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Jodie

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  1. Happy New Year, forum members. Thank you for the prompt to say hello - and in haste as I am preparing a research paper to share with international researchers in Bath next week. The world of academic publishing is frustratingly slow, but as publications become available I will share links to open access (i.e. free) versions here. As I think was mentioned in the original press release about this role, part of my remit has been to bring waterways research to the attention of researchers working in other fields. I have given papers at a number of Victorian Studies conferences which focus on nineteenth-century attitudes to canals. These (often middle-class) views are expressed - as you all know - in various forms, from literature to newspapers and letters, and are retrieved from archives dispersed around the country but including the Wellcome Collection and local studies archives. It has been really interesting to put these nineteenth-century attitudes in dialogue with other discourses about labour and industry in the Victorian period. I was lucky enough to speak at the Railway & Canal Historical Society Waterways History Conference in Birmingham, thinking about the ways in which the times we live in (political, economic, cultural, environmental) affect the ways in which we think about waterways today. Huddersfield University recently hosted part of European Researchers Night, and visitors of all ages were encouraged to annotate maps with the canals they know and love, and then look at archival images and text representations of the people who lived and worked on those canals. For some younger visitors it was the first time they had even thought about what the canals they live right next to were for. This is just a really quick snippet of the sort of work I've been doing and, as I say, more to come.
  2. Thank you all for these insights (and welcomes!); much appreciated. I will be following them up.
  3. Thank you; I have been reading the section with great interest yesterday and today. The amount of detailed knowledge is, as you, say hard to match anywhere. I look forward to engaging with the forum and its members more. I should note (and this relates to an earlier post, too), I am full time at the University of Huddersfield; the CRT role is honorary (i.e. I do the CRT activities in addition to my lecturing role and without additional payment).
  4. Thanks! I may not be able to post as often as I'd like, but will be calling by when I can...
  5. Hello, I thought I should virtually introduce myself and say thank you for the thought-provoking comments on my academic research and work with CRT. Always good to know where one stands, and that people care about the way research is conducted. It’s clear from some of the perceptions of my profession (or, perhaps, of me) articulated here that some of my academic colleagues have not done a good job previously of communicating what they do nor of valuing the expertise of people outside universities. I realise that some academics have, as Joseph Boughey put it, ‘looked down on’ the research and knowledge beyond their ivory towers. I try to be a different kind of researcher, and am keen to learn from the vast body of work that has already been undertaken (properly credited, of course). I aim to champion this expertise within academic circles, and not just in the disciplines usually associated with this field. At a meeting of researchers (academic and non-academic) at my institution recently, I opened with some words of appreciation of volunteers and all those who work on and research canals, including a picture of local people clearing up after the floods caused havoc on the Calder and Hebble Navigation. As one poster here notes, I lecture in English Literature, so come to the issues from another perspective (often valuable in itself) – I’m particularly interested in the way Victorians represented the canals, but I do have broader interests in that period and in the longer history of the people of the waterways. I’m a Midlander living in Huddersfield – how could I not be? Genuine question: which human stories of the canals do you think should reach wider public and academic audiences? And if you have any questions/comments about my work, you can either ask me here or drop me a line: j.matthews@hud.ac.uk.
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