When I decided to explore the transnational nature of the welfare state for my project, the transnational elements I expected to be tracking were the ideas spreading across borders and the networks that facilitated them. However, this is a lot easier said than done. After a lot of research I realised that tracing when and where ideas move from A to B can sometimes prove to be nearly impossible due to the fact that the transfer of these ideas is not always well documented. It can be easy to see a common theme across borders and propose a transnational link (e.g. the fact that so many European countries started implementing social reforms on such a large scale post-1945) but finding solid evidence to support this link is much harder.
\nAfter struggling with this for a while, I came to the conclusion that tracing the movement of ideas is challenging because by their very nature they are fairly elusive and are not often written about as often as people. Therefore, I thought that perhaps the best way to explore the movement of ideas for my project was through examining the \u2018border crossings\u2019 (as Patricia Clavin described it) where actors engage and influence one another. This is the reason why I have chosen to focus on one particular episode for my project, with David Lloyd George\u2019s 1908 visit to Germany, as this narrow focus is personally the most effective method I have encountered so far.
\nHowever, with such a narrow focus on one episode, it seems inevitable that I will end up using microhistory in my project. On the one hand, this is really exciting as I have always loved the powerful narrative and immediacy of microhistory. But on the other hand, this is fairly daunting. Microhistory sometimes gets called out for becoming too lost in its own narrative and losing sight of the bigger historical picture. This is something I definitely do not want to happen with my project. Therefore, I think the biggest challenge I will face in the next few weeks is thinking about how to appropriately bridge microhistory with the macro picture.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When I decided to explore the transnational nature of the welfare state for my project, the transnational elements I expected to be tracking were the ideas spreading across borders and the networks that facilitated them. However, this is a lot<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[137,114,72,138,119],"class_list":["post-581","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-macro","tag-microhistory","tag-narrative","tag-patricia-clavin","tag-welfare-state"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5wNtZ-9n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/581","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=581"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/581\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":623,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/581\/revisions\/623"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=581"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=581"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=581"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}