Virtual Encounters | 24-25 June
Hosted by the University of East Anglia
Day 2 Thursday 25 June 2021
09:00-9:30 | Welcome and announcements
09:30-10:30| Keynote 2: Dan Hicks
Chair Matthew Jones
“Dan Hicks FSA, MCIfA (born 1972) is Professor of Contemporary Archaeology at the University of Oxford, Curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum, and a Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford. Dan works on the material and visual culture of the human past, up to and including the modern, colonial, contemporary and digital world, and on the history of Archaeology, Anthropology Art, and Architecture. His curatorial work has ranged widely, and most recently included the co-curated exhibition and book Lande: the Calais “Jungle” and Beyond in 2019.”
Dan will talk on ‘Is an Anti-Colonial University possible?’
11:00-12:00 | Parallel sessions 1
1A. Room 1 | Decolonise, Feminist, Diversity and Climate Action Networks meeting
The CHASE Decolonise Network, Feminist Network, Diversity Network and the Climate Justice Network as well as the CHASE Student Committee propose putting on a joint network session in which we will discuss the key themes of the conference and how they relate to the lived practice of CHASE and CHASE institutions. For this session, the networks will talk about the state of the networks, particularly over the lockdown, and the difficulties they have faced in the past year.
THIS SESSION CONTINUES AFTER LUNCH IN PARALLEL SESSION 2A
1B. Room 2 | Education Network session – Digital Research Methods
Organisers: Chloe Cheetham (Goldsmiths), Ayisha Ahmed (SOAS)
With the coronavirus forcing many researchers to reconsider how they conduct their research, this workshop will be exploring the possibilities and prospects of using digital ethnography as a means of data collection. This workshop will be of use to all researchers planning their future fieldwork as well as those whose face-to-face research has been disrupted due to the pandemic. This workshop is open to all, not just those in the Education network.
The Education network is pleased to welcome Dr Aminul Hoque and Yang Zhang (both Goldsmiths, University of London) to share their experiences of conducting ethnographic research using digital methods.
Aminul will deliver a workshop aimed at answering the following questions:
What are the considerations, possibilities and limits when using digital methods for research?
How can digital methods be used for participant observation, and what are the ethics involved in this?
Does data gathered via digital methods alone form a valid basis for an ethnography?
Does a lack of face-to-face fieldwork call into question the legitimacy of one's academic training?
Aminul and Yang will then be available for questions about using digital methods which may relate to your own research in the arts, humanities and social sciences.
SPEAKERS
Dr Aminul Hoque MBE lectures in the Educational Studies department at Goldsmiths, University of London. Aminul’s work focuses on multicultural Britain, identity, social justice, youth policy, religion, race relations and Islamic feminism. He is currently engaged in two research projects using digital ethnography. More information about Aminul is available here: https://www.gold.ac.uk/educational-studies/staff/hoque/
Yang Zhang is a sociocultural linguistics PhD student at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her study uses linguistic ethnography to explore how Chinese young men use their everyday conversation with their close male friends to perform their identities and masculinities. Yang used digital methods for her ethnographic data collection including recording and social media.
ORGANISER BIOGRAPHIES
Chloe Cheetham is studying Applied Linguistics at Goldsmiths, University of London, alongside her role as a primary school teacher. She is using linguistic ethnography to explore the discursive practices of a class of Year 6 children, looking at gender and leadership.
Ayisha Ahmed’s doctoral research is on education reform, missionary history and student aspirations in Ghana. She is currently in her second year at SOAS in the department for Anthropology and Sociology.
1C. Room 3 | Panel discussion: Expanding our research horizons and building community (through medieval French).
Organiser: Jessica Honey (University of East Anglia)
Over the past nine months, a group of researchers from CHASE institutions (and further afield!) have shared a series of sessions designed to develop their skills in the arcane arts of reading medieval French texts in the original language. This session will share some of the results of this process, as attendees present on their own engagement with sources that share the connection of being written in the French of centuries past. It will also, however, look to highlight the importance of our own networks of research, especially within the context of Covid-19. Thanks to the move online, the group has been able to welcome researchers from around the world, which has led to a diverse range of texts and topics being covered, and has -- as the presentations themselves will show -- provided the impetus for a supportive network of medievalists to come together and, without even realising it, guide each other's research.
Contributors:
Ségolène Gence, CHASE-funded 1st Year PhD student at the University of Kent, works on the transmission and translation history of a Middle English devotional text, the Mirror of Holy Church. Ségolène will discuss how this course will help her in her approach to the Anglo-Norman source text and to her linguistic analysis of the English text.
Katrin Kania wrote her PhD thesis about medieval garments, which requires looking at a large range of source materials from all over Europe. She will speak about the benefit of coming in from the fringes, having at least rudimentary language skills in other languages, and the importance of having a solid network of people to ask.
Jessica Honey, CHASE-funded 1st year PhD student at the University of East Anglia, works on Chaucer and his reception of Latin humanist historiography. She will discuss how this course enabled her to write an unexpected thesis chapter on a medieval French translation of one of the key texts in her thesis.
Jack Newman is a final year CHASE Doctoral Candidate at the University of Kent and the University of London. His paper will explore a reconsideration of an early fourteenth century political poem which has been called the first in the Robin Hood tradition.
