MoHu Projects

Laura Lo Presti

HuMaps explores the link between the emerging “cartographic humanities” and mobility and migration studies from a geo-visual and narratological perspective. The two-year research project has the dual objective of analytically deconstructing the imaginaries of migratory maps as well as reconstructing alternative, creative and sensitive imaginations of human mobility. These two research lines thus envisage an analysis of the cartographic narratives of the global migrant crisis to assess how maps, map-like objects and cartographic imaginaries have reproduced human migration over time – and migrated through several networks, artistic media and hybrid materials – to alternately foster feelings of hospitality and hostility towards newcomers. More importantly, HuMaps will reflect on novel applications of digital (and non-digital) mapping methodologies in the context of migration storytelling. These methodologies will be developed in collaboration with the MobiLab, as well as with the support of international scholars and partner institutions in Europe, the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada.

Despite their illusory condition of immobility, museum objects represent the meeting point of a wide bundle of itineraries, each of which has enriched them in meaning and, therefore, narrative potential through time. The mobility perspective allows us to read these itineraries and circulations as main components of the value of objects and to better understand the complexity of the role they play for their heritage communities.

Among the numerous kinds of movement that can involve museum objects, the basic one concerns the trajectories objects have followed from their production places to the collection seat itself, their main stages, the actors involved, the reasons behind them, the techniques, materials, and representations. Mobility is a defining characteristic in the life and history of objects. The point of origin of an object’s trajectory, however, coincides with the destination point of the trajectories traced by the commodity chains of its material components, and connections between unexpectedly distant places are revealed, together with the historical roots of contemporary topics like the object’s environmental and social sustainability.

Objects also trace spatial trajectories in relation to their use in different practices and places. Thinking of science and geography museum collections, for instance, instruments might have known a mobile outdoor life related to fieldwork-based research, either in specific location or widely spread. In such a context, the reconstruction of the instruments’ itineraries might allow us to compose different heritage expressions into a coherent mobility-based system, both tangible (instruments, photographs, documents, maps, etc.) and intangible (research output, practices of knowledge construction and research documentation, teaching habits, etc.). Moreover, focusing on the life of plants, botanical, and ethnobotanical collections in terms of the mobility/immobility turn means to look at their “life cycle” through a different conceptual and theoretical lens.

The meaning of objects is also frequently affected by shifts and changes. Although this can appear a metaphorical application of the mobility paradigm, such a shift in the meaning of an object is often related to its physical transfer and the consequent change of its perception and/or use by new subjects. Vice versa, sometimes the transfer itself represents the evidence of a change of significance for the person or community dealing with it.

The Covid-19 emergency is multiplying the number of museum objects involved in another kind of mobility: digitized and shared online, narrated through virtual tours and podcasts, they are moving creatively from Museum platforms to people’s digital devices and therefore potentially towards everywhere and everyone. Tracing their movements along the ramifications of the WWW would represent an extremely interesting investigation under several points of view.

Thanks to the Museum of Geography and the Botanical Garden of the University of Padova, we bring together different traditions and fields of studies, such as museum studies, history of science, historical geography, and material culture history. In our research project we aim at deepening the multilayered concepts connected to the idea of museum objects’ mobility. On the one hand, we follow different “things” through their uses, itineraries, trajectories and circulations in space and time. On the other hand, we focus on the theoretical implications connected to the general idea of mobility of objects in museums.

Urban wildness is a little explored topic because of its very nature. One reason for this neglect is to be found in urban wildness both as a dynamic concept as well as an ever-changing entity. How to study a mobile and innately undefined object? Rather than considering it merely as a forgotten space or a natural resource, this project aims to interact with urban wildness as a subject. To foster a relational approach, the project explores urban wildness going through it and involving all senses in the production of knowledge.

A preliminary part of the research will focus on the evaluation of methods and instruments of enquiry, their capabilities and limits of observing and recording this mobile subject: from fieldwork diary to photography, from audio-visual methods to performance.

