Making & Doing Sessions at the 12th ToE Conference, 2026

At the 12th Tensions of Europe Conference in Eindhoven, we tried something new. Throughout the conference, the Making and Doing History programme created space for comics, museum objects, walking, creative writing, photography, digital experiments, dialogue and dance alongside more conventional conference formats. This track made visible the wide variety of experimental work that happens by members of the Tensions of Europe community, but which is nevertheless rarely presented as historical scholarship at Tensions conferences. By developing the Making and Doing program, we – organizers and all contributors – wondered what would happen if we gave this work a shared space within the conference and treated formats such as walks, workshops, objects and dialogues as ways of producing historical knowledge. How could this help us think about the role of historiography in contemporary global and interconnected challenges, experiment with how history becomes active, and generate insights, methods and materials that participants could take back into their own work?

As a first takeaway, one of the participants in the closing discussion on this program at the end of the conference observed that conferences are normally often considered to be most productive during the coffee breaks. Making and Doing offered spaces in which those conversations could continue, take shape and become generative of new work and collaborations: around objects, images, maps and experiments, with participants actively making and thinking together.