The session will be chaired by Edward Mills, Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Exeter, who devised and delivered the course.
1D. Room 4 | Network meeting: Love, Care and Mutual Aid: Resisting State Reliance and Violence
Organiser: Baljit Kaur (University of Sussex)
This proposal is for the network meeting (one hour) hosted by Baljit Kaur, Samantha Pointon and Dr. Jade Lee. Baljit Kaur is a third-year doctoral researcher in the department of Cultural Studies at the University of Sussex. Samantha Pointon is a freelance writer and will be joining the doctoral programme at the University of Essex in 2022. Sam has previously written for the CHASE Feminist blog and has collaborated with Baljit on a workshop for the CHASE Feminist Sharing Research and Practice Event (February 2021). Dr. Jade Lee is a CHASE and SOAS University Aluma, and also the Director of Aurora Learning.
This network meeting will be centred around the recently organised series: Love, Care and Mutual Aid: Resisting State Reliance and Violence. The series was funded by the CHASE Feminist Network open specifically to women doctoral researchers*, and ran over the course of 6 weeks (6th May – 10th June 2021). The series emerged in light of state responses to Nicole Smallman and Bibaa Henry, and more recently, Sarah Everard, and the subsequent (gendered) violence towards protestors and students in the University. The aim was primarily to provide a space to talk about these experiences which many of us live through and are impacted by vicariously. Additionally, it was also an opportunity to create a space for mutual aid; sharing knowledge, resources, educating and raising awareness in a way that isn’t overwhelmingly academic but intended to bridge the gaps between the academy and the communities with which we are in. To do this, we invited and collaborated with professionals and activists in the community who contributed to sharing knowledge and practice and encouraged student-led discussions in the sessions.
The purpose of this network meeting is to therefore share our reflections with regards to organising such projects and what this entails, the content covered in the duration of the series as well as its successes and learning points for the future, and importantly, what is at stake when opportunities for mutuality do not exist, particularly in the context of state violence and the pandemic. In sharing these reflections, we hope to gain more interest from women doctoral researchers so that we can continue to run the series, and fundamentally, open discussion about how we can organise similar mutual aid groups across our home institutions and maintain a sense of community in incredibly unsettling times.
* open to all women (trans, intersex and cis) and all nonbinary, agender and gender variant people.
**Cancelled** 1E. Room 5 | Brief Encounters Launch Event Cancelled
Sandy Balfour | University of East Anglia
Launch event for Brief Encounters 5, featuring presentations and Q&As with authors
13:00-14:30 | Parallel sessions 2
2A. Room 1 | Decolonise, Feminist, Diversity and Climate Action Networks meeting
CONTINUED FROM EARLIER PARALLEL SESSION 1A.
The CHASE Decolonise Network, Feminist Network, Diversity Network and the Climate Justice Network as well as the CHASE Student Committee continue their conversations to reflect on how the networks have contributed to the experiences of the CHASE researcher community over the past year and how the work they do contributes to the lived practice of CHASE and CHASE institutions. In this session, the networks will facilitate open discussions about the ongoing journeys of the networks, how they might collaborate, and how the networks hope to develop as we all go into a 'new normal'.
2B. Room 2 | Presentations: History | Chair: Sarah Sharp (UEA)
Alex Cruikshanks | University of East Anglia
The Carrington Conference in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and the Lasting Impact of Small Decisions
In September 1991, the European Community appointed Lord Peter Carrington, the former British Foreign Secretary, to chair a new peace Conference to attempt to mediate a resolution to the then recent outbreak of violence in the collapsing Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. While it was the central republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina that would eventually see by far the worst violence, for the moment tensions there remained below the surface, and so Carrington and his negotiating team largely ignored it for several months. This would prove to be just one of a series of disastrous decisions taken by the international negotiators – decisions that at the time, likely seemed to them relatively small choices to render the peace talks a simpler undertaking, and indeed most were taken in the space of just a few short weeks in February and March 1992. But instead, the competing Bosnian political elites often took these choices as endorsements of their own political and military goals. In particular, Carrington’s decision to limit participation in negotiations to the three parties then in the governing coalition – all nationalists – would help cement a colonial-esque vision of Bosnia as a space inextricably divided between three armed ethnic camps – a vision both Carrington himself and his successors right up to the present day would struggle to row back from.
This presentation, which will be based significantly on my recently completed chapter on Lord Carrington’s diplomatic worldview, would be an opportunity to explore and explain those few weeks of early 1992, and their impact for the region for many years thereafter, in greater detail.
Speaker Bio: I am currently in my third year of study at the History Department in the University of East Anglia, supervised by Professor Cathie Carmichael. I also host and produce The History of Yugoslavia, a regular podcast narrating the history of the Western Balkans since the late Eighteenth Century, which as at the time of writing been downloaded over 350,000 times.
