{"id":73,"date":"2025-09-17T15:43:08","date_gmt":"2025-09-17T14:43:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/student-salon\/?p=73"},"modified":"2025-09-17T15:43:08","modified_gmt":"2025-09-17T14:43:08","slug":"instead-of-just-looking-reflections-on-our-workshops","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/student-salon\/2025\/09\/17\/instead-of-just-looking-reflections-on-our-workshops\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cInstead of Just Looking\u201d: Reflections on Our Workshops"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

As we passed around objects during our student salon workshops I was reminded of a 2013 decorative arts pedagogical video called \u201cThis is Not a Chair<\/a>,\u201d where Harvard researchers from a variety of disciplines gave new identities to several seventeenth and eighteenth century chairs. Responses in the short film ranged from \u201cthis is not a chair, this is a sculpture\u201d from an art historian, to \u201cthis is not a chair, this is a document of enslavement\u201d said by an historian to describe a chair made by enslaved labour. Objects in our cabinet told their stories likewise, this is not just a sugar bowl, this is a document of enslavement; this is not just a map of Asia, this is a worldview. By letting material objects tell their own stories, as we handle them and reflect upon their design and usage, our cabinet is actually in keeping with eighteenth century imaginative approaches to objects. It-narratives of that century come to mind, where thimbles in their \u201cown\u201d words tell us they were \u201cinclosed within the narrow limits of a small traveling box\u2026for the purposes of traffic among the opulent in the neighborhood.\u201d The objects in our cabinet require a more critical approach than just travelling about to the \u201copulent of the neighborhood.\u201d So, the student salon cabinet allowed us the chance to unravel and expose the objects\u2019 colonial ties, while offering them to a variety of students for careful and creative study. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In taking the time to handle objects, and contemplating them, our workshop participants had the chance to re-assess the meanings of the objects and the reality of the salon as a place for exchange and experience of familiar and unfamiliar objects. After all, to quote the famous line from L.P. Hartley\u2019s The<\/em> Go-Between,<\/em> \u201cThe past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.\u201d By asking questions of the objects in their hands, students were confronted with an opportunity to ponder what biases or judgements we all bring to our understanding of the past, in a similar way to how past peoples in actual salons showed their biases and prejudices through their handling, mishandling, and consumption of objects from countries other than their own. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
A collection of broken 17th-century tobacco pipes lie casually in a drawer of the Student Salon cabinet. Unseen in this picture, one of them is marked with the image of a ship sailing through the waves.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Feedback from our participants, including the title of this post, are teaching us the continued importance of hands-on, contemplative, object study for early career students in fields like history, literature, archaeology. Suggestions for how the cabinet might best be used in the future emphasized a desire by and for students to \u201ctouch history,\u201d within modules that focused on the same historical periods as the items. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

One participant even described how our cabinet\u2019s fabrics and prints reminded them of studying Daniel Defoe’s Roxana: The Fortunate Mistress<\/em> (1724), and suggested the cabinet\u2019s use in future seminars on the novel. Dancing in her salon-like drawing room, Roxana masquerades as a ‘Turkish princess’ wearing garments of ‘fine Persian or Indian damask.\u2019 Originally belonging to a Turkish woman who was captured and enslaved, Roxana bought the garments as a ‘curiosity’ in Italy at the same time her lover ‘bought me a Turkish slave’. She mentions, to prove the authenticity of the performance and the garments, that the ‘little Turk’ often helped her dress in it. While Roxana is keen to convey how much the dress is worth, our attention is drawn to the life of the other woman the cloth reveals, and the child who knew the garment better than Roxana herself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Fabric
A selection of 18th-century fabric samples in the Student Salon cabinet.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Several participants noted the feel of fabric, the texture of porcelain, or the smell of the spices included in the cabinet, all which are sensory experiences that are both memorable and enhancing to the descriptions in the literature read for modules. I can even remember the first time I studied a hand sewn gown or held a broken seventeenth century pipe stem straight from the dirt of an archaeological dig. I suddenly felt the weight of real, complex people of the past by holding their objects. This process of realisation, that objects have stories to tell, and are a vital path for learning about the past, was evident in the questions, feedback, and even facial expressions of our workshop participants. Objects of the past, after all, aren\u2019t just for looking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rachel Hogue<\/strong> is an MA student in Eighteenth Century Studies at the University of York.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As we passed around objects during our student salon workshops I was reminded of a 2013 decorative arts pedagogical video called \u201cThis is Not a Chair,\u201d where Harvard researchers from a variety of disciplines gave new identities to several seventeenth and eighteenth century chairs. Responses in the short film ranged from \u201cthis is not a … Continue reading \u201cInstead of Just Looking\u201d: Reflections on Our Workshops<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":267,"featured_media":75,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-73","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorised"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/student-salon\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/20\/2025\/07\/IMG_6730.jpg","custom_fields":{"_edit_lock":["1758120190:267"],"_thumbnail_id":["75"],"_wp_old_date":["2025-07-30"]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/student-salon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/student-salon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/student-salon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/student-salon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/267"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/student-salon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=73"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/student-salon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/student-salon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/75"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/student-salon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/student-salon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/student-salon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}