Encounters Conference

|8th & 9th December 2022|

Join Us Online…

This two-day conference will host leading, interdisciplinary research presentations from across the arts and social sciences, from Classics to contemporary fieldwork.

Free for all to attend, this conference includes professional training from sought-after CHASE providers and wellbeing sessions inclusive of all ages.

Day One Programme - Thursday 8th December

Please note: the conference programme is subject to change at any point before or during the conference itself.

Introduction from CHASE

Overview from Conference Lead Milly regarding conference layout, programme and commitment to accessibility.

9:00 - 9:20 Welcome Announcements

9:20 - 9:45 Welcome to the Cohort (Work in Progress Presentations)

Chair: Milly Mulcahey, Center for Indigenous and Settler Colonial Studies, Kent University

Connor McClenan Staging Autism: A reflection on the theory and practice behind staging Shakespeare through an autistic critical lens.

+ Abstract

In my presentation, I plan to detail my experiences during my MA Theatre Directing Final Project, which formed the foundations upon which my PhD Research is built. I shall discuss my investigation around the effectiveness of British theatre director Katie Mitchell's directorial methodology in the exploration and reclamation of staged autistic identities, and the observations and discoveries I made during this process. I shall share with the conference the practical and theoretical challenges faced during my investigation, which involved staging an adaptation of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night with autistic re-imaginings of two characters, and how working effectively and collaboratively with my neurodiverse cast on this project directly informed the development of my current PhD Research.

Connor Mccleanan is a First Year Drama Practice Research PhD within the School of Art at the University of Kent.

Erica Piasecka Pained Bodies, Pained Worlds: A Feminist Phenomenological Investigation of ‘Being-With’ Chronic Pain in Live Art and Performance.

+ Abstract

I am based at UEA and my research concerns chronic pain in live art and performance. My focus is on artworks that, by engaging in a queer discourse on chronic pain as a non-normative experience, problematise the requirement for pained bodies to enact their pain in specific ways in order to access treatment and support. In this way, I hope to move away from dominant narratives that present chronic pain as an individual problem at a time where pain and pain-related diseases are the leading cause of global disability and disease. The concept of 'being-with' is central to my overall theoretical framework, which will draw on feminist phenomenology of illness to understand chronic pain from a relational perspective, foregrounding encounters between pained bodies, non-pained bodies and the world in the space of performance. Since ‘being-with’ is crucial to the phenomenology of Martin Heidegger, a large part of what I’m doing at the moment involves reading Being and Time and trying to think about ways to develop a critical response.

Erica Piasecka is in the first year of her PhD at the University of East Anglia. Her research focuses on chronic pain in live art and performance and draws on feminist phenomenology of illness to understand chronic pain from a relational perspective through the concept of ‘being-with’.

Emma Rose Kraus A Method for Madness

+ Abstract

Emma Rose Kraus is a PhD candidate at the University of Kent’s Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies (MEMS). Her thesis project (conducted in association with The Oxford Marlowe) examines performances of madness in contemporary productions of early modern drama under the supervision of Dr Sarah Dastageer, Dr Rory Loughnane, and Professor Chrissie Rogers.

9:50 - 10:50am Room One: The Positionality of the Researcher

  • After two years of digital research conducted during the Covid-19 pandemic, in May 2022 I embarked on an in-person apprenticeship at the AfricaMuseum (Tervuren, Belgium), where I could experience what the so-called ‘new normal’ meant for the personnel working in the museum and, especially, for researchers. Based on my personal experience, the overarching questions I will address and explore in this work- in-progress session are: to what extent will scholars return to in-person research? And when they do, how long will they stay (or are they allowed to stay), and what type of visit will suit them best?

    Bio: Deborah Dainese is a CHASE-DTP funded part-time PhD candidate at the University of East Anglia, Sainsbury Research Unit for the Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas. In her research she focusses on retrieving the life and activities of the Congolese sculptor Mashitolo mwata Zola (1915ca - ?), who worked in the Kwango- Kwilu areas (present-day southern Democratic Republic of Congo) during the mid-20th century.