Jon Winder | University of Kent
Revisiting the playground – Charles Wicksteed, manufactured play equipment and the creation of dedicated spaces for children to play in interwar Britain
Children’s playgrounds are a ubiquitous feature of British towns and cities. And yet the politics and values that have informed their creation, purpose and form have rarely been considered by scholars, practitioners or the wider public. Drawing on archive materials from social reformers, park superintendents and play equipment manufacturers, the paper will use the playground and the rhetoric that accompanied it to examine how assumptions about the environment, childhood and health combined to shape the physical form of British parks and other urban landscapes. It will consider how the children’s playground came to be seen by some as an ideal solution to a number of urban, environmental and social issues in the late nineteenth century. The paper will then move on to chart the creation of a specific playground space marking its centenary in 2021, Wicksteed Park in Kettering. In doing so, it will examine the liberal motivations of its creator Charles Wicksteed and his links with the garden city movement, before exploring how the popularity of his play equipment and the associated commercial success of his manufacturing company contributed to the creation of highly standardised playground spaces in urban areas across Britain and beyond. As present day Wicksteed Park struggles to remain open and financially viable in spite of Covid-19, the paper will close by suggesting that a better understanding of the historical links between playgrounds, health and the urban environment will help us to imagine more inclusive post-pandemic public spaces.
Mina Radovic | Goldsmiths, University of London
Totalitarianism, language, and film
Totalitarianism is an ideological political system based on the total monopolization of human life, from the inner-most expression of thought in the private sphere to (political) action and creation in the public sphere. Totalitarian systems produce logically coordinated terror, aiming to isolate people from one another and mould them into masses incapable of action. In making human beings “superfluous”, Hannah Arendt writes, totalitarian ideologies do not only make it possible to socially marginalize groups of people labelled enemies of the state, but to also exterminate them.
Language and film represent two of the most widespread means of communication which have been used by totalitarian regimes for ideological coercion. Natural language is the building block of political speech, press, and policy and film an excellent tool of mass media which be used unassumingly to normalize an ideology among large groups of people under the guise of entertainment. More specifically, film is the site where natural language, once structurally manipulated in the public sphere, enters film language and attains its maximum ideological effect. This effect goes beyond what we generally under as propaganda, constituting what I term the aesthetics of negation: the visual manifestation of the inherently negative totalitarian ideology of the regime.
This presentation is divided into four parts. The first and most substantial provides the case study of Nazi Germany from my doctoral research, showing how the Nazi regime programmatically used language and film to disseminate totalitarian ideology among the people of Germany. The second examines how totalitarianism could be subverted in the German context, or rather how post-war filmmakers offer cinematic reflections which demystify the mechanisms by which Nazi ideology functioned. Third, I propose that by considering the work of important filmmakers like Branko Bauer and Pier Paolo Pasolini we can assess the significance of deconstructing totalitarianism beyond Germany. Fourth and finally, I demonstrate how cinema as poetry, and indeed examples of cinematic poetry, stand as the ultimate antithesis of cinema in the hands of the totalitarian. By combining linguistic analysis, film analysis, and historiography this paper aims to demonstrate new ways of reading the construction and subversion of totalitarianism through language and film.
2C. Room 3 | Presentations: Literary analysis | Chair: Joseph Williams (UEA)
Michael Askew | University of East Anglia
Writing like Weasels: Literary Forms of Attention in the Work of Annie Dillard
My paper examines the poetics of attention in the writings of the American nature writer Annie Dillard, exploring how Dillard combines qualities of attention drawn from both the essay and the lyric poem. It begins by examining what Dillard’s ideal qualities of attention are, finding them best expressed in a metaphor from ‘Living Like Weasels’, where she depicts a weasel’s way of life as receptive, immediate, and abundant. It shows how this form of attention is also an idealised way of writing, drawn from an American lyric tradition of receptive, immediate, and abundant writing which stretches back through Whitman to Emerson. It then argues that, in Dillard’s work, such a poetic of attention is never fully realised, but is only gestured towards from within the essay form; and that, furthermore, it is the opposing qualities of the essay — its interiority and high level of consciousness, its incompleteness and selectivity — that allow it to make such a gesture. Developing this argument, it examines how Dillard uses the essayistic technique of being highly attentive to her own forms of attention to make her essays behave like lyrics, and foster the weasel-like qualities of her idealised poetic: that is, how she reaches from within the essay towards the lyric. It concludes by examining how such a movement is enclosed, on the other side, by a return to the essay form, in order to reincorporate the ‘lyric attention’ which is gestured towards within the more easily understood context of the essay.
Niall Boyce | Birkbeck, University of London
Stages of sleep: rethinking A Midsummer Night's Dream
Modern-day critical and theatrical interpretations of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream frequently demonstrate the enduring influence of Freudian dream theory. The nocturnal events in the forest are considered to be the eruption of suppressed urges and drives which exist in contrast to the orderly Athenian state. The unconscious forces of chaos and creativity are therefore set in diametrical opposition to those of discipline and rationality. However, in this paper I propose a new reading of the Dream based on Renaissance ideas about the mechanism of dreaming (specifically, the operation of the faculty of fantasy) and drawing from twenty-first-century neuroscientific debate on the function of dreams. I propose that A Midsummer Night’s Dream can be placed in a new context, in which the operation of fantasy in dreams is neither an expression of repressed desires nor a temporary escape, but a functional strategy to avoid overfitted rigidity of thought and behaviour, and effect permanent transformation. Drawing on Susan Snyder’s concept of ‘evitability’ in comedy as opposed to ‘inevitability’ in tragedy, I will explore how the ability of fantasy to remix, reshuffle, and reform perceptual experiences is intrinsically linked to the nature and dramatic outcome of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
2D. Room 4 | Reflections | Chair: Rachel McNair Smith
Jack Manzi | University of East Anglia
The Crito project
Since 2013 the Crito Project has been delivering classes in philosophy to prisoners serving their sentence in the east of England; one of the charity’s key motivations has been to provide a level and style of education that closely mirrors that which a student could expect in the first year of their philosophy degree.
