Historical geography I

Abstract

This report uses the First World War as a way to open up current debates into issues of bodies, selves, battlefields, memory and death in historical geography and beyond. Sweeping through a range of scales, from the global nature of imperialist practices to the intimate spaces of the psyche, this report highlights the contributions that historical geographers are making to these studies and the creative approaches taken. The aim is to expose the need for historical geography to engage with the darkest corners of human experience, in relation to conflict, so as to learn from the past in present insecure times.

Creative geographies and living on from breast cancer: The enlivening potential of autobiographical bricolage for an aesthetics of precarity

“…My intention here is not to open up the paper to such painful global meshworks between people and botanical material in some perverse celebratory manner, but I rather do so to engage with materiality critically (Noxolo & Preziuso, , p. 120) and thus refuse a politics of dehumanisation whereby the deaths associated with botanical and human entanglements remain concealed. Precarious minded‐bodies who “despite their best efforts, travel through the different spaces of their worlds battered, bruised and sometimes broken by the conflict they have felt and/or encountered” (McGeachan, , p. 2) are an important part of the botanical lineage that must be acknowledged. So in calling attention to the “horrors and ugliness that are often (and deliberately) hidden from view” (Tyner & Henkin, , p. 300), I am simply trying to acknowledge my multifaceted connections to the painful structures and relations of violence happening every day in many parts of the world in relation to botanical matter, forcing consideration of the politics of materiality.…”

“…In engaging with these “darkest corners of human experience” (McGeachan, , p. 1), autobiographical bricolage can start to create a conceptual language that accounts “for the vulnerable, absent, the unloved, and the (soon to be) disappeared” (Ginn et al., , p. 118), allowing us to become “less uncomfortable” with the vulnerabilities of livingdying. In providing “an opening into learning” (Rosenberg, ), this is an approach that does not avoid mortality but rather endures, works through and lives with the pain of death, grief and living on without being destroyed by it.…”

From Death in the Ice to life in the museum: Absence, affect and mystery in the Arctic

“…A specific area of empirical overlap between archaeology and historical geography has been human remains (McGeachan, 2014). Young and Light (2013) note that human remains are a physical manifestation of past lives, subject to cultural practices that are political in nature.…”

A genealogy of military geographies: Complicities, entanglements, and legacies

“…Wilson () uses letters, diaries, and memoirs to explore how British soldiers on the Western Front in WWII attempted to make sense of, or locate the war‐torn landscapes, poverty and refugees they witnessed. As McGeachan () has stated:

“[t]he sheer scale of destruction and devastation of war can never be fully accounted, but the processes of shifting through the human, material, social, political and cultural debris will continue in order to seek understanding into the lives and world that have been lost, altered, or obliterated” (p. 834).

For the historical geographer to move across scales can be a practical methodology, their archive is replete with official military documents, maps, plans, and diaries, as well as memoirs, letters, personal diaries, photographs, poems, it moves through national archives, museums, battlefields, monuments, to family attics, photo albums, heirlooms, oral histories, or things never discussed. The debris of the military archive is ripe for resisting neat narratives or contained histories; as war seeps into and bleeds out, so do its traces and narratives, and thus, for the historical geographer, moving across scales is also an ethical imperative.…”