Issue Details: First known date: 2020... 2020 Doing History in Urgent Times : Forum Introduction
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'As we enter the 2020s, our times are daily getting more urgent. The climate and ecological emergency, catastrophic Australian bushfires, and now the COVID-19 pandemic and associated economic meltdown have launched us into a new era of seemingly incessant crisis. Through it all, history remains omnipresent. In press conferences and Zoom meetings, in newspapers and Twitter feeds, history is invoked to bring sense and meaning to our disorienting present. As public commentary mythologises the past in order to manage a destabilised and unknown future, what should the response of professional historians be? What are our responsibilities in the face of cataclysmic change? In this forum on ‘History in Urgent Times’, we present three attempts to grapple with what it means to be a historian in this alarming historical moment, and ask how historians ought to respond.' (Introduction)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon History Australia vol. 17 no. 2 2020 19797942 2020 periodical issue

    'We write this introduction in changed and challenging circumstances, with an acute awareness of how unevenly the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic have been distributed among the AHA membership and wider readership of History Australia, even as narratives of this crisis suggest that ‘we’ are all experiencing this ‘together in lockdown’. At the same time, the Australian Historical Association, this journal and its diverse membership are working to nourish our disciplinary community in a period when our connections with each other can no longer be embodied in the physical space of departments, conferences, seminars, museums and libraries. We are, for the moment, a community enacted almost entirely through virtual and other mediums, and these are meagre substitutes. Our weekly editorial meetings, once treasured moments of connection, laughter and collegiality around a table, now take place on Zoom, with words and phrases sometimes garbled or lost in their translation from sound, to data and back to sound again. Many of us are having to learn how to work together without being together. The loss is acute. We hope that the arrival of issue 17.2 reminds our members, authors and readers of their membership in a community of historians in, of or from Australia.' (Leigh Boucher, Michelle Arrow, Kate Fullagar, From the Editors, introduction)

    2020
    pg. 225-229
Last amended 4 Aug 2020 09:59:22
225-229 Doing History in Urgent Times : Forum Introductionsmall AustLit logo History Australia
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