We are currently in the final stages of navigating the process of accreditation and, if successful, when we recommence provision at HMP Wayland in September, the UEA will accredit three of our six modules, in what we believe to be the first arrangement of its type in the UK. Higher education in prison has the power to transform futures and to create new positive incarcerated communities: join us to hear about the success stories abroad that inspire us here in the UK, the exciting vista of possibilities open to university/prison partnerships, and the challenges faced by incarcerated students. The presentation will feature two speakers: Jack Manzi (3rd year PhD student) & Ben Walker (honorary research fellow) from the UEA’s philosophy department.
Jane Davidson | University of Kent
Follow the money; financing animal medicine
The Royal Agricultural Society of England’s role in providing fees, grants and employment to nineteenth century veterinary surgeons in Great Britain
Establishing the history of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons (RCVS) from the financial transactions of the Royal Agricultural Society of England and the Royal Veterinary College has brought some issues in unentangling the narrative. The process of professionalisation of the veterinary surgeon was aided by the grants, fees and employment opportunities from the Royal Agricultural Society of England (RASE).
Support from established communities provided a way to legitimise veterinary surgeons as being a professional community. RASE created a national organisation for the improvement of agricultural science and there was the desire to improve the health of horses and cattle. The grants and fees were initially for the Royal Veterinary College (RVC). Due to Covid restrictions I have had limited time in my main RCVS archive. This has meant I have had to visit supporting archives first and reverse my research process. I have had to do a wide sweep of supporting archives that will lead to a more focussed search in the RCVS archives. This has changed the shape of my project and I am keen not to lose my focus of the history of the RCVS.
Considerations for reflection:
Repetition of names
How I resolved this – see bingo card
Financial processes – communities of people or institutions as recipients How to analyse following the money – focus/methodology?
Compare to similar processes of the time – agricultural education?
Was the recipient of the financial support the person or the place and does this matter?
Not losing the RCVS narrative to the history of other institutions
How to remain focussed on the RCVS and their presence
How to establish and define the lack of RCVS presence in some situations
Joseph Radcliffe | Birkbeck, University of London
Archival research in the pandemic
I would like the opportunity to discuss, and open a wider discussion, into the challenges faced by researchers who rely heavily on archives for their research. In the current climate many researchers have had to rethink their methodology and approaches as they have been faced by institutions they would have otherwise relied on being inaccessible. This had led to new creative methodologies and sometimes completely changing how they would otherwise approach their research question. What happens though when this is not an option? Many researches, particularly in History have no other option but to use archives and have thus found that their work has been restricted, delayed and in some extreme cases put on indefinite hiatus. My field is early black British history and while people of colour are a pervasive presence in the archives they are often hidden or scattered within larger packets of sources and require a patient, methodical approach to unearth and sew together. Even with the archives open, time is at a premium and the researcher has to work with speed whilst hopefully not overlooking any important information. In this reflective session I would like to describe the challenges I have faced, how it has shaped my methodological approach and bring into focus not only the negatives of archival research during a pandemic but some positives that these extraordinary times have had for someone at the beginning of a PhD research project. In the Q&A section if there is time I would like this to act as an encouragement for others to share their experiences and share what collective knowledge we have to help each other succeed whilst access to archives remains limited
Naomi Donovan | University of Kent
Reflective Rundown: Top Ten Research Tips
This session is inspired by the conference’s theme of community: in this case, research communities. In the session, I will reflect on my PhD experience by sharing my top ten research tips with the CHASE community. This will include a short PowerPoint presentation offering advice on topics such as organising your research and extending your networks. The session will be applicable to a wide range of research areas.
Naomi Donovan is in the fourth year of her PhD in English Literature at the School of English, University of Kent. She is currently researching eighteenth-century publishing history. Her research interests include book history, and music and literature.
2E. Room 5 | Presentations: Community | Chair: Sandra Sattler
Poppy Williams | University of East Anglia
The Evolution of The Black Women's Liberatory Narrative: A Genealogical Study from the 1970s Onwards
My 20 minute presentation lays out several of the research questions, key concepts and methodologies which fuel my project, entitled The Evolution of The Black Women's Liberatory Narrative: A Genealogical Study from the 1970s Onwards. I argue that since the 1970s, the literary tradition that strives to articulate the past of enslavement from a specifically Black female perspective has been under constant evolution, influenced by the historical and historiographical context in which each text has been conceived. My research examines three approaches to the topic of enslavement in these texts: the articulation of subjectivity and personhood; shifting geographies; and changing representations of implication and responsibility.
