Paradoxes of Place: Pausing Motion in Ancient Italy

Current theories of place, mobility and citizenship provide new means of understanding how individuals and communities relate to real and imagined points in the inhabited landscape and how people envisage and give value to the places in which they live. In this research, Ancient Italy will be examined through textual and material evidence to make explicit what a 'constructed' nature of place means and how the mechanism of its construction develops and changes community membership and identity. It will focus on the creation of the joint Romano-Italian power in the last two centuries BC by investigating three areas: the mapping of space and time; the agency of architecture and landscape; and the reconciliation of citizenship and belonging. I will test the hypothesis that a fluid relationship to physical locatedness, prevalent prior to Roman hegemony, gave way to one that required greater physical fixity. The project is therefore concerned with aspects of human migration and the development of borders, and it examines the challenges presented by contexts in which human mobility is sometimes acceptable, and sometimes obnoxious. As such the project engages issues of major importance in our own world. Modern Europeans increasingly negotiate their identities on the interface of converging cultures, just as the populations of ancient Italy did centuries ago. Their predicaments are also visible throughout history where territorial disputes amplify, and are amplified by, cultural and communal friction. In such situations, how is our sense of place negotiated and expressed? How do we imagine what a place can be in our lives as citizens and individuals? The project will: (1) provide detailed historical analysis of the particular issues in play in ancient Italy as indicated above; (2) conceptualise these in relation to interdisciplinary theory from several domains including geography, anthropology and sociology; and (3) contextualise these within a wider historic framework.

The AHRC fellowship will form the final stage of this project, which was begun last year. It will provide the crucial time and space to bring together my empirical studies on ancient Italy, with insights from the interdisciplinary workshops on the subject of place, and the research which I will be conducting with other historians as a Davis Fellow in Princeton, in 2010. These will culminate in a book on Paradoxes of Place: pausing motion in ancient Italy, which will be completed by the end of the fellowship in 2011. This research will form the foundations for an ongoing interdisciplinary and cross-practice collaboration with artists and architects to develop further the ideas and ensure that the findings have maximum impact. An application for such a venture has already been submitted, to the European Research Council, entitled Alternative Place: past and future. It will consider the way that the concept of place moves between contexts in which either the physical or the relational/performative aspect of its construction have primacy. The AHRC fellowship will allow the completion of research which will offer an innovative methodology for exploring the relationship between historiography and conceptual theory to illuminate a common set of problems in the human experience of place.

There is an urgency to this project which may not be apparent at first. The acknowledgement that locatedness is constructed and not a given, and that we use the discourse of place to position ourselves and make sense of the world, is an issue that has taken root in diverse fields of inquiry, covering numerous disciplines. This trend reflects our need to comprehend and manipulate the current condition of time-space compression or globalisation. Today we live in a world in which negotiations about community membership, borders and identity are conducted on a global scale, whether in the interfaces of a Europe increasingly converging in common interest, or in places of major political tension elsewhere, such as the Middle East, where territorial disputes amplify, and are amplified by cultural and communal frictions.

Using ancient Italy as a primary case study, this project will articulate the distinct perceptions of place and test the extent to which they had a role in, and were in turn affected by, historical developments. The importance of the resulting schema is that its application will transcend the ancient Italian case study and encourage a reconsideration of socio-political change in other periods. Its goal is to increase our understanding of what a 'constructed' nature of place means and the instruments of its construction. The project will also have relevance for contemporary concerns about the porous nature of bounded space, and non-territorial borders. Such concerns have fuelled numerous reflections on global networks, the post-nation state, sovereignty, imperialism, biopolitics and security, all of which require new forms of mapping. Within such a context the physical border and bounded space constitutes only one form of the contemporary experience of being a citizen or an outsider. Through a joining of history, incorporating its diverse evidence base, and theory I hope to make explicit the constructed nature of place and the mechanisms that create it, illuminating the situation in the past and also that which looks to the future.

The early activity of this project has already had an impact on the wider community, through public presentations, performances, web site and art exhibition, that formed part of the AHRC funded De-Placing Future Memory workshops. This pilot project investigated the permeability of the bond between memory and place. For details: http://projects.beyondtext.ac.uk/deplacingfuturememory/index.php.

It is anticipated that the results of the Paradoxes of Place project, for which the current AHRC fellowship is sought, will build on the interdisciplinary and cross-practice collaborations already made. In particular they will be used as a platform to ensure that the findings, which will be published as a book, have maximum impact. This will be possible through the project web site, and via a launch that will have a public element to it, such as an exhibition and a performance. I also plan to present the work in non-academic fora.

The findings of the project and specifically the book will form the foundation of a more large scale venture, Alternative Place: past and future, for which I have applied to the European Research Council. This 5 year initiative includes leading artists, architects and curators working with academics to produce a body of work that will have an academic output, e.g. publications and conference proceedings, as well as a public outlet in the form of art exhibitions at international venues such as the Venice Art Biennale.

The Paradoxes of Place project has already begun to impact on museums and galleries, as well as local schools, through the art exhibition and on creative and performing arts through the music compositions. With the further culmination of the research findings in the form of the book it is hoped that they will benefit policy makers, public sector