Going deeper, the project will attempt to build a relationship with urban wildness inhabitants, such as plants, animals and people. It is in fact their entanglement that makes urban wildness a living, dynamic, mobile subject. Collaborative labs will be opened on the field to enquiry and enhance a collective representation of urban wildness ‘from inside it’. Finally, the project will pay special attention in the making of synesthetic artefacts, out of the multiple wildness representations archived, to disseminate this new knowledge.

The research will be developed by specific case studies, in different European cities, following the footprint of the stereotypical “nomads” that are believed to be the main inhabitants of urban wildness: the Roma. Are Roma the only living in urban wildness? Who is living on the move in contemporary cities? Is mobility a choice?

The interaction with urban wildness, in different contexts, will open new possibilities of conceiving and representing the geographies of mobility in the contemporary city, raising the issue that to live on the move mainly means a restriction on the very possibilities of movement in contemporary Europe.

Andrea Frizzera

At the beginning of an age in which Rome developed an ever-growing awareness of its Mediterranean extension, we can observe the exploitation of new possibilities of movement that the new political configuration of the Mediterranean could offer. Not only does this spatial turn involve commerce, cultural exchanges and migration, to name a few, but political refugees as well. This project aims to conduct an investigation into the latter. So, my first step will be to start from existing prosopographic studies, ancient sources (such as literary, epigraphic, numismatic) and more recent ones on Sullan proscribed will do that not only to share their journeys and explore the ways in which they found rescue in different places in the Mediterranean Sea, but to shed light too on their choices of movement, and on their fresh identities in their newly-adopted homes. A study on the mobility of the fugitive proscribed could not just give us an insight into what extent the elites were aware of Rome’s full Mediterranean influence, but also, by comparing all accounts, provide information on how the different political and social situations exercised influence on decision-making both by the Sullan faction and the proscribed themselves. The mobility of the proscribed resulted very much affected by all these factors and it had peculiar features compared to other displacement typologies. I am also hopeful that such an area of research could contribute, from a different perspective, to enrich the debate on the significance of the Sullan proscriptions and the consequences they caused in the Roman world. Finally, I would hesitate to exclude the possibility that, by adopting such an approach, the research’s focus could expand to 43 BC proscriptions or other cases of political refugees or exiles in the first century BC.

“Bo 2022” is an innovative digital project that explores the history of the University of Padua by mapping the academic population who animated its cultural and institutional life from the foundation of the Studium in 1222 to the 20th century. Starting from the previous project PADU-A financed by the DiSSGeA, a team composed of medievalists, early modern and modern historians designed an open-access database by using Nodegoat, a web-based research environment developed to build, manage and visualise large sets of historical information. The project is also supported by the University of Padua, the Center for the history of the University of Padua (CSUP), and the University Museum Centre (CAM).

The “Bo 2022” dataset focuses on the students who graduated at the University of Padua during the past 800 years as well as on professors and other employees. Due to the different sources available for each historical period, the database is conceived in modular and separated sections. Each one contains a wide range of prosopographical information, that may include the geographical origin of the students, the scientific area of their studies, their religious belief, the title of their thesis, the final evaluation and many other aspects.

1. The Medieval Age section (1222-1405) maps all the people who had been qualified as having a relationship with the University during the 13th and 14th centuries by using mainly (but not only) the private charters edited by Andrea Gloria.
2. The Quattrocento and the “Paduan Golden Age” section (1406-1605) focuses on the students who graduated at the University in that period and were thus recorded in the Acta graduum academicorum Gymnasii Patavini.
3. The Modern Age section (1606-1805) collects the academic population of Padua from the last years of Galileo’s teaching period to the Austrian government’s reforms.
4. The Contemporary Age section (19th to 20th centuries) maps all the students who graduated at the University of Padua and, whenever possible, their tutors by using both the students’ files and the dissertation records produced, that were produced by each Faculty.

