We are delighted that Objects in Motion, a special edition of Society and Space edited by Malini Sur (2022 Visiting Fellow) and Kylie Message (HRC Director), is now out in the world. This beautifully curated collection results from the 2022 HRC theme of “Mobilities” and includes articles by current and former HRC Fellows, Honorary staff, a 2023 NMA-ANU Summer Scholar, and friends.

How might the journeys, encounters, and transformations of objects, persons and ideas emphasise dynamic experiences of transition that are not conventionally featured in scholarly accounts of history and mobility? Inspired by Michel de Certeau’s proposition that “there are countless ways of ‘making do’” (1984: p. 29), our provocations offer new ways of thinking with, through and about the history of objects and the relationships that objects have with mobility and materiality. This collection of essays explores how objects and ideas in motion connect people and places to produce richly textured forms of public culture. We recast attention to a variety of objects — letters, photographs, jute sacks, maps, model boats, roadside shrines and grains of wheat-observing these from the crevices of urban walls, and in warehouses, farmlands, churches, and museum cases. In so doing, we reveal a new set of connections about public culture.

See more details here on this special issue.


Contents:

Mutable Immutable Mobiles: Museum Things Tony Bennett

The Epistolary Interior Mary Roberts

Empire’s Containers Malini Sur

Quotidian Worship in Kochi George Jose

Repeopling the Boats: A Journey into Material Culture Research with the Tran van Hoang Kylie Message

Historicising Institutional Mobility: The Case of the Roman Catholic Church Miles Pattenden

Tramways, Noise and Aural Flânerie: On Sonic Mobilities and Transgressions in 19th Century Urban Europe Jakob Ingemann Parby

Tracing Historic Mobilities Through Maps: The Case of the Roman Campagna Katrina Grant

The Story of Wheat Evelyn Lambeth