Table Topic: “Fluid Disciplines and Archives”

 

On their table “Fluid Disciplines and Archives”, Annika Raapke and Lucas Haasis will discuss about how to find the sea in the archive and why methodological hierarchies should be challenged to free the relevant documents. Find their table statement here:

 

In which archives, and where in the archive, do we look for the sea? Which documents, whose testimonies do we seek out and include in our research, and how do we prioritise them? We argue that, in order to approach and explore the sea from new angles, and to go beyond the familiar historiographic narratives of the sea, with their often narrow disciplinary boundaries, we should dare to free documents from their seemingly set contexts (the “maritime”, the “naval”, the “economic”, the “legal”) and the methodological hierarchies which seem to govern their use, but more importantly to include documents and objects that may, so far, not have seemed relevant in sea-related research. The oceans were not only transregional spaces, they were places and spaces of intense, often intercultural interaction, where trade, politics, warfare, colonialism and rebellion, personal and public affairs would be carried out simultaneously and often within the narrow confines of one single ship. Archives hold a “sea of seas” and a sea of sea stories, but many of them may hide in unusual and unsuspected places.

 

Annika Raapke is the Public Relations coordinator for the Prize Papers Project, a project dealing with the digitization of a unique collection, the  result of the early modern practice of capturing enemy ships and confiscating all papers travelling aboard them. Her research interests include Carribean History and the History of Bodies.

Lucas Haasis is a PhD candidate at Carl von Ossietzky University in Oldenburg. His research interests include European and Atlantic History. He is responsible for the Research Cooperations of the Prize Papers Project.

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