Dr. Abbie Garrington, Lecturer in 19^th & 20^th Century Literature, Newcastle University

Writing a literary history of mountaineering for the modernist period, I’ve been struck by the peculiar and multifaceted relationship that both mountains and mountaineering practice have with issues of temporality. Part of the strange allure of a mountain, whether or not one is liable to climb it, is its endurance. Not only does its summit provide an expansive geographical purview, but its geology gives us a long view of a different order: one back in time. Across cultures, mountains might be venerated for their beauty, the power they confer upon those who access them, in intended abeyance of evil spirits, or for the challenge they pose for potential climbers or pilgrims. Continue reading →

‘History in the Making’

Andrew Thompson is interviewed for The Magazine of the International Red Cross Red Crescent Movement: http://www.redcross.int/EN/mag/magazine2014_3/24-25.html.

Prof David Archard, Queen’s University Belfast School of Politics, International Studies and Philosophy; QUB Centre for Children’s Rights

Morality and time stand in an awkward relation to one another. It seems obvious that we are morally responsible for what we did and also for what we will do. Thus we are rightly blamed (or praised) for our immediate past actions and we, rightly, ought to think about how we can make a difference in the near future. Yet if – as philosophy has done – you look harder at the relation between morality and time there are really intriguing, and extremely puzzling, complications.

Consider, first, the question of how far back or forward you might choose to go. Popular history loves the kind of thinking exemplified in the ‘for want of a nail’ rhyme. This is intended to illustrate how small actions can have a huge impact when spelled out across a chain of causes. Yet we can also use these kinds of example to explore causal chains that extend across long periods of time, and do so in terms both of what actually happened and what might have happened. Continue reading →

Prof David Zeitlyn, University of Oxford, Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology and Fellow, Wolfson College

A common typo (for bad typists such as myself) for Pasts is Pasta. Which suggests a potent range of metaphor: I’m not sure if this is a lasagne, rigatoni or perhaps a pasta dish: putanesca.

Bishop James Ussher did arithmetic and came up with an answer, 4004 BC. Anything before then is null. If I have understood it correctly, in Ussher’s account a creator (that some might see as malign or mischievous) produced fossils and rocks in the process of radioactive decay (nb radioactive decay only identified post-Ussher) amenable to the interpretation as being older, as if processes were continuous (which on Ussher’s account they are now but were created midway, as it were).

A different form of creationism is social construction – our understanding of pasts (and futures) is the result of work done by authors in their own presents. So pasts, futures are entangled in our presents, in what could be called presences of pasts and futures… But what then when (Ussher excepted), we start to think in the long term, in geological time scales such as 1 million years BC? This was the title of a Hollywood film famous in some circles for its anachronisms such as Raquel Welch wearing a fur bikini.  But if Raquel Welch were not constructed then what?

I can imagine Woolgar or Latour’s accounts about the use of evidence to construct an understanding, detailing the uncertainties and the politics at arriving at a consensus. But such accounts fall or duck the realist projection motivating the actors (a move I am sure they would trumpet as a positive), yet it strikes me as being worrying like Bishop Ussher.

The geological assertion is that even if all these accounts are wrong, there was a planet here in which stuff was happening, so there is/was something to be wrong about. Similarly if we pick a date far into the future but before the sun explodes, there will be a planet even if unpopulated by large or medium-sized mammals. This is dangerous ground. It invites us to think of independent existences and to take the view from nowhere and nowhen.
My middling approach is to accept both independent existences and that there are no godly perspectives (accessible to humans). So we may have to accept that our access to (or our knowledge of) distant pasts and futures is weak, patchy, incomplete – or frankly, nugatory.

Leadership Fellow Prof Andrew Thompson’s article in Red Cross Life magazine

Joan Whittington with prisoner of war food parcels at national headquarters in 1956. Image: British Red Cross

Prof Andrew Thompson writes about Joan Whittington, post-war pioneer of the British Red Cross.

Read the article here, courtesy of the British Red Cross and Red Cross Life Magazine Oct 2013. You can now also read the article online at the AHRC website, which includes an additional image.