 Hello everyone and welcome to the third episode of our in conversation series about material methods. For anyone not yet familiar with this series, Sophie Woodward and me are co-leading the series for the National Center for Research Methods and we're inviting different colleagues in different very diverse disciplines to talk about their ways how they develop and apply material methods in their work. So today I am delighted to be hosting Leonie Hannon, who is the senior lecturer in 18th century history at Queen's University Belfast with a background working in museums and heritage. Your research mainly, Leonie, is about the practices of atypical intellectuals in the 18th century and you make a case for the home as an important material site of enquiry. So that's very interesting. I understand this is your latest book project, so could you just say a few words about the house as this kind of site for material enquiry? Yeah, thank you. Thanks very much for having me, Natasha. This is a really fascinating area of material methods and I think we'll get to a few different threads of that as we go through. Yeah, the thing I'm really working on most at the moment amongst other diverse projects is this idea of the home, the early modern home as a site of enquiry. I started off very much looking at women and women's intellectual lives and that's what led me to the home because of course they had all of their kind of learning and exploration or a lot of it would happen at home. I started to see the spaces are not one exactly of a kind of closed space of kind of work and drudgery and childcare and nothing else, but to start to think of it as a space which could allow for more interesting things. So one of the things I was really interested in thinking about is the materials and mentions of the home. Now we live in an age of hoovers and electric ovens and all sorts of technology, right? But in the early modern home, lots and lots of things were produced from scratch and so there were a series of complex material processes to produce just the basic things that the household needed to survive on whether that was bread or whether that was cheese or whether that was beer, right? And you start to get a glimpse from account books and recipe books from this period of just a huge amount of material knowledge these people have and whether that was servants or people who owned homes and organised servants work. And they had, you know, quite a decent material literacy and one that and then a lot of these processes were ones that allowed for a form of experimentation. You know, how exactly do you get the best, well, you might adjust some parts of that long process, that long material process to get there. So I suppose what I wanted to do is look at how the specific material dimensions and affordances of home actually actively encouraged intellectual inquiry in this period for people who we may not have heard of, you know, people who are not fellows of the Royal Society at this time. Yes, that is fascinating. So I'm thinking about the material culture in general and the material culture in the particular period. So how would you define material culture methods that you do perhaps, you know, in your discipline. But also I am, I do know that you see yourself as an interdisciplinary researcher and academic. So would you tell us how we, you know, how we go understand, you know, material culture methods in your view. Yes. Yeah, you're right. It's just totally interdisciplinary. So from a historian's point of view, the way that we have learned to do material culture history, we sometimes sometimes call that it's really by pulling things in from outside, right. Our discipline is incredibly, in its traditional sense, our discipline is incredibly textual. Now this isn't quite true of people who do ancient history and it's a medievalist because where the textual record gets thinner people historians have reached for objects and artifacts to try and explain the past. So for people working on the kind of period I'm in, so from the early modern period on through to the modern period, it's, it's been text, text, text and our training is incredibly textual. So we've had to look to anthropologists, archaeologists, art historians, curators, museum professionals, we've had to look to all of these people to pull in ideas about how you actually work with material culture. Within history, I would say, largely speaking, material culture history is often very textual. So questions may be driven to some extent by interest in the material world of the past. And they may use material cultures one part of many different kinds of material. But we're still often looking at the subject of materiality and material world through paper through textual sources and a lot of my work is like that. Having said that I have worked much more with kind of object analysis in very of my career, and myself and Sarah Longer wrote a book aimed at historians and students of history, trying to talk about history through material culture, acknowledging that you can do a lot of material culture history by by engaging with books and recipe books and all sorts of kind of textual sources. But you but but trying to push people to think about the intellectual benefits of direct object analysis and what that can bring to your thinking that is different from perhaps methods that we're more familiar with we're more comfortable with. So material methods for historians don't necessarily mean objects analysis, but it certainly can do. And I think increasingly that is the case or part of the picture anyway. Yes, and that is exactly what you have done so would you say that you work with so different tags and archives, but also you combine that with objects based observation or you know objects, objects based methods. What is object based methodology and also object based learning because I know, you know, in your extensive work in in museums and their collections, and you have explored objects with interdisciplinary with an interdisciplinary team. And you also have engaged in object based learning. So that's very interesting in the ceiling. Yeah, so there's two sort of wings I would say to my interest in this kind of direct objects handling one of them is object based learning, which I can explain and talk a little bit about. The other side of it is, is an approach myself and Kate Smith at the University of Birmingham took when we were both working at UCL, where we took a bunch of researchers and from a real wide range of disciplines and put them in front of objects and prioritise and emphasise that that relationship with that object. And then we work collaboratively, you know, we each had an object and we work collaboratively collaboratively together to think through material methods really and experiments and provocations around around how we how we look at objects how we can look