Encounters
13 June 2024 | University of Sussex
Creative & Critical
We invite you to join us at the University of Sussex for a stimulating, provocative, interdisciplinary CHASE Encounters conference on 13 June 2024.
Research in the Arts and Humanities is often divided – by institutions, funding bodies, publishers – between creative and critical scholarship. The reality, of course, is much less distinct, and the critical and the creative necessarily mingle, sometimes in unexpected ways, in all our work. At a point when the meaning and boundaries of these terms are being tested, particularly in relation to testimony, autobiography, and by the advent of AI, we invite you to come to Sussex to reflect on the nature of the creative and of the critical, their many relationships, and the part they might play in the future of our disciplines.
Programme
Location: Thursday 13 June | Jubilee Building, University of Sussex (map)
Please note the programme may be subject to changes
Registration from 08.30
Tea and coffee will be served in G30
09.35 - Welcome – Jubilee Lecture Theatre
Prof Kate Lacey, CHASE DTP Director and Professor of Media History & Theory, University of Sussex
09.45 - 10.45 - Plenary – Dreaming the Creative and Critical (Jubilee Lecture Theatre)
Dr Katherine Kruger, Senior Lecturer in Community Engagement, University of Sussex and Prof Nicholas Royle, Emeritus Professor (English), University of Sussex
10.45 - 11.45 - Parallel training/information sessions
Postdoctoral Funding (G115)
Prof Lizzie Thynne, Professor of Film and Director of Research and Knowledge Exchange for Grant Capture, University of Sussex
Dr Charlie Jeffries, Lecturer in American and Media Studies, University of Sussex
An introduction to some post-doc funding opportunities and how to apply for them. We will hear from ECR Charlie Jeffries talk about her experience of a BA postdoctoral fellowship application.
Open access publishing: your options explained (G118)
Maggie Symes, Research and Open Scholarship Librarian, University of Sussex
Dr Tomasz Kowalczyk, Research & Open Scholarship Supervisor, University of Sussex
This workshop will summarise open publishing options for your research outputs and highlight what this means for you as a researcher. It will introduce recent developments and debates within open publishing and explain the different routes to making your work openly available. You will then put your knowledge into practice as you play the Game of Open Access and compete to get your article published and gain as many open access points as you can!
Creative and Critical Writing (G155)
Dr Sam Ladkin, Senior Lecturer in Creative and Critical Writing, University of Sussex
Although designed from the perspective of a writing PhD, this session may be of interest to those conducting creative practice research in other fields. We will spend a brief moment reassuring ourselves of the nature of critical & creative research (a nod to regulatory frameworks), but the majority of the short session will be an invitation to you to contemplate your own writing and art practice.
A short series of questions, prompts, and brief texts will, I hope, encourage you to speculate on your own work - where it has come from; where it is; where it is going - in order to help see it as though from a distance and to ask, what does this work need? Is it doing and saying what it needs to do and say? Is there an authentic relationship between the different aspects of a creative & critical project?
Together we will neither abolish all distinctions between the creative and critical, nor only work counterintuitively to find the creative in the critical and the critical in the creative (though they are there), but rather try to re-imagine the division in your work to ask instead, what ways of knowing does each way of making permit?
11.45 - 12.00 - Break
Tea and coffee will be served in G30
12.00 - 13.30 - Parallel academic paper presentations
Session 1 - Landscapes and Knowledge Systems - (Jubilee Lecture Theatre)
Gerolamo Gnecchi (Goldsmiths): ‘Engaging with the Thames Estuary’s Tides: Practising in the Wild for Creative and Critical Practices’
Nastassia Nasser (Goldsmiths): ‘Into the Fault zone: excavating the architectonics of occupation’
Jonn Gale (Birkbeck): ‘Visual Ethnography Practice in Botanical Archival Research’
Chair: Abdulmalik Abdulrahman Abdulmalik (UEA)
Session 2 - Selfhood, Stigma, and Space (G118)
Naomi Morris (UEA): ‘Still Ill: Recovery Narratives and their Alternatives’
Zoë Glen (Kent): ‘Stigmatising narratives from autism research and their impact on autistic experiences of performing arts training’
Olivia Andrew (Kent): ‘Informed by Experiences: How my research has developed and why we should not be afraid of change.’
