OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
Historians of nineteenth-century women and material culture have explored the myriad ways that material practices informed female strategies of identity, agency and creativity. This paper relates these ideas to experiences had in the nineteenth-century asylum. Focusing on the experiences of women, it examines the diary and material legacy of one asylum patient in particular: Elizabeth Hitchcock, a staymaker confined at Lancaster asylum in the 1840s.
Through Hitchcock’s diary, this presentation interrogates the ways in which asylum patients engaged in meaning making through material artifacts. The paper examines Hitchcock’s rich material practice, exploring how these material processes spoke to creativity, craft and care. Arguing that agency had an important part to play in the creative practice of incarcerated individuals, the paper considers the therapeutic potential of the material world of the asylum.