at objects how we can learn from objects. So there are these two slightly different things but they're actually very roughly the same thing so I can give you a bit more of an idea about the object based learning if you like to start with. In some cases the basis, you know all researchers, you know we often artificially separate the idea of research and then teaching and learning. And actually of course we're all learning aren't we like researchers are just trying to learn stuff. So, so I think this is why object based learning is really at the heart of a lot of this. Now I can no longer claim to work directly on object based learning by spending a good number of years working with brilliant colleagues at UCL who are still very much at the forefront of this field. So Professor Helen Chatterjee, and also Linda Thompson who's a psychologist, Helen Chatterjee is actually a biologist and a zoologist, so she came at objects from a completely different kind of disciplinary perspective to myself. So now Thomas Cador who's an archaeologist, which again gives a different perspective on artifacts. So these guys have really pioneered the evidence base for object handling as a route to better understanding within adult learners and specifically in a higher education context. So the backdrop to this, of course, but anyone who knows about education studies that they've been actually loads of work done on active and experiential learning for school-age children right and young people and there was a real sense that these people needed it. This was very much based and linked to ideas about learning styles which have gone slightly in and out of fashion and been kind of changed over time how people think and understand learning styles. But you know this notion that not everyone learns brilliantly and it's not always a brilliant learning experience to just be told things right and then to try and absorb them. And that actually engaging your senses, engaging your own meaning making, making those connections by doing things and talking about those processes with your peers can be a much better form of learning. So ditch the lecture into the kind of workshops scenario. And we were making the case that this is very much true for adults as well as kids. And I think it's very much true of researchers as well. So with object-based learning we would often put students in front of objects. Sometimes that would have a subject link. But you know Helen had come through her training and her engagement with object-based learning came from putting her students in front of skeletons so they could understand morphology and evolution and all sorts of those concepts. And I can much more from a kind of trying to learn history through looking at heritage or historical artefacts. But we would also try and use, or when I was working around this, I would try and use unusual combinations. They put in humanity students in front of a science type of, you know, mixing things around because I also felt, and this is where there's the link to the research project that Kate and I, Kate Smith and I, and I ran called The Hundred Hours Project, that I felt that objects can be provocative, they can create unusual disjunctures in your thinking. They can create a kind of barrier sometimes and that needs, that if you bother, if you take the time to work through, you can get somewhere quite different. So my sense was that text is often linear, not linear but very narrative oriented. And then of course our whole process as academics and researchers is to write things up into a narrative, beginning and middle and an end. And, you know, Sarah Longer, who I wrote the research guide with, was very firmly, she's someone who spent a long time working in education at the British Museum, she's an academic now at Lincoln, and she firmly believed, and I agree, that objects send you out in all these different directions. So the thought of that process of turning our research into this nice narrative, they don't send you off in one direction, they send you off in ten, and those ten directions maybe completely feel very unrelated. But I think in terms of challenging yourself to think differently about a subject, they can be so powerful. And so there is this process of just meaning making for yourself through tactile and multi-sensory engagement, and so this element of provocation I think you get with objects, that is something special and can really help people really of all ages engaging with a given subject. Absolutely, and I can relate to that through my research because what I have done is the research looking at graphic methods that link to material methods, because, you know, images and graphic representations, they can capture and show different elements, you know, of the material environment, and then we can use them to inquire concepts, different concepts in different disciplines or create and create new knowledge, develop knowledge on a topic or around a particular challenge or problem when you combine methods or a methodological approach that is more textual or language-wise and more kind of material or visual. So from that experience, I do understand that, you know, learners' knowledge and I also think researchers' knowledge and understanding can be really enriched when we work in interdisciplinary groups, and also introduce, when we introduce new ways of thinking, you know, about different areas, different topics, so that is something that definitely link, you know, the materiality of the world and our everyday materiality, because, you know, you started, we said that at the beginning of the video of our conversation, that, you know, we are now in our homes, especially in the present situations, spent so much time surrounded by, you know, material objects, different, we use different things and they mediate our everyday reality, and I think that's very interesting, you know, how we relate to both built and natural environment, kind of interior design, you know, different, you know, small and big objects. So can I just ask before we wrap up, if you could give a very specific example, maybe, you know, just provide an example where you talk about the particular object and how you, you know, how you went about, you know, exploring that object, both, you know, with your team and with, you know, learners and, you know, which disciplines, you know, the learners came from when you did that work. So the most intensive best of objects analysis, in a way, was through the 100 hours project, because the process that we put people through there, there were 12 of us in total, so Kate and I led the project and we drew in 10 other researchers and there were curators, art historians, historians of science, anthropologists, artists, so we had a real range of people, right, and we, everyone chose an object from the UCL collections and I chose a plaster cast of a child's foot from