Juliane Tomann (Public History, Univ. Regensburg) and Karin Reichenbach (Leibniz-Institute for History and Culture of Eastern Europe – GWZO) (Web) // (PDF)

Time: 02.-03.03.2023
Venue: Leipzig
Proposals by: 15.12.2022

Whenever history – as a narrative about the past – is displayed, performed, or staged publicly, gender is performed as well. Memory studies have already acknowledged the strong intersections of memory and gender and reflected on the question of how gender shapes memory (Penkwitt and Moos 2007; Paletschek and Schraut 2008; Reading 2016; Altınay et al 2019). Studies in the broad field of public history have thus far largely focused on institutions like museums and historic sites and have analyzed the ways in which they display and represent gender (Muttenthaler and Wonisch 2006; Spanka 2019; Vinitzky-Seroussi and Dekel, 2019). By addressing the ways we do history and the practices of reviving, restaging, recreating, citing, and emulating past events in the present, this workshop will rather shift the focus towards bottom-up or do-it-yourself, ephemeral, and performative modes of public history. It will mainly address such forms that hinge on embodiment, immersive, affective, and experiential approaches, which in turn highlight playful, corporal, multi-sensory and personal engagements with the past. Thus, the workshop focusses on constructing and creating meanings of the past that lie outside but are not unrelated to academic history and archaeology and further sheds light on the effective power history performances may have on the production of historical knowledge and on transformations of historical awareness in public audiences. Additionally, it stresses the connection of doing history and doing gender. The concept of doing gender was first established by Candace West and Don Zimmerman as early as the 1980s and emphasized the notion of gender as a routine embedded in everyday interaction (West and Zimmerman 1987). Judith Butler further stressed the performative and constructivist aspects of gender as a historical and reflexive concept (Butler 1990; 2004). Read more and source … (Web)