Due to its relationship with the presentation of community, my presentation will focus on this third theme of responsibility. My presentation will define what I mean by the key terms ‘responsibility and implication’ and summarise how this issue has been presented since the 1970s into the 2010s. I will present my research questions regarding the changing presentations of ‘responsibility and implication.’ First: how do authors insert alternative narratives of responsibility and implication in their work and break down the explicit dichotomies of power and vicitimisation inherent to the master narrative of slavery? Second: how is this difficult question of non-white implication and responsibility in the history of slavery introduced? Here I draw upon the accountability of African populations for the slave trade and the position of the Cherokee as slaveholders. I argue that the engagement of these difficult histories through fiction allows us to imagine the effects of those complexities on individuals who are inaccessible to us through archival records.
Ultimately, my primary texts—Tiya Miles’s The Cherokee Rose and Yaa Gyasi’s Home Going—indicate that in the face of enslavement’s oppressions, its complexities and its transgenerational legacies, the individual turns to the community as a source of support, guidance and personal discovery. These twenty-first century texts thus have particular significance when exploring the intersection of community with issues of responsibility and implication, expanding the memorialisation of culpability and betrayal, while also demonstrating the prevalence of community in confronting and surviving this difficult history both on an immediate and transgenerational scale.
Janet Morrison | University of East Anglia
Black female business networks in antebellum New Orleans
The proposed paper is an examination of a community of free Black women who sold fabrics, garments and accessories in antebellum New Orleans. These women capitalized on their skills, which had been acquired in various ways, sometimes from their former enslavement, in order to provide a service for their largely female clients. This also necessitated their negotiation, not only with the wholesalers of New Orleans but also with those in Paris, in order to satisfy their society’s desire for all things French. The paper shows how they successfully marketed their goods, both in the internal market in Louisiana and how they dabbled in the transatlantic market of Europe. They also invested their business profits into real estate, becoming proprietors, with all that this implied for their social status in New Orleans.
That they were a cohesive community was demonstrated by the ways in which they formed business networks, sometimes traversing racial lines, in order to achieve their goals of wealth, privilege and a certain amount of power in a patriarchal society structured by a racial order, where such benefits were assumedly limited to white men. The paper will also show how this community of businesswomen provided increased support for its members in various ways, even extending to the court room, in a society largely hostile to the visibility of women, whether Black or White, in the commercial world. It examines how these networks enabled them to compete on equal terms with male entrepreneurs, in a way which would be lauded today and was certainly remarkable then. Thus, the paper argues that it was their formation of a business community which further allowed these women to become active architects of their own destiny and against all the odds, enabled them to engender a legacy of Black female achievement which should be recognized and applauded.
Anita Strasser | Goldsmiths, University of London
Documentary photography as radical practice: recording as a form of resistance to uneven urban change
During last year’s (Virtual) Encounters Conference, I introduced my PhD research project Deptford is Changing: a creative exploration of the impact of gentrification, taking the audience through the participatory methodology I utilized and the creative/political material that was produced by research participants as part of the resistance against unjust housing developments in the area. I talked about what it means to work in dialogue with communities, to use academic research for political ends and to hand over control and ownership of a project to participants. Coming from a background of documentary photography, a practice facing ethical and political critiques concerned with the problematic nature of photographic representation of the ‘the other’, which I had been contemplating for a long time, I was more than eager to hand over the image-making process to participants. However, participants requested that I document their creative outputs, their lives and campaign activities, saying they needed “good” images to help them tell their stories, raise awareness of their social justice campaigns and highlight the emotional impact gentrification is having on them. I began to re-re-think the role of documentary photography, contemplating its original intentions to democratize political debate and affect social change and its later problematic history of aestheticizing meaning while denying political content. I wondered how I could develop a photographic practice that combines individual authorship with an ethical and dialogical approach, while also working towards a political aesthetic. My documentary practice, then, works with a new ontology of photography that involves a ‘human being-with-others in which the camera [is] implicated’ (Azoulay, 2012), creating a dialogical aesthetic that reflects those human relationships. It conceives of photography as an encounter with multiple participants involved in collaborative and political action (ibid.). It works in constant dialogue with participants to create and publish political images that offer an alternative history to gentrification. As such, documentary photography goes beyond recording; it plays a political role in countering the dominant rhetoric of urban renewal and ‘disrupt[ing] the smooth image that corporate capitalism is trying to spread’ (Mouffe, 2008). This presentation discusses how documentary photography in my PhD project became a way of recording as a form of resistance to uneven urban change.
15:00-15:30| Session 3: Three-minute presentations
Carmen Silvestri | University of Essex
European heritage languages in primary schools: understanding identity and pedagogy in multilingual London
This research project on language, identity and pedagogy examines the impact recent changes in London’s linguistic demography have had on the primary education sector and the diversification of heritage languages (HLs) in the area. It investigates the development of transnational identities and the role of multilingual pedagogy in post-Brexit England, with a focus on the Italian community. Through an ethnographic case study in an Italian complementary school, I will investigate how children develop a sense of self and self-perception, and intercultural sensitivity as transnational citizens. Building on this, I will explore how teachers use the linguistic repertoires of the children in their classrooms in a mainstream primary school
Jessica Gasson | The Courtauld Institute of Art
I propose a short presentation on my PhD topic, raising the challenges I have faced researching this subject in the hope that I might make connections with other students who find themselves in a similar place. My PhD focuses on the textile canopies at the Burgundian Court: a form that no longer survives and must be studied through a variety of sources including inventories, accounts, chronicles and painted images. I would like to present on how some of the challenges and unexpected biases these documents can have has affected my research.
