The EMHIS project has now formally started! On the 13–15 of November, our first event named EMHIS Forum 1 took place at the Hans-Bredow-Institut in Hamburg. This forum will be followed by six others in Bournemouth, Lund and Hamburg up until the year 2017.
For this introductory conference, we were 13 participants that came together, but the network will expand during the years to come and more researchers will join in, all according to the plan we drew up in our STINT application in 2012. Prior to the conference, the travelling activities of EMHIS had also started. Maike Helmers from Bournemouth and Charlie Järpvall from Lund had already arrived for a longer stay in Hamburg (see their reports on their respective blog posts), as well as Johan Jarlbrink from Lund/Jönköping. In addition to this, Marie Cronqvist is formally a guest researcher at the Hans-Bredow-Institut from Oct 2013 to May 2014, although commuting from Berlin.
The wonderful and sunny weather and the joys of Hamburg were not able to disencourage us from spending two full days sitting inside entangling our perspectives. The first day was reserved for delightful, short presentations of on-going research from all the participants (link to programme). On the second day, some main concepts of “entanglement”, “histoire croisée” and “mediatisation” were in focus. Departing from three readings by Werner/Zimmermann, Bauerkämper and Bösch, our discussion aimed to pinpoint our common – or different – understandings of these concepts. While “entangled history” is a well-known concept intimately connected to and applied within the field of global history, “entangled media histories” remains ours to define. Judging by the waves of discussion at the conference, we collectively think of entanglement as something beyond mere comparison; it could be used to describe the complex web of media ensembles or media systems (that any single medium is not isolated from other media) as well as pointing to the transnational dimensions of media. As evident from our project description, in the years to come we will try to bring in these perspectives in focus when dealing with four dimensions: media technologies, media producers, media products/texts, and media audiences/users.
A fair amount of time during this first conference was also reserved for the practical issues of the EMHIS schedule over the coming four years, including the design and setting up of this blog, activities in social media, and the planning of EMHIS 2 in Bournemouth. And finally, by lunchtime on the 15th, we all gave our warm thanks to Hans-Ulrich and his colleagues in Hamburg for all the practical arrangements around EMHIS Forum 1, and the Hamburg team handed over The EMHIS Scroll to Bournemouth (picture below), where we all will meet in the beginning of May. Auf Wiedersehen und bis demnächst!
