ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Studying the past, projecting the future: object pedagogies as modes of investigation

• In Event: “Pedagogies of Things” in the Natural History Humanities

English Abstract

Pedagogies are often described as strategies used to transfer skills to “scientific personae” in training, to communicate research findings or to demonstrate particular concepts or ideas. Yet object pedagogies also frequently function as modes of investigation that are inherently speculative or open-ended. As material technologies and forms of labor, they create opportunities to study the shifting entanglements of real materials (realia), including information about their past, present and future uses. In this paper, I explore how object lessons create opportunities to study “use” and to “project” the future by considering two examples in particular. The first is from a moment in the early eighteenth century when some of the first polytechnical schools and universities were founded in Central Europe that made object lessons a central feature of their teaching praxis. The second is from my own recent experiences of using realia from the Cumberland Plateau (TN) to teach undergraduates interested in the history of science and environmental humanities about the entangled, colonial histories of natural history.

Author

• Kelly Whitmer, Sewanee