Chair Olivia Andrew

  • "Traditional academic writing conventions have frequently emphasised the importance of minimising writer presence in order to achieve greater objectivity and authority. This can often be seen in writers distancing themselves rhetorically using an agentless or passive voice (Leggatt-Cook 2010). However, the nature of academic writing for health and social care students requires them to combine theoretical knowledge with reflection on their own lived experiences of practice in care settings. While traditional gatekeepers might try to exclude these more personal voices, perhaps they are essential if we are to understand different types of knowledge. There is little consensus about voice and how to express it, except that it is important (Robbins 2016). For health and social care student writers the challenge is not only to develop their Higher Education voice, but to synthesise constantly evolving personal, academic and professional identities in their writing. The closeness of the relationship between nurses and patients means it is not value free – should this be reflected in a new normal for health and social care academic writing conventions? This session provides an update on research into writer identity and reports on participants experiences of self-representation in writing.

    Bio: Caroline Hawthorne is an Academic Skills Tutor at the University of Essex. She contributes to a range of UG and PG modules, working with both home and international students. Caroline’s research focuses on the writing experiences of health and social care student writers at university.

    References

    Leggatt-Cook, C. (2010). An uncertain balance: Negotiating theory, politics and love in academic writing. Feminism & Psychology, 21(3), 393–410.

    Robbins, S. P. (2016). Finding your voice as an academic writer (and writing clearly). Journal of Social Work Education, 52(2), 133–135."

  • Lawyers undertaking doctoral studies focusing on the courts in which they have practise experience is unsurprising and ‘normal’. However, having completed my fieldwork – consisting of court observation and interviews – I wish to reflect on how my fieldwork was both assisted and hindered by my positionality as a lawyer, as well as the ways in which structural inequalities might impeded more diverse perspectives.

    Bio: Vanessa is a barrister and PhD student at the University of Sussex where her research focuses on social class and socioeconomic inequality in the UK criminal justice system.

  • In this brief talk, I will examine the epistemic position of the socially privileged progressives to reveal how they are ignorant despite their privileged social position. Using the idea of the ‘standpoint theory’ in feminist epistemology, I will argue that the socially privileged do not have a standpoint, so they are ignorant of their privileged dominant position in society. I start with the idea of the ‘situated knowledge’ as a central claim of the feminist epistemology to introduce the feminist standpoint theory. Then I extract the foundations of the idea of standpoint in Marxist theory. I will apply the methodology of standpoint theory to the case of the encounter between a well-intentioned progressive person and a marginalised, oppressed person. This will help the overall aim of this paper to examine the cause of the ignorance on the part of the progressive privileged knower. Feminist epistemologists distinguish between a standpoint and a perspective; meaning that every knower could have a perspective, but only some knowers have achieved a standpoint. So, I will argue that despite having perspectives, the privileged progressives have no standpoint, so they inadvertently perpetuate epistemic oppression towards marginalised subjects.

    Keywords: Social Epistemology, Feminist Standpoint Theory, Situated Knowledge, Epistemic Oppression, Ignorance

    Bio: I am a philosophy student at Birkbeck college in London, returned to academic research after more than a decade of professional work as a journalist and media practitioner. My research interests are social and political epistemology, with the focus on feminist epistemology. In the search for the relation between power and knowledge, I philosophise the question that ‘how well-intentioned progressive people epistemically oppress marginalised groups?’

9:50 - 10:50am Room Two: Interpreting the Arts as Researcher & Practitioner

Chair Rob Witts

  • In this presentation I’ll discuss the experience of doing a Collaborative Doctoral Award between the University of Kent and Wellcome Collection, working with the zines in Wellcome Library. After giving some context to the project and a brief outline of work and progress so far, I’ll consider the project’s goals from the perspective of Wellcome Collection, and how my identity as a zine maker and zine librarian, with my own zines in Wellcome Library’s collection, shapes my research and the projects’ outcomes. I’ll explore how to assess the strength of a zine collection, drawing from my experience in other zine libraries and collections. I’ll end by considering how orientation, how users navigate zine collections as researchers or otherwise, has become a key idea both in this project and in my wider work.

