Either that or objects that inhabit space to change it in ways that, at some level, I have, at some past point, desired. By saying this, for instance, I mean the ways I have placed photographs or art by friends' children or in reproduction in certain spaces picked with varying degrees of acknowledged intentionality.
This placing sometimes means, as in all palimpsest structures – or archaeologies – places where I have placed images on top of or obscuring other objects. I am very aware of this as I look around the room now, although I’m also aware that some objects have stayed where they are. The book combinations on the shelves has changed as have some objects, although a poster I bought in Leningrad (before the fall of the Soviet Union) represent Mir (peace) ironically as a young soldier holding a wild flower in his hand and by his eyes STAYS. Its meaning has probably changed for me a little though, although it represents a trip I made with my partner thirty years ago, now (after legalisation in 2006) my husband, on a train-linked trip to Moscow and Leningrad.
Memories change in ways that act like palimpsests too. The object may have had its original meaning obscured by what now is its purpose in the present (my politics have changed somewhat as has the left (with which I still identify) in general) as if it had been layered over by another version of itself.
To the other side of where I sit are photos, put into one frame following the funeral of my mother of a holiday to Blackpool as a child in the Huddersfield ‘Wakes Week’ (the common annual holiday given in working-class districts by the factories in which my mother worked). The same shelf that holds that picture-holder allows it jostle with photographs of me (now an out gay man and somewhat then alienated from my parents) holidaying in Tunisia as well as mementoes of past pets (the present one – now enfeebled by arthritis can be heard climbing the stairs to achieve some closeness she wants for reasons best known to her).
And there is also personal and impersonal clutter – debris from the signs by which I attempt to make room for new books to fill new learning needs by dispatching ones less present to me through EBay at give-away prices. In this room the books are really mixed – behind me books on online teaching and art, to my left philosophy and classic (the latter two being in part debris from recent online course I have studied) but which have left a nearer sense of the presence of other parts of a heritage – of Classical Greece for instance.
Sometimes debris from the past – a kind of unsorted waste from throughout my 64 years – also tells you a lot about what heritage might be. Just above my comfortable line of sight are a set of ‘digital stop-clock’ timers I used to use when I taught experimental methods in schools for Psychology foundation courses. I notice that I look again, resolve to recognise their total obsolescence and throw them away – but I don’t (and deep down know I won’t) because these too are part of the heritage, serving to remind me that I once switched from over-exclusive study of the arts alone to sciences – and I catch sight of my model skeletons and ‘brains’ (all used in present teaching on mental health in online synchronous & asynchronous interactions).
It is the nature of heritage as represented by my collage that I could go on infinitely perhaps, so I won’t.
I have tried to argue that cultural heritage and identity have an uneasy relationship in which cultural objects and intangible practices often interact and sometimes don’t do so – but lie dormant (perhaps temporally forgotten or otherwise obscured or buried. Heritage might be called a kind of data mining.
Well it’s a start.
Steve