Professor Alison Bartlett (University of Western Australia, IASH Fellow): Walking Feminist Heritage.
This seminar is a rough map of the work I plan on doing here around the idea of walking as an embodied movement through historical activist legacies attached to particular places. I plan to focus on women's heritage walks as a form of mobilising activist legacies and possibly subjectivities through 2 case studies anchored to particular places: one in Perth Australia (where I'm from) that was devised in the 1980s that I found in the archives; and the other from Glasgow (where I've just been) devised over the last few years by the independent Glasgow Women's Library. I'm interested in the way memory and loss intersect the walks, and also in applying the idea of solastalgia, a concept developed by Allbrecht in relation to environmental loss as a kind of homesickness while still at home. I'm also influenced by Solnit's ideas around walking as a space for thinking and placing ourselves in time and space. From this work I hope to form a concept of feminist heritage sites, that might add to the place of feminist ideas and also contribute to current public debates around monuments and their politics over time.