    Bio: Lea (as in sea, aka Lilith) Cooper is a zine maker, zine librarian at Edinburgh Zine Library, and zine researcher, currently in their third year of a collaborative PhD between the University of Kent and Wellcome Collection. They live on the Fife coast. You can find their work at www.zinejam.com and they are on twitter at @lilithjcooper.

  • Jazz, education and practice: how gender and diversity are creating and challenging the ‘New Normal’

    Preliminary fieldwork at the start of my CDA has shown that conversations around jazz, gender, and intersectionality have never been more prevalent. My CDA partner organisation is leading the way on many of these issues and will be invaluable both through collaboration and the facilitation of my research into the lived experience of women and gender non- conforming musicians in contemporary UK jazz.

    In this presentation I will introduce my topic, my partner organisation , show how we have connected so far and share some of my early findings.

    Bio: Naadia Sheriff is a UK Jazz Pianist, Composer, Musical Director Arranger, and educator. She is a founder member of Yazz Ahmed’s Hafla band with whom she appears on the Jazz FM award winning album ‘Polyhymnia’ and in tribute to Chick Corea on the recent Bluenote “Re-imagined volume II’

    Naadia teaches at St Paul’s Girls’ school and is an ABRSM examiner. Her initiative ‘Kids Concert Club’ supports young people from East London in performance and community music and in 2020 received a national lottery grant.

    Naadia is currently a doctoral researcher at the University of Kent researching ‘Women in Contemporary UK Jazz’

    https://www.naadiasheriff.com

  • Bio: Raquel Morais studied Literature (University of Lisbon) and Film (Birkbeck). She has been working in cinema related activities (distribution, exhibition) since 2014 in Portuguese and international institutions, such as the ICA, London. Morais is currently part of the programming team of the Essay Film Festival.

11:00 - 12:00 Wellbeing Sessions

Room One: Yoga - Embrace the True Self | Hypnosis - Become Who You Are

led by Cass XuXin

"...Hypnosis is the art of presenting ideas directly to the receptive unconscious mind..." This session, delivered by Cass XuXin, combines ancient practice YogaNidrã and modern science based Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapy. MesmeRest delivers a Therapeutic Deep Relaxation, bringing IMMEDIATE physical and emotional benefits, melting away stress, fear, pain and anxiety.

Room Two: Mindfulness Art: Look, Listen, Make led by Hanna Randall

No art skills or creativity required! In this session, you will be introduced to looking closely at one artwork and listening closely to a piece of music through short guided meditations and guided art making prompts. Art making with mindfulness invites us to be more fully aware of our sensory experience: the lines and shapes of the image or sound, the movement and touch of your pencil or brush, the rise and fall of the breath as you create, your bodily movements and sensations in response to the artwork. Coming into our senses like this can help us to feel more focused and grounded, creating a positive effect on our sense of wellbeing. Please bring any art making equipment that appeals to you to the session, preferably non-3D mediums such as pencils, pens, and paints, as well as paper to work on or any other surface.

Room Three: Plant your Wellbeing, Easy Ways to Grow your own Indoor Wellbeing Jungle

Host, Harry Salisbury - Climate Justice Network

Hosted by the Climate Justice Network, this session is lead by the Kent Community Oasis Garden. Discover the value of curating your own green space and learn affordable and zero cost ways to pick and propagate plants - from spider plants to succulents and even tips for growing your own apple tree.

12:00 - 1:00 LUNCH

1:00 - 2:30pm Room One: Understanding Change within Artistic Media

  • "How does the new become normal in historical sources? Texts on yoga from the first half of the second millennium innovate by recording physical practice. As well as this overall innovation, change occurs within the corpus. These changes relate to both physical practice and the yogic body, the models of the body on which praxis is based. Processes of marginalisation also figure in these sources.

