If you have submitted to present at Porous Archives 2, it will be added to this programme within 48 hours of your registration. Presenters can choose morsels, vignettes, or papers and these different formats are explained when you register. Please register here.
Venue: Armstrong Building Room 2.49 (provisional – exact room may change) Newcastle University.
Note: the Doreen Massey archive workshop session provisionally scheduled for 13.00 to 14.45 is in-person only and the Teams meeting will pause for this.
11:30-11:40: Welcome
11:40-12:10: The Nautical Turn: The Birth of the Renaissance as found in it’s Cartographic History and it’s Shift to a Maritime Focus. (Seb Willis, University of Hull)
Abstract: The junction between the Mediaeval and Early Modern eras has, frustratingly for some, always been divided by the Renaissance. A period often defined by humanist philosophy, classical romanticism, blossoming republics and mercantilism, the Renaissance is elusive in its origins. A stark juxtaposition between Mediaeval and Renaissance culture is found in the cartographic traditions of both. The mappamundi of mediaeval Europe, characterised by its religious allegory and moral teaching, was pushed abruptly aside by the Portolan Charts of mercantile republics. This shift in cartographic expression coincided with, and this paper will explore if it created, a changing world view that saw the sea not as a border separating the Earth from the rest of the cosmos, but as a vector of opportunity to be explored and exploited. Rejecting its capitalist resolution, this paper will lean into Edgar Zilsel’s thesis on the artisanal origins of modern science. Thus, reframing Renaissance cartography as something born from the personal relationship with, and the many knowledges of, the maritime world as held by the people living and operating upon it.)
12:10-12:30: Cruising the Cut: Lesbian histories of mobility and queer futures of boat-dwelling on the UK’s canals. (Georgia Dimdore-Miles, Royal Holloway)
Abstract: My work takes a multi-methods approach including oral history, mobile interviewing, archival work, ethnography and experimental archiving. In this vignette I will present ideas about this project’s experimental archive, a response to Cvetkovich’s (2003) call to queer historians to create “unusual archives” as “sites of recovery” to record lives that have been too fleeting, or in this case mobile, to exist within traditional collections (Lee, 2021; Orr, 2021). During ‘floating interviews’, which will take place upon queer houseboats cruising through varied landscapes, narrators will donate material culture to the projects’ community mobile archive. I coin this an ‘archive in motion’ – a portable but powerful small-scale collection of material culture that will travel with me on ethnographic fieldtrips on queer houseboats. Temporarily situating this archive on the houseboats will contribute to its unique character, the quotidien fabric of these mobile worlds will be woven into the collection; photographs, letters and licenses, flags, signs, badges and boat tools. In this watery world of flows and freedom, the ‘archive in motion’ will radically contest the archive as a static site that fixes queer identities (Lee, 2021).
12:30-13:00: Lunch and morsel (Jenny Brown, University of Glasgow: My morsel will map archival narratives that challenge a dominant contemporary interpretation of ‘The Highland Society models’. This collection of models of agricultural implements and machines in National Museums Scotland were first acquired by the Highland and Agricultural Society of Scotland from 1790 and gifted to the Museum in 1855. That association currently dominates current institutional understanding and presentation to the public. Can a visual representation of the original artisans alter this perception?
13:00-14:45: Stories-so-far: Doreen Massey archive (Ben Newman and Colin Lorne, Open University).
Abstract: during this workshop Ben and Colin will share a small collection of (scanned) materials from the Stories-so-far: Doreen Massey archive project. This is a significant privilege, and a brilliant opportunity to actively practise some of the emerging tenets of Porous Archives by directly engaging with the papers of a truly public intellectual and deeply political geographical scholar.
14:45-15:00: Refreshments and morsels.
15:00-15:30: Nuclear perpetrations in the thoughtful landscapes of Eryri National Park (Paul Wright, Newcastle University).
Abstract: National Parks are created to preserve natural, beautiful landscapes, so you probably shouldn’t build a nuclear power station in the middle of one. But starting in 1953, this actually happened, and archival holdings can offer insights into the thinking that enabled this. Damaged landscapes might be labelled as “spoiled”, “scarred” or “ruined”: the scholarly terminology is “encroachment” or “disturbance”, with “coherence” as the opposite with an understanding of landscape damage as an outgrowth of thoughtlessness, when a feature is conceived and built with scant (or no) thought to its coherence with the landscape (Davoudi and Brooks 2019, 9). Thoughtless features may end up too large, or mis-oriented, or an inappropriate shape, or texture, or colour. In short, for landscapes to fare well, additions to them need to practice a kind of mimicry – they need to adopt (to some extent) the look, scale, and orientation of the landscape receiving them. Using this definition, Trawsfynydd Nuclear Power Station may appear to be one of the UK’s more significant acts of thoughtlessness and damage. Eryri National Park – formerly Snowdonia National Park – was created in 1951 to protect the natural beauty of, and public access to, the landscapes of North Wales. Just two years later, a public enquiry concluded that a nuclear power station should be built in a relatively prominent location within Eryri, and between 1959 and 1965 the two reactor halls and ancillary buildings of Trawsfynydd Nuclear Power Station were completed. But Trawsfynydd may not actually be thoughtless – and it may provide a chance to critically rethink how landscape damage is conceived. The archived text of the public enquiry is a valuable starting point because it appears to feature care, hesitation, a degree of affection, and a particular articulation of what we now call “coherence”. Arguably the public enquiry was also wishful, and possibly naive and evasive at points, but it wasn’t simply thoughtless in landscape terms. What the archived public enquiry offers (and what this paper analyses) is an insight to the question of how landscapes can be damaged by caring hands, and additionally, to ask whether landscapes are experienced differently if people know that the damage arose from errant care, rather than thoughtlessness.
15:30-16:00: The evolution of Central Asia’s geospatial structure: interactions between nomads and sedentary populations (Qiran Song, University of Warwick)
Abstract: The evolution of Central Asia’s geospatial structure is closely associated to livelihoods, migration, trade, and political and military affairs. The South-North Tie (S-N Tie), underpinned by interactions between nomads and sedentary populations, played a significant role during the early stages of this evolution. Even as nomads gained military-political dominance, the S-N Tie fostered their trend toward sedentarisation. While the S-N Tie remained influential, the East-West Tie (E-W Tie) emerged as nomadic groups entered Central Asia in succession from the East Eurasian Steppes. The E-W Tie arose from tensions between China (Han-Di) and the steppe-forest regions of Mongolia and the watersheds of the Songhua and Liao Rivers, as well as the conflicts between Sassanian and Byzantine, demonstrating the feature that interdependent rise-and-fall dynamics among Eurasian nomadic groups and reciprocity between nomads and peasants interwove. After the 15th century, Central Asia’s geospatial structure was increasingly shaped by maritime powers, which integrated Central Asia into a new geospatial structure that the influence of the Eurasian Continent and the ocean intersected.
16:00-16:15: Refreshments and morsels.
16:15-16:45: Presentation(s) to be confirmed.
16:45-17:00: Outline of 2026 events, and close.