Beside these sections, the database also focuses on some cross-cutting aspects concerning more than one period: the copyists of medieval manuscripts (13th to 15th centuries) who declared in their writings a connection with the Studium of Padua as current or graduated students, and the hundreds of the students’ coats of arms that have been preserved in the Palazzo del Bo as well as in other buildings of the city (15th to 17th centuries).

Starting from the database, the “Bo 2022” research fellows aims to carry out research on the circulation of both people and ideas connected to such an important centre of high-culture and learning. Consequently, the project is strictly connected with the mobility studies and aims to give an important contribution in measuring the attractiveness of the University of Padua in both an European and Global perspective. Beside the database, three books dedicated to specific aspects of the history of the university will be published on the 800th anniversary of its foundation. The subjects include the mobility of students and its consequences on both their career development and the urban life of Padua during the medieval and early modern period; the intellectual, religious and social freedom guaranteed by the university (the so-called patavina libertas); women and the University of Padua.

Mobility in Historical Perspective is a networking project focused on the theme of mobility from a historical perspective. Students and researchers from the Universities of Oxford, Berlin (Humboldt and Freie Universität) and Padua.

are part of this network, whose participants meet once a year in one of the partner cities to discuss the various facets of the theme of mobility in history (human mobility, intellectual mobility and economic mobility).

Mobility in Historical Perspective provides opportunities to discuss and share knowledge among scholars. It is indeed in international workshops that innovative perspectives on traditional research issues usually arise by challenging established points of view and methodologies.

By adopting a long-term chronological approach, the project shows that mobility has always been a central feature of human life. Moreover, it gives the opportunity to look at the phenomenon of mobility from different perspectives, comparing various historiographical approaches and methods depending not just on the individual formation and preference of the scholars, but also on their affiliation. The meetings of the three academic communities, indeed, demonstrate that there are different angles from which mobility studies can be approached and the project gives everyone the opportunity to get acquainted with the different scholarly traditions of the three countries. At the same time, new approaches which emerge in such environments affect the universities involved as a whole, enhancing the development of new research cultures inside the university itself, thus facilitating academic renewal.

In their recent delineation of the new subfield of Mobility and the Humanities, Merriman and Pearce (2017) focused on the specific contributions that a humanistic perspective can bring to the well-established field of mobility studies. First, the Humanities allow the exploration of the experience of mobility in addition to the factual movement of people, objects and ideas; second, they introduce a historical perspective, stressing the temporal dimension of mobility processes and practices; third, the Humanities work with texts and representations; forth, they are particularly capable of generating theoretical possibilities for the interpretation of mobility in its nuanced variations. Merriman and Pearce (2017) also underline the need to rediscover the alternative genealogies that offered early or implicit theorisation of mobility in the humanistic field. This project uses what Bal (2002) called a ‘concept based methodology’ to study ‘travelling concepts’ in the Humanities to propose a mobility-based methodology for fields such as cultural history, cultural geography and literary studies (but also visual and classical studies). The temporal frame extends from antiquity to the present and to possible futures. The mobility of people and objects, of ideas and cultural products, as well the contexts and the infrastructures hosting these mobilities may be captured from research angles that help not only to explore the meanings of movement but also to reimagine mobility studies from a humanistic and cultural perspective. How does the evocative concept of mobility impact our intellectual creativity? What is the potential of this concept to generate transdisciplinary and transmedial nexuses? If movement becomes mobility when it ceases to be factual evidence and becomes practice and discourse, experience and meaning (Cresswell, 2010), what are the different nuances of mobility in past, present and future times?

The project includes a Memorandum of Understanding signed by the University of Padova and the CRPM at the Université Paris Nanterre, networking activities, meetings and seminars, a joint conference, and the publication of an edited collection.