    The first source text for these practices, the 11th century Amṛtasiddhi, is itself marginal, arising in an outlier sect of vajrayāna as shown by James Mallinson (2016). By the end of this period, in the 1450 Haṭhapradīpikā, these practices have become the new normal. Subsequently these teachings are expanded and disseminated to an ever-wider audience in South Asia, culminating in modernity’s globalisation – or glocalisation – of yoga. / Within the early second millennium sources the sectarian affiliations both determine the reorientation of praxis and are themselves written out. This paper outlines the technical processes of manuscript culture that incorporate change: the birch bark and palm leave manuscripts that must be copied out afresh every two to three hundred years providing opportunity for amendment and error, and the academic process of manuscript collection, comparison and collation that reveal change whether textual re-use or fresh authorship. Yet the influence of the orality of the culture is harder to trace. To reveal these processes at play I chart changes in vajrolīmudrā, the upward urethral suction of sexual fluids, that sometimes involves ritualised sex, in the Amṛtasiddhi, Dattātreyayogaśāstra, Śārṅgadharapaddhati and Haṭhapradīpikā."

    Bio: Ruth Westoby is a CHASE-funded doctoral candidate in the School of History, Religions and Philosophies at SOAS, University of London. Her research project is titled, ‘Bodies in early haṭha yoga’, an intellectual history of the yogic body in premodern Sanskrit sources on haṭha yoga.

Chair Jessica Coulson

  • My research focuses on the ancient Greek historian, Thucydides, who wrote The History of the Peloponnesian War in the fifth century BCE. Since he is often cited as a forefather of International Relations for his resonance with the ideas of Realpolitik, it is easy to overlook the vividness, or enargeia, for which he was renowned among ancient audiences. At paradigmatic moments in his narrative, Thucydides offers points of excitement, colour and deep pathos. My research has developed insights from recent scholarship on Thucydides’ style, based on narratological and rhetorical analyses, to examine the specifically sensory nature of his work. My thesis explores how the theory of sensory assemblage (from archaeology) and concepts of enactivism and immersivity (from cognitive and literary studies) might be combined usefully to understand the sensory nature of audience experience. My key findings lie in the networking of not only the conventional five sense hierarchy but also elements of space and place, movement and time. Through this my research seeks to understand better the emotional affectivity of Thucydides work for his audience and refine our interpretations of his account of the war.

    Bio: Liz is in her final year of a part-time PhD in the department of Classical Studies at The Open University. Her research interests include historiography, ancient Greece and sensory studies.

  • The impact of German theories of perception and subjectivity on British public art galleries and state arts education has yet to be fully explored by existing scholarship, particularly for cities beyond London. Across Britain in the mid nineteenth century, German theories of vision fuelled debates about the purpose and definition of art, aesthetics and the role of art in society. This period also saw the first debates about state arts education, and the new role of public museums and galleries as educators - debates which continue to be revisited to this day. The connection of the British art world with Germany is an instructive case study in transnational influence and the processes of individual and institutional dialogue by which this occurs. The cosmopolitan and rapidly expanding commercial and civic centre of Manchester presented a very particular cultural context, with a significant German migrant population. Across the civic and social institutions of the city, the German intellectual presence was widely in evidence. / In this paper I will focus on Manchester’s Albert Memorial, the current major renovation of which is in itself symbolic of the re-evaluation of this historical period and the renewed importance of civic spaces. This public monument speaks of the relationship

    between the individual and society, which was much debated by the Victorians, and has been brought into sharp focus by the pandemic. Instigated as a civic project, for the betterment of the people, as I shall explore, it was also a monument to the contribution of a German national to the development Manchester’s arts and arts education. It is thecreative participation of the individual in reading the monument and constructing their own personal concept of it, that gave, and continues to give, validity and life to the vision of its creators.