Thomas Lucking | University of East Anglia
Settlement Change and Climatic Fluctuations in the East Anglian Breckland c.1000BC – 1600 AD
This project focusses on changing patterns of settlement and land use in the East Anglian Breckland between the Late Bronze Age (c.1000BC) and post-medieval period (c.1600AD) and explores the extent to which these changes can be associated with longer-term fluctuations in climate. Essentially, this project is investigating whether landscape developments in a ‘marginal’ environment can be explained in terms of their relationship with changing climate and what this might tell us about the complexities of environmental change at different spatial scales.
Initial research has revealed that patterns of settlement and landscape development are more complex than has previously been assumed, with no modern attempts to synthesise the evidence into broader 'history' of the region. As such, part of this project will aim to bring together a range of evidence to produce an up-to-date interpretation of the historic landscape before we can begin to establish the role that climate might play in shaping these changes. For example, Roman settlement appears to be present on areas that become heathland in the medieval period, so why was that area suitable for settlement in the Roman period but not re-settled during the population and settlement expansion of the early medieval period?
15:45-16:45|Parallel sessions 4
4A. Room 1 | Researching the contemporary | Chair: Jane Davidson
Siân Hunter | University of East Anglia
Chasing a wave: keeping up with contemporary feminist discourse
A discussion of the challenges of undertaking research on the contemporary: through exploring the ways in which authorship in contemporary film and television shapes, and is in turn shaped by, popular feminist discourse. This session examines the difficulties experienced while following five women currently working in film and/or television who can be seen as actively participating in feminist discourse, either through their work or through their off-screen activism. The aim of this reflective session is to unpack the demands of studying not only active actors, writers, and directors who are constantly engaging in new projects but the ever-changing cultural environment – from #MeToo, to Black Lives Matter, to the rising prominence of transphobic discourse.
Rachel McNair Smith | University of East Anglia
Reflecting on change: challenges, discoveries and new perspectives during a pandemic.
Change in a PhD can be nerve-wracking and a challenge to overcome, but it can also be freeing, providing an opportunity to explore new discoveries and perspectives, and strengthen the originality of a thesis. This short ‘Reflective’ session will focus on my individual experience of change in my second year, during a pandemic, when the cancellation of an international Fellowship, and research and fieldwork, along with methodological issues and chance findings of new material, led to my modifying my research project; something that I am continuing to work through today and into the future.
Rachel McNair Smith is a current third-year PhD candidate in the Sainsbury Research Unit for the Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, where she completed her BA and MA in 2011 and 2015 respectively. She has worked in a curatorial capacity in several museums and galleries including National Museums Scotland and National Galleries of Scotland, both Edinburgh, and The University of Aberdeen and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Thomas Elliott | University of Sussex
Digital Isolation and Coping with Zoom; Some Reflective Thoughts
I would like to use this time to reflect on some of the less discussed struggles that we have all experienced in the past year; loneliness, isolation, the pressure to continue as “normal” and anxiety. I hope to share my experiences and some ideas about what worked for me, as well as what did not. My mental health really suffered as a result of the winter/spring lockdown this year and I was thinking of dropping out of my PhD programme. My university offered what support they could, but one of the main things that I was struggling with was remote learning/support/etc. I found that zoom and related apps increased my anxiety and my low mood exponentially, but, unfortunately, that all my “lifelines” and support networks had moved online.
Following some very good discussions with my supervisor, I decided to take a step back from my direct research and to instead dedicate my time to the language acquisition element of my funding (Spanish) and to my CHASE funded internship with “19”. As a researcher this was a struggle, it felt unproductive to put my research on hold and I worried about falling behind, but ultimately, it helped.
I will close by encouraging my fellow researchers to explore some of the less advertised benefits of the internship/placement scheme at CHASE (mainly its benefits to mental health and being a space separate from, but linked to, our research) and reflect on the usefulness of stepping back from our studies when needed and the importance of being flexible in our priorities.
Sarah Sharp | University of East Anglia
Researching popular music and mental-ill health: strands of a critical autopathography and exploration of future support.
This paper draws on my doctoral research on mental ill-health in popular music. The PhD explores representations of mental ill-health in 20th and 21st century verbal, written and performed media texts, created by high-profile musicians with a diagnosis of mental ill-health. I am also assessing whether these themes are incorporated within the support current organisations give musicians with mental ill-health.
This paper consists of a mixture of a work in progress and a reflective discussion around cultural and personal implications of my research area. The theme I shall focus on is Futures, as my research seeks to identify gaps in support which could be developed in the future. I will also be giving advice to PhD students with a diagnosis of mental ill-health which may help them with their own future research.
I will begin with an overview of my research and chosen artists, and a short discussion of my theoretical framework and methodology. I will then reflect on my experience of being a PhD student with a diagnosis of mental ill-health, and share advice based on my own personal experience to other students with mental ill-health and who are researching the subject. For example, I have found some reading of musicians' autobiographies to be a trigger for my memories of being ill. I would advise others to take a break and talk to someone if this occurs during their own research. The aim is not only to give advice, but also initiate or contribute to a future-oriented networking activity with others who are also researching mental ill-health within the humanities.
I am a part-time PhD student in my third year of study at the University of East Anglia, in the Film, Television and Media Studies department.