“Communities in the Early Middle Ages” is a five-years research project financed by the Ecole Française de Rome (2018-2022). It focuses its attention on small communities that are based on common practices on a local or regional scale, looking for their constituent elements. The exogenous notion of community makes it possible to orient our research not towards its essence, but towards the modalities of its implementation (i. e. through the lived space, collective memories, circulation and mobility through space) and to assess if the expression of its identity is conscious or if it is instead created or manipulated by an outside agent (i.e. group of people paying the same tax, or having to fight together).

Recent historiography reveals two main strands of research: the first one is interested in identifying the formation of religious communities within society; the second is interested in the process of  the institutionalization of communities. If communities never represent moral persons before the 12th century, nevertheless certain historians do not hesitate to define communities certain villages or group of villages from the Early Middle Ages, in relation to the territory and the emergence of the seigneurial lordship. W. Davies uses the concept of community territory to emphasize the fact that peasant ownership is not a series of isolates plots but constitutes a network of interrelations.

The scientific interest of such a study is based on the discussion of concepts from the social sciences such as the flexible notion of community of practice (E. Wenger): the members of a community are gradually trained through their participation more and more complete with the group activities. Their interactions with experienced members gradually transform them into full members, capable in turn of forming new members. We will also consider the modes of construction but also of dissolution/destruction of communities: construction by the norm, by processes of exclusion and inclusion, by the constitution of a hierarchy. Finally, we will tackle the crucial question of ideal communities: the study of the discourses that legitimize the community will shed light on the way it represents itself, reproduces itself, transmits its own memory and guides the construction of the identities of the subjects that compose it.

The project has brought together several conferences, which are currently being published by Brepols editions (Collection Haut Moyen Age).

Laura Lo Presti

Addressing the contemporary European migration crisis from the vantage point of its maps, this research project explores the mediated landscape of institutional, mass-media, artistic, and mobile mappings that concern migration and cultural diversity issues. Drawing from fields of mobility studies, visual culture studies, and post-representational map studies, this interdisciplinary work reflects on the cultural and affective ecologies and the technological and political digitalities through which cartographic images represent and perform the condition of im/mobility experienced by migrant subjects. Adopting digital ethnography and visual analysis of cartographic media content, the project pays particular attention to the many unpredictable ways in which maps, as visual landscapes of human mobilities, elicit and embody a plethora of discourses, actions, and feelings about the migration crisis, its forms of hierarchized mobilities, and alternative imaginings of solidarity and hospitality.

Yafa El Masri

A growing number of academics across the globe now share the conviction that the mainstream notion of development needs to be deconstructed to open a way for cultural alternatives that nurture and respect different forms of life on Earth (Kothari et al, 2019). The concept of post-development, which is squarely rooted in solidarity, has appeared as a way to defend the local against the global, giving value to community economics, human wellbeing and local traditions (Mathews, 2017). And while refugees have long been silenced by the humanitarian government and widely portrayed solely as recepients of humanitarian aid (Agier, 2011: Rajaram, 2002: Silvermann, 2008), this study rather explores innovative post development approaches to managing space and livelihood practiced by refugees, and even identifies the expansion of solidarity-based initiatives to the refugee hosting communities. This study attempts to demonstrate how refugees are agents of their own space and post development through a strong base of solidarity, rootedness and collective emplacement. This study takes Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon as case of observation, utilizes postcolonial methods and Donna Haraway’s feminist concept of situated knowledge, to reflect on my own positioned rationality of growing up as a stateless Palestinian refugee in Lebanon’s refugee camps. Using long term participation observation, auto-ethnography and interviews in Lebanon and Europe’s Palestinian refugee community, the study finds that solidarity-based dynamics (cooperation values, food sharing and gift economies) tend to be increasingly replacing the shrinking humanitarian development aid and market activities within Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. Then, if “grassroots solidarity can transform the world” and if “Another world is possible”, and possibly another world is even necessary, along these lines, can refugees help change the world?

Keywords: Refugees, Livelihood, Post-Development, Pluriverse, Refugee Agency