    Bio: Kate Stubbs is a part-time CHASE funded PhD student in the Essex School of Philosophy and Art History. She has a background in secondary school and Sixth Form leadership, and art teaching. Currently she works part time in school marketing and communications.

    References

    Avery-Quash, Suzanne & Alan Cookham, “Art Beyond the Nation. A European Vision for the National Gallery” in The Museum is Open, Towards a Transnational History of Museums 1750-1940, edited by Andrea Meyer & Benedicte Savoy, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014, pp 165-179.

    Bennett, Tony, “Civic Seeing – Museums and the Organisation of Vision”, in A Companion to Museum Studies, edited by Sharon Macdonald, London: Wiley & Blackwell, 2010, pp263-282.

    Bennett, Tony, et al., Culture, Class, Distinction, London & New York: Routledge, 2009. Davis, John, R. The Victorians and Germany, Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007. Klonk, Charlotte, Spaces of Experience, Art Gallery Interiors from 1800 to 2000, New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2009.

    McClellan, Andrew, Inventing the Louvre, Art, Politics and the Origins of the Modern Museum in Eighteenth-Century Paris, Cambridge University Press, 1994.

    Noordegraaf, Julia, Strategies of Display, Museum Presentation in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Visual Culture, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen publication, 2004.

    Pergam, Elizabeth, The Manchester Art treasures Exhibition of 1857, Entrepreneurs, Connoisseurs and the Public, London & New York, Routledge, 2011.

    Waterfield, Giles, The People’s Galleries, Art Museums and Exhibitions in Britain, 1800- 1914, New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2015.

1:00 - 2:30pm Room Two: Research as Creative Practice

Chair Rebecca Buckle

  • Bio: Laurenne is a second year doctoral researcher in the School of Law at the University of Sussex. Her research is focused on reproductive rights in West Africa, considering the impact (or lack thereof) of the Maputo Protocol's radical right to abortion and the ways in which reproductive freedom might be reconceived and secured.

  • I offer this as a work in progress and a glimpse into some of the fragments from my practice- based research on Black women’s spaces of hair care in London as spaces of Black feminist world-making and orientation in Diaspora. / Through a focus on my current exhibition, Intimate Archives, at the Horniman Museum and Gardens, I invite us to sit with and listen to the archival images from personal and found archives and the museum collection. I will share Images and fragments of soundscapes from my work in order to signal ways of knowing that offer possibilities for re-imagining our histories and futures. How can we challenge and disrupt Museum practices? What can we learn from Black women’s archives? What ‘new normal’ can Black women’s geographies point and orientate us towards, if only we listened? Some of the themes I will explore include; time outside of its colonial constructs, care, collaboration and futurity.

    Bio: "Rambisayi Marufu is a holistic therapist and a practiced-based PhD student at Goldsmiths university. Her work locates African Diasporic hair salons in London as intimate sites of Black feminist world-making and re-orientation. Rambisayi's practice brings together people, sound, photography, film, and imagination to illuminate multiple modes of knowing and being."

  • After heated debates about the rewriting of the museum definition at the international conference in 2019 in Kyoto, the International Council of Museums has finally voted for the proposed new definition of the museum during the Prague international conference in August 2022. The new definition states that museums are “not-for-profit, permanent institution[s] in the service of society that research, collect, conserve, interpret and exhibit tangible and intangible heritage”. To these words were added the concepts of ‘accessibility’, ‘inclusivity’, ‘diversity’ and ‘sustainability’. Finally, the definition stresses that museums are institutions which have to “operate and communicate ethically”. Following the new definition and the inclusion of several new terms and concepts, what does it mean for museums to be defined as such in 2022? How does the new definition fit within the decolonial agenda? How will it impact museums in their methods and practice? This paper will look at the ongoing changes in museum institutions in reaction to the new ICOM definition and the current global context.

    Considering specific examples within museums of ethnography and world cultures in Europe will allow me to understand how the new definition was based on existing museum practices but will also act as a guide for best practice.