the pathology collections and it showed talipers, which is, I mean, sometimes known as clubfoot, so it's a, it's a, but now there would be various operations that you could do to, to correct that, but anyways, so it's this little cast and it was a number, it was one of a number of casts in the collection of childhood pathologies and now I, the process we put people through and I went through was that we would return again and again to the object. And the idea was that we would, that as we went on, we would gain a familiarity with that object and we would, and through that insight may come now this prompted a number of sources of reflections that within the group. So I would say for, for many of us, not all of us, and for many of us, research really means extensive source based research, so we go to lots and lots of different places to try and gather this and we try and put it together to create a larger whole. Now some, some disciplines don't work exactly like that and literary scholarship would be a good example of a discipline where returning to a text time and again is something that is considered to be fruitful to your analysis of it that you can refresh, you can with a new perspective, you may see something different. And so there was so we were trying to apply some of those, those techniques but what was interesting was because people felt strongly that they wanted to push their engagement with the material and slightly a shoe they perhaps usual urge to run to the archive to try and contextualize this object. Many sat again and again with this object and trying to just pull meaning from it from its material presence and with little recourse to those kind of contextual angles. And so that was really, really interesting because at times people talked about a familiarity, you know, really deep. There was very, very strong feelings in the end about some of these objects and I felt the same about about my one and to experiment with refusing some of our normal kinds of approaches, I guess. In the end, these, these studies, these became really, they became a reflection on methodology and method. Now, we wouldn't suggest that just returning to an object and and over and over again is necessarily the best route to answering any given research question, but what it did do is it pushed us into directions we wouldn't normally go to. So we had a scholar and historian of colonialism and colonial collecting of objects around the world with a dodo skeleton, holding the weight of bones in her hands and trying to infer things about her interest from that. And, you know, these were deeply, deeply challenging kind of engagements. But yeah, in the end, the group, and we certainly found things out about our objects, many of us did in the end return to the archive to try and find out more. We flushed them out, we made them into a source of collection of their own 12 objects that became associated with each other in a new way in a way they hadn't been before. In general, the conclusions and the thought processes that came out of that were about approaches about material methods about the importance of engagement with the material, I think, as well as as well as the textual, not to not to, not to say otherwise, but yeah. Brilliant. So, so basically it sounds that the methods, you know, the kind of methods like object based inquiry or object based learning is all about a different way of thinking about no lateral thinking thinking outside the box that actually can bring really something new to your knowledge about an area or your own discipline or or a concept so that that's really fascinating because it can be transformative, you know, for the person doing the inquire but also for the entire group, you know, when you do it together. Yeah, so that is, that is fantastic, really, really fascinating and thank you so much for your time when they do just want to finish this recording this conversation with the little reflection short reflection about what, you know, the future calls for for material culture methods in your opinion. Yeah, it's a really interesting moment to ask that question, isn't it. I mean, I'm obviously very invested in this as something that I hope will will have a long term effect on the sort of discipline I work in and the disciplines I work with. And, and I think it is really interesting moment because of course the museum sector right now is completely absorbed with digital manifestations of objects. So it's always been a great defense and a correct defense of the need for in person and often tactile engagement with objects museums are brilliant at facilitating and allowing that right. And so that and look back to that that looking directly at something that in front of you right because even if it's behind glass, but right now, of course, is museums have been shut. And I think it's a time because suddenly touches like we can't touch other things. We can't even be close to other people so in this moment of pandemic and it throws in the air some of the things exactly some of the things that we would have absolutely champion. I think it's a really interesting juncture but for me, where the digital comes in and you may find this yourself with in terms of interesting in graphics and visual culture is where digital comes in I think it isn't too. I feel that the two were much more than than we might think so often people have who have been who've been the people who've driven forward like digital methods of engagement with artifacts, for example, and not the same people who are running object classes, but I think increasingly that we have to see the synergy between these two halves, and that in a world where we're increasingly living our worlds, living our lives through screens and through, through computers effectively, and there will be that that that obvious urge to make to do to touch to engage with the mechanics and the materiality of things will will only grow and I think we can see that popular culture basis, you know, endless sourdough base, and you know we can see it coming through in our culture. So for me and for me people concerned with collections. I think, I think these two, we have been thinking about material methods and digital methods is two halves of the same process. And yeah, yes, yes, I think I think that is definitely the way forward and how we connect our now very much, you know, digitalized interactions and the digital world that it's you know we are inhabiting right now. And, and, you know, the tactile nature of our lives and and and that is definitely something to be impact in the future. So thank you very much. I'm sure that we have sparked an interest in material culture methods, you know, among our viewers and also that they will check your work. Thank you very much for your time and for sharing your insights and I'm just saying bye to everyone watching the video and enjoy.