Parity in History?
by
6 December, 2022
During the course of the semester, students were required to carry out a process of active reading, which has been described in depth in the article ‘Reading-With: A Collaborative Method for Inclusive Architectural Histories (scroll down for abstract). This deep engagement with historical texts is being developed by Dr. Anne Hultzsch and Dr. Sol Pérez Martinez of WoWA as a means to test how specific examples of women’s writing, which exist outside the traditional means of producing architectural critique and history, are actually writing about architecture.
The texts examined during the seminar course are represented here by a collection of annotations produced by participating students out of their active reading of four pairs of authors. The student activities – annotations, readings and discussions, were made and collected on a miro board (from which the screen shots of the students’ annotations were taken).
The annotations connected to this collection, which can been accessed via the list on the right, came out of a workshop held by Women Writing Architecture during the seminar course. This resulted in two types of writing: annotations on selected texts from the course list that are marked up through the process of annotated reading by student peers; and the postcards (a process inspired by Emma Cheatle’s essay ‘Between the Landscape and Confinement’), which are shown below.
Couple I: Mary Wollenstonecraft and Edmund Burke
(secondary reading: Emma Cheatle)
Couple II: Maria Graham and Alexander von Humboldt
(secondary reading: Mary Louise Pratt)
Couple III: Elizabeth Keckley and Thomas Jefferson
(secondary reading: bell hooks)
Couple IV: Sophie von La Roche and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
(secondary reading: Rebecca Solnit)
Abstract for Reading-With:
This article describes reading-with, a new collaborative reading method developed as part of the ERC-funded project WoWA (Women Writing Architecture 1700-1900). It offers architectural and other historians a starting point to produce inclusive histories based on the writings of those so far invisible within disciplinary canons. Arguing that historiography can be made more inclusive if the historian’s approach to their sources changes, reading-with introduces a set of precise and timed reading tasks organised in layers to focus the researcher’s attention on different aspects of the narration as well as their response to the text. Based on methods developed in the fields of psychology and feminist oral history, it aims to disrupt learned, canonical reading methods, paying attention to the relationship between reader, text, narrator, and context. Performed by several groups of researchers and master students in Switzerland and Chile in 2022-23, the method has been tested with texts authored by women in the 18th and 19th centuries. It foregrounds their architectural agency and influence on architectural cultures, even if their links to the professional sphere have so far been regarded as marginal. Reading-with is an invitation to read otherwise to centre the experiences and agency of those not yet acknowledged.