    Bio

    Clémentine is a student at the Sainsbury Research Unit at UEA, working on a project titled 'Archival Future: Pacific Artistic Collaborations with(in) the Contemporary Museum of Ethnography'.She is co-founder of the blog and association CASOAR which received the French National Institute for Art History’s 2022 scholarship for young researchers.

    References:

    Fraser, John, 2019. A Discomforting Definition of Museum. Curator: The Museum Journal, 62(4), 501-504.

    Modest, Wayne, Thomas, Nicholas, Prlić, Doris and Claudia Augustat (eds), 2019. Matters of Belonging: Ethnographic Museums in a Changing Europe. Leiden: Sidestone Press.

  • This will be an Informal lecture to tell the story of the evolution of my book with a few pictures and by reading short extracts from the book.

    In 2019, I started to write my book about an enigmatic Edwardian, Harry Bensley, who ‘walked the world’ wearing an iron mask and pushing a pram. This man had been a figure of fascination for me ever since I had heard his story down the local pub eight years previously. The oral history handed down was of an aristocratic gentleman who had accepted a wager of £21000 to walk around the world incognito wearing an iron mask. The people who set the wager were none other than J.P. Morgan and Lord Lonsdale. They gave him strict criteria, such as he must visit three towns in each English county. He also had to find a wife on his journey who would marry him sight unseen. He found his wife and, so the story goes, only stopped his journey WW1 broke out to fight for his country. / What more could a storyteller need? There was mystery, romance and patriotism. The only problem was that most of it was bunkum. He did walk around much of England (6000 miles) wearing an iron mask and pushing a pram but only to raise money after his release from jail. Bensley was a bigamist and serial fraudster, with a back story that was almost as exciting as his made-up story. I decided to investigate.

    The original plan was to visit the places he lived and to write psychogeographical chapters to include biography, geography and history. Because I discovered parallels with my life and the life of the women Bensley mistreated, I decided to add past memories about my relationship with my children’s father and lightly touch on my present day struggles of living with my husband and four children.

    This process worked well for the first three chapters. But then lockdown hit. How was I supposed to write about places I couldn’t visit?

    I had also promised myself, I would write this book with action as its central core – now I was tied to the desk. Wasn’t there something I could do? I attempted re-enaction and dressed as one of Bensley’s wives but, more importantly, my family and our interactions came to play a central role. There wasn’t much choice as during the next eighteen months, we experienced two assaults and one mental breakdown resulting in sectioning.

    As I recounted these things in my book, alongside the story of Bensley, something else began to emerge: the power of imagination. Imagination allowed me to envision one of Bensley’s wives as an ally who could help me through the process of telling Bensley’s story and give me support when I was the only one capable of keeping the family safe. Imagination allowed me to immerse myself in Bensley’s story when everything else was falling apart.

    Bio: Petra McQueen is a second-year CHASE funded PhD researcher specialising in Creative Nonfiction at Essex University. She has a BA(hons) Drama from the University of Wales, Aberystwyth and her Creative Writing MA was completed at Essex. For the last thirty years she has been both a writer and teacher and is the founder of The Writers Company: an affiliation of creative writing teachers and manuscript assessment specialists.

2:35 - 3:10pm Room One: Introduction to Brief Encounters

Brief Encounters is looking for you! 

The editors of Brief Encounters will briefly introduce the journal - its scope, its nature, and its mission. They will talk about the upcoming issue, and discuss the new call for peer-reviewers

2:35 - 3:10pm Room Two: Tensions between Representation and Reality

  • My project is about visual archives deriving from the fieldwork of three anthropologists (Gregory Bateson, Reo Fortune and Margaret Mead) in Papua New Guinea between 1929 and 1938. These archives have the potential to shed new light on Indigenous agencies in colonial photographic archives. I will particularly focus on historical and relational processes as well as the contexts of circulation of these archives. Through different methodologies, my aim is to interrogate the photographic act in which photographed subjects are seen but silenced, and thereby recover Indigenous voices and agencies. By doing so, the research will activate the potential of these archives to reconnect past and present Indigenous agencies and bring new perspectives into current and important discussions on decolonising archives.