Baljit Kaur (University of Sussex) & Kit Ashton (Goldsmiths)
Study Buddies! Care and Community in the Context of the Pandemic
This proposal is for a reflective session (5-10 minutes) presented by Baljit Kaur and Kit Ashton, both CHASE-funded doctoral researchers at the University of Sussex and Goldsmiths University, respectively. Baljit Kaur is a third-year researcher in Cultural Studies and Kit Ashton is a fourth-year researcher in Music.
This session aims to offer researchers, particularly those in the early stages of their research, an insight into the benefits of a study buddy system which we arranged at the onset of the initial lockdown back in March 2020.
To do this, our session will reflect on the benefits of previous Encounters conferences as opportunities to network and connect with researchers whose research interests are similar to yours, and the potential for these encounters to evolve into building communities in the future. In the context of the pandemic, our mutual research interests led us to create a study buddy system in which we used online platforms such as Skype to regularly check-in and virtually work ‘together’, which helped maintain the mutual support and sense of community that the pandemic had/has eradicated for many doctoral researchers. We reflect on some of the strategies we used to forge the online space into one in which we were able to collaborate; discuss, share ideas and solutions to overcoming research and personal challenges, offer collegiality, and importantly, offer encouragement in persevering with our research and writing.
It is through this example of the study buddy system that we hope to convey one way in which researchers, including ourselves, can continue our sense of care for one another, and continue building communities in the often challenging and ever-shifting contemporary world.
4B. Room 2 | Decolonisation | Chair: Tariq Mir (SOAS)
Augusta Ivory-Peters | Goldsmiths, University of London
A classicist reflecting: towards a decolonised classics
Abstract: As a classicist, I am acutely aware that my discipline has reached crisis point. Classics – namely the study of Graeco-Roman antiquity – is not only steeped in a history of privilege and exclusivity but has uncomfortable associations with colonialism and patriarchy. Classical scholarship that continues to engage uncritically (both with the ancient world itself and the methods that we use) reinforces these problematic ideas. To ensure the survival of classics – if the discipline has a future? – there is an urgent need to ‘decolonise’ classics. In this context, I understand decolonisation as the process of decentring the Eurocentric foundations of classical knowledge.
In my presentation, I will reflect on several difficult questions that I have faced in the first year of my PhD surrounding the precarious future of classics. I will also suggest new ways that we can ethically reconstruct antiquity and embed more diversity and inclusivity into the discipline. In doing so, I hope to contribute to ongoing conversations surrounding a future self-reflexive classical scholarship. A case study is made of contemporary classicist Anne Carson.
Shelley Angelie Saggar | University of Kent
Learning to live with ghosts': Representing the restitution debate in Anna Lee Walters' Ghost Singer
Abstract: This work-in-progress presents my research into how methods drawn from Indigenous literary studies can contribute to decolonial heritage practices. Drawing on contemporary public discussions surrounding the potential restitution of Indigenous remains and cultural patrimony held in museums, I will analyse how Indigenous writers have represented the repatriation debate through literary texts in order to demonstrate the unique potential of fiction to nuance the parameters of the political discussion. This paper will examine how the trope of spectral Indigeneity is strategically invoked in Pawnee/Otoe novelist Anna Lee Walter’s 1988 novel Ghost Singer to assess the agential potential of Indigenous ghosts in furthering calls for restitution/repatriation/return in the latter part of the twentieth century. I will then turn to consider how the passing of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) has provoked changing representations in Indigenous literary fiction, arguing that a departure from the spectral, and an insistence instead on ‘survivance’ characterises literary engagements with the museum repatriation debate.
4C. Room 3 | Medical humanities & non-thematic| Chair Elizabeth Chappell
Robbie McDermott | University of East Anglia
Musicians with Absent Limbs and Digits Study
This presentation demonstrates my current stage in the PhD process and how my research has been progressing thus far. This will include some introspective insight of certain struggles with aspects such as writing and planning.
The 5-10-minute work-in progress session will emphasise the theme of community, and to some degree, futures as well. My PhD focuses on musicians with absent limbs and digits including popular musicians and their experiences of being a public figure with a disability. This then moves on to lesser-known musicians and their knowledge of music-making such as using and not using prosthetics devices to play, as well as using modified instruments, both including issues of control and haptic feedback. This leads into case studies of organisational and institutional support that help these musicians to achieve their musical aims. To conclude, the thesis explains how advocacy is at the heart of being a musician with absent limb(s) and/or digit(s) and my desire for a knowledge base for provisions for disabled musicians.
My name is Robbie McDermott and I am in my 5th year of part-time study at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in the department of Film, Television, and Media Studies.
Caroline Hawthorne | University of Essex
Identity and agency: Exploring the relationship between theory and professional practice in Healthcare students’ academic writing
This session considers progress to date in exploring the key research concepts of identity and agency amongst Healthcare student writers, and in the development of qualitative research tools. Specifically, it will report on the process of creating a pre-interview online questionnaire, and on initial thoughts surrounding the development of a writing analysis framework that seeks to identify different facets of identity and agency in student writing. The session will also include a brief reflection on experiences of working and studying part-time for a PhD, and will consider how a reframing of a stop-start study pattern can help to reduce stress.
