An Introduction
Hi, welcome to my first blog post! My name is Daisy. I live on Wurundjeri land in Melbourne, Australia. I moved here on a whim in early 2020, packed my car full to the brim and drove 9 hours from Sydney. I had a far-flung dream of a PhD scholarship in the back of my mind and waited tables while I put a research proposal together for an advertised position I had found online. When the pandemic rolled in, I lost my job, as many others did, but my silver lining was the PhD program I was later accepted into.
My research proposal fused the history of emotions with the advertised Conviction Politics PhD position, which was to be a transnational study on the activism of political prisoners transported to the Australian colonies in the mid-nineteenth century. I proposed to look at activism, protest, transportation, and exile, as sites of emotionality, where hope and horror coexisted, by drawing on the media activism about or created by political prisoners from the Chartist and Young Ireland movements. These two radical parliamentary reform movements are a particular focus for their links to democratic reforms, varied forms of campaigning and resistance across borders (including journalism), and connection to mythologised events in the colonies, like the Eureka Stockade, and other instances of collective action. While much has been written about the various groups of political prisoners, traditional scholarship has held that they generally did not engage in politics or activism in the Australian colonies. My research seeks to question this.
My research question thus asks: what was the nature, success, and impact of the political prisoners’ activism and protest in the UK and Australia, and how did emotion feature in this?
To break this down further, I’m thinking about:
What were the emotions of exile, transportation, and incarceration and how were they framed by class, race and gender?
What agency did political prisoners have and how was it negotiated by affect and feeling?
How was emotion used in the media, cultural activism and protest for law reform and self-government in the colonies?
How was democracy shaped by affect and types of emotional expression?
If we rewind back a year, I had just completed my honours thesis on the cultural conception of consent in relation to rape law reform in 1970s Australia. I was (and still am) interested in cultural, media, and feminist history, as well as notions of criminality, and was very much inspired by my supervisor Melissa Bellanta. I was also intrigued by the history of emotions. This intrigue I suppose was because I found history to be emotive, rich, and layered, but also because I wanted to feel how others had felt in another time, and to be able to bring accounts to life after they had become faded from the passing of time.
To feel history is to do justice to those from the past that I am writing about and presenting today. To capture what made them, them, as well as the layers of meaning and structures in which events unfolded. It’s also fascinating to me how feelings are shaped historically and culturally; how certain emotions can frame notions of acceptability and respectability and govern modes of expression; and how we can retrieve traces of emotion from the past. Furthermore, the dynamics of collective feeling in protest, activism or the building of a political constituency, and how this has often been disregarded in past scholarship in the pursuit of objectivity and rationality.
Just writing this has made me feel emotional; because I am grateful for these experiences and where this love of inquiry has led me. I’m now in my second year, after passing my confirmation milestone in September of 2021. I have a somewhat clearer vision of what is set out before me and I hope to be able to undertake archival research in Melbourne, Hobart, and Sydney, and possibly in the UK, if this pandemic allows it. I look forward to the pleasure of and process of uncovering, the slow work of delving into archives, but also into another time and place. But right now, I need to develop and nurture a daily and reflexive writing practice. This blog, I intend to be a part of that process, as I communicate my ideas and document the progress.
If you have read this far - thank you.
Daisy
