of a social historian
One of the most significant developments in the study of history in recent years has been what some call the ‘spatial turn’ – the recognition that history moves through space as well as time. Once this is acknowledged, it becomes important to see the events of the past being played out at different levels. Different factors are at play at local, national, regional and global levels. Moreover, few stories begin and end in the same place. Movement becomes something to consider. The term ‘transnational history’ is often banded around in place of ‘comparative history’, but the two are different. Although both widen the frame to consider events in more than one place, transnational history does something more than compare. It places the focus on movements across borders – movements of people, funds, practices, technology, ideas… Diseases, for example, do not respect national borders and aid organisations follow them in response. The history of medicine and charity is therefore inevitably a transnational history.
An important challenge facing work like mine is whether we can bring together the local and the international into a single narrative. It’s something that’s cropped up in various ways in the following blog posts…
Originally posted on the VAHS blog as Making Connections: From Transnational Histories to Epistemic Communities on 29 October 2012 It has been nearly a year now since the Voluntary Action History Society put out a call for expressions of interest in forming a new informal international network. The idea was to bring together researchers working on …
Written with Professor Melanie Oppenheimer of Flinders University, Australia and originally posted on the VAHS blog as Transnational Histories of Voluntary Action on 9 January 2012 In 1989 Francis Fukuyama declared the ‘end of history’ was underway. The fall of the Berlin Wall had marked the end of the fundamental clash of ideas that had defined modern history. Liberal …
Originally posted on the VAHS blog as Healthcare, Voluntarism and the State in Twentieth-Century Ireland and Britain on 5 September 2011 I recently made my first visit to Dublin. Being invited to workshops is always nice, and when you get to go somewhere new that’s even better. So this was a real treat for me. …
Musings 