Ricarda Brosch | The Courtauld Institute of Art
I will give a brief summary of my PhD progress and how I have tried to adjust my research to the current times.
4D. Room 4 | Film and Art | Chair Jacob Rollinson
Raquel Morais | Birkbeck, University of London
Imagined films
I am currently in the early stages of my project “Exhibiting an Interdisciplinary Archive: Curatorial practice as reactivating the film archive”. Over the past few months, I have completed a review of the existing literature on my case-study, the films of Portuguese directors Margarida Cordeiro and António Reis.
Among other important aspects, the concept of imagined film came up as relevant. The six films directed by the duo between 1963 and 1989 remained pretty much impossible to watch for about three decades, because of material aspects related to their distribution and exhibition history.
We could say that Cordeiro-Reis’s films are “imagined films” in two specific senses. Firstly, they are imagined before being watched – many cinephiles would spend years hearing about the films without being able to watch them in proper conditions or to even watch them at all. The mystique surrounding these works became part of the narrative created around the films, which somehow infused them with a new life. Secondly, there is a sense in which the films are imagined during and after being watched, as they demand/require an active spectator, who can trace and unveil certain elements, while at the same time envisioning new ones, which means an availability to “complete” the films.
I would like to incorporate these aspects as part of my methodology and the practice element of my project. How can I conceive of myself as an “intermediary” spectator, who can re-imagine these films in the process of programming them? Is it possible to revive the films by infusing them with other texts, films, paintings, stories, objects which are not in the films explicitly, but also, and precisely because of that, can be there at the same time? How can I build a project that relies in a non-linear and associative way of describing a film’s history, context of production, afterlife?
Allan Norris | Open University
Figuration in the work of post-conceptual british women painters
It is widely accepted that the most significant development in painting since the 1990s has been the return to figuration. And, as Linda Nochlin has observed, many women artists with feminist affiliations have turned to painting as a means to reject the masculine displays of phallocentric dominance characteristic of modernism. In Britain an entire generation of female figurative painters has emerged. Artists such as Jenny Saville, Cecily Brown, Chantal Joffe and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye have all become internationally acclaimed.
The choice of these artists is important in art historical terms because their emergence and ongoing influence within the institutional structures of the international art market signals a particular transitional shift in contemporary British art. From the relative antipathy to representational painting during the dominance of conceptualism in the 1990s to the growing critical attention afforded it today, we have seen a marked change in attitude which continues to confound notions of the death of painting.
My research explores the extent to which contemporary figurative painting, engaged in by women, can operate as institutional critique or challenge the objectification of the female body. It analyses the extent to which the relationship between painting and representation serves to construct, support or subvert prevailing hegemonic structures and how the feminist critique of modernism has enabled certain interventions to flourish, through the perceived interrogation of a hitherto male dominated canon.
Alice David | The Courtauld Institute of Art
Man in the Machine: Xerox Performance Art in Brazil, 1981 – 1982
Over the course of my research into alternative printmaking practices in Latin America during the 1970s and 80s, my focus has gradually shifted from printing technologies’ simple function for replication in favour of other essential operations such as contact, transfer, absorption and resistance. This line of inquiry has most recently taken me full circle to the lesser known, second version of Walter Benjamin’s seminal text The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility (1936), in which the author identifies the potential for productive interplay (Zusammenspiel) between humans and technology. I would like to take this opportunity for interdisciplinary discussion to consider printmaking as a technology through the lens of media studies and related fields outside the narrow confines of art history. To do so, I propose to use Brazilian artist Hudinilson Júnior’s Xerox series 'Narcisse' Exercício de Me Ver II (Exercise of seeing myself II, 1982) to explore the possibility for play contained within these office machines, and to interrogate the multiple ways in which the notion of play offered countercultural artists an alternative mode of making art outside the commercial demands of the art market.
Bruno Verner | Goldsmiths, University of London
Title: Man Ray on the Radio: Underground Post-Punk, Death Sambas and Other Tropical Sonic Transitions in Brazil.
Less a genre of music than a new assemblage of practices, post punk culture has produced a new type of futurism and utopianism. How did it develop into a dissent post-tropicalist sensibility in Brazil?
My research is concerned with the investigation of sonic-politico and aesthetic overlooked manifestations of singularity in Brazilian underground artists from the 1980s and beyond. It explores how their practices and ethics were instrumental in forging an experimentalist and yet popular independent DIY culture by examining a constellation of unheard voices, inflections, and forms of musicality as it investigates distinct processes of subjectivation in the construction of a poetic and political black-latino-caboclo-pardo semiotics. In particular, the work of non-musicians and/or experimental artists/bands who have radically invented their own praxis, spaces of occupation and poetics in the public sphere, breaking off from institutionalised modes of production, including traditional forms of MPB (Brazilian Popular Music) structure and dissemination.
Developed around explosive countercultural scenarios in cities such as São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Belo Horizonte, these scenes created specific and autonomous territories of experimentation, and were fostered by a singular collision of sources and ideas from poetry, pop, visual arts, politics, performance-art, electronic music, feminism, and the avant-garde.
Bruno Verner is a PhD researcher in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths University, and a composer/artist in the Brazilian duo Tetine (www.tetine.net). His thesis examines the overlooked histories of experimental post punk and post-tropicalism in Brazil.
