The network will run four workshops and two history harvests between October 2019 and October 2021. More details will appear here as things develop. The current planned events are as follows:
Summer (TBC) 2022 Workshop 4
Storytelling: Intangible Inheritances (Oxford Brookes)
Stories, beliefs and values are critical to the formation of the family. This workshop explores how families transmit such intangible inheritances across generations to illuminate how and when they evolve, establish what explains their resilience, and analyse why particular stories move from the personal to public domain in autobiographies, biographies, popular histories and heritage sites
October – November 2021: Seminar Series: ‘The Books That Bring US Together’
Family bibles, scrapbook albums, recipe-books, photograph albums, ‘family books’, and similar productions bring together families across time and place to ‘do’ the work of family life. Through the shared production of identity and material happenings, these joint endeavours provide space to explore boundaries, meanings and affections of family life. Of particular significance is the role inheritance plays, since objects and the stories and emotions associated with them are transmitted through families across time and space. This is a dynamic process in which the objects are themselves undergoing change through writings and re-writings, ephemera, and collage-like additions, to reveal individual contributions to the production of family and identity.
Ninety minute online events via Zoom – registration is required and the links are below:
Friday 15 October 2021 – Seminar One: writing gender and family life. Watch the seminar.
Thursday 21 October – Seminar Two: family archives: emotional and physical displacement. Watch the seminar.
Thursday 28 October 2021 – Seminar Three: family cookbooks and recipes: emotions and identities. Watch the seminar.
Thursday 4 November 2021 – Seminar Four: familial emotions across time: bibles, religious books and quilts. Watch the seminar.
Monday 8 November 2021 – Seminar Five: scrapbooks, snapshots and albums: changing emotional meanings. Watch the seminar.
A full programme for the seminar series can be found here.
For any queries with registration, please contact inheritingfamily@brookes.ac.uk.