    Bio: I am a PhD student at the Sainsbury Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. I graduated from both Art History at the Ecole du Louvre, Paris and Social Anthropology at the Université Paris-Nanterre. My studies focus mainly on visual archives, the intertwined colonial history of anthropology and photography. I am a co-founder and writer for the blog and association CASOAR which was the recipient in 2022 of a residency for young researchers at the French National Institute for Art History in Paris.

Chair Erica Piasecka

  • I intend to provide an overview of some of the emergent debates in, and beyond, queer theory. Whilst queer theory has, since the 1990s, defined ‘queer’ as anything that is oppositional to the norm, emergent queer voices within literature have increasingly appealed to the right for queer people to have the choice to live a normative and even conservative life. The purpose of my short talk is to attend to these tensions and the questions they raise about who is entitled to the elusive notion of ‘normalcy’, and to what effect.

    Bio: Genevieve Smart is a Literature PhD student at Birkbeck, University of London studying non-female childbirth in the avant-garde under the supervision of Professor Jacqueline Rose and Professor Jo Winning.

3:30 - 5:00pm Training Sessions

Room One: Managing your Workload as a Neurodivergent Person

Host: Jack Rutherford, Diversity Network

This unique session will be delivered by Alba Jato from PTSD to PHD providing creative, practical, and transformative project management solutions for neurodivergent and non-neurodivergent students alike.

Alba Shares: “ As a neurodivergent PhD student, I have encountered many unique challenges with organizing and managing my data, time, and productivity - not to mention managing my triggers, anxiety, depression, executive dysfunction, and an attention span comparable to that of a golden retriever.

Fortunately enough, I am also an efficiency enthusiast with a knack for GANTT charts. I will help you to be effective, efficient and productive by providing solutions for time management and organisation tools that will make your life easier. I offer workshops, planners and blog articles that will help you write effectively, research efficiently, and perhaps more importantly, harness your unique abilities in a way that empowers you.


As my slogan says, I came, I freaked out, I conquered.

Room Two: Taster Creative Journaling Workshop for Researchers - Magnetic Ideals and Arts for Life

This taster session for the longer course on creative journaling will address how we can externalise inner thoughts through the practice of regular creative journaling.  In this context, a journal can be viewed as a flexible instrument of personal, academic and creative insights. Considering how reflective journaling aids in developing critical thinking skills, reducing anxiety and improving memory. 

Learning these creative journalling skills creates a space to explore and develop ideas. This can be useful in practice-based PhDs for documenting the creative process and also for demonstrating progress for upgrades and supervision meetings. Through some quick practical exercises, we will explore how creative journaling can open sensory awareness, emotional expression, and creative exploration. Participants do not have to be skilled in drawing or painting, but you will need a pen and paper! Researchers will be given a chance to respond to their own research and reflect on their insights with others.

This session will be run by Expressive Artist and Researcher Kirsty Lumm (Arts for Life) and Independant Academic and Researcher Activist Dr Heather McKnight (Magnetic Ideals)

Example Journal Pages - A breadth of topics and journal skills will be discussed.

Room Three: Getting Published: How to Write a Paper - True North

This session is capped to 20, and is only available for CHASE students and so has a separate Eventbrite page - please sign up here.

Writing research papers as a doctoral student can be daunting. In this one-hour introduction to getting published, you’ll explore your own research for potential topics for papers or articles. Can you extract one – or more – ideas that are original, rigorous and of value to your peers? We’ll also discuss what editors want (and don’t want) and reflect on how you might package your ideas in a way that’s enticing to editors and readers alike. You’ll learn how to:

  • Be succinct: craft a compelling take-home message and state it upfront.

  • Think about who your idea will interest – and then say why.

This session will be facilitated by Marina Benjamin from True North – a team of writers who deliver workshops that bring creative writing techniques to academic writing and research.