Keiran Wilson (Birkbeck): ‘Conceptualising the Psychiatric Ward as a Carceral Space’
Amilia Gillies (Kent): ‘Sex, Scandal and the State: Contextualising the "Scandalous" Spate at the British Court, c. 1614-1621'
Chair: Prof John Drever (Goldsmiths)
13.30 - 14.15 - Lunch (G30)
CHASE Network Stalls (G22)
14.15 - 15.15 - Parallel panel conversations
- CHASE Placements (Jubilee Lecture Theatre)
Rima Bist, Director of Student Success Projects, Brilliant Club
Dr Danny Shipsides, Policy Advisor, UK Government’s Open Innovation team
Yingbai Fu, undertaking a CHASE placement with the Royal Academy of Arts
Indu Lakhshmi Prasad, completed a CHASE placement with the Mapping Archaeological Heritage in South Asia project
- CHASE Collaborative Doctoral Award (G115) Doings of the Sunbeam: Contextualising a Nineteenth-Century Collection
Dr Sarah French (CHASE Alumna) and Professor Meaghan Clarke, University of Sussex
Chair: Dr Alexandra Loske (Curator of The Royal Pavilion and Brighton Museum and CDA Alumna)
15.15 - 15.30 - Break
Tea and coffee will be served in G30
15.30 - 17.00 - Academic paper presentations (two parallel panels)
Session 3 - Languages, Technologies, and Decoloniality (Jubilee Lecture Theatre)
Craig Ryder (SOAS): ‘Creative Data & Critical Interlocuters. A decolonial approach to the study of social media’
Adeyemi Awomodu (Essex): ‘The impact of the Language of Instruction on educational experiences and attainment in Nigerian primary education’
Eleanor Hex (Kent): ‘The Church and the Plantations: An Examination of the Bishops of London and their Workforces in the Tobacco Colonies, c.1680-1800’
Chair: Aadhavan Pazhani (Goldsmiths)
Session 4 - Sense and Experience (G118)
Clara Rawlings (Birkbeck): ‘Medieval smell and spiritual progress’
Amber Butchart (Essex): ‘Fabric of Democracy: Textiles as Propaganda’
Frankie Wakefield (Birkbeck): ‘Monstrous mushrooms and mycological understandings’
Adam Simcox (Kent): ‘The Contours of Fear: Investigating Affective Experiences of Horror Films’
Mick Feltham (Sussex): ‘Ghost in the Beat: A Short Biography of the Roland SP404 in Experimental Hip-Hop'
Chair: Benedict Welch (Sussex)
17.00 -17.30 - Closing comments – Jubilee Lecture Theatre
With the PGR session chairs, Benedict Welch, Aadhavan Pazhani and Abdulmalik Abdulrahman Abdulmalik, CHASE DTP Deputy Director Prof John Drever and CHASE DTP Director Prof Kate Lacey
Chaired by Tiffany Murphy, PGR Conference Officer and postgraduate researcher, University of Sussex , University of Sussex
Drinks social at the IDS Bar
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Abstracts & speaker biogs
12.00 - 13.30 - Parallel academic paper presentations
Session 1 - Landscapes and Knowledge Systems
Chair: Abdulmalik Abdulrahman (UEA)
Gerolamo Gnecchi (Goldsmiths): ‘Engaging with the Thames Estuary’s Tides: Practising in the Wild for Creative and Critical Practices’
Abstract: This presentation explores the research methodology ‘Practising in the Wild’ as a way to engage with the tides of the Thames Estuary. This approach entails embodied technical processes that integrate multiple knowledge systems and local practices, such as seafaring. Practising in the Wild offers a way to examine how tides are known. It offers a space to (1) resist hegemony and singular knowledge systems, (2) elevate embodied, situated, and experiential ways of knowing tides (3) become differently familiar with the estuary's complexities by actively engaging with the tidal cycles, processes, and flows (4) build different readings and experiences to make tides differently available.
The presentation provides a brief summary of the Thames Estuary. The estuary is situated within a complex and ambiguous framework, which lies between habitat preservation and the eradication of environmental dispossession. Based on fieldwork, workshops, and creative practices, the presentation then, invites the audience on a drift, a mud-walk, with different people and bodies along the intertidal zone. This journey highlights how different tidal flows shape and transform the environment, allowing us to perceive things as combined, rather than separate. Furthermore, by engaging with the rhythms and patterns of the tides, the presentation aims to offer new ways of relating to and caring for the Thames Estuary, encouraging a deeper sense of environmental awareness.
Bio: Gero Gnecchi is a PhD candidate in Arts and Computational Technology at Goldsmiths University. His research integrates his personal experiences along the Tidal Thames with his background in art and architecture. The focus of his doctoral research is to explore what thinking with, becoming with, and being with the tides of the Thames Estuary, might signify.
Nastassia Nasser (Goldsmiths): ‘Into the Fault zone: excavating the architectonics of occupation’
Abstract: Ayta el Fokhar, Caza of Rashaya, Lebanon (35 km from Damascus, 35 km from the ALPHA line –Golan Heights). Space here has gone through wars, been occupied several times, by different actors seeking different goals, but each of these, seemingly ended. However, the idea of peace is still somehow uncomfortable, volatile. What endures is a form of unease once confronted with the assumed ‘fundamental’ axiom: the clear distinction between a ‘state of war’ and a ‘state of peace’. The state of peace that exists today is one of multiple crises and constant contingencies oscillating between peace and war. This grey area has shaped a state of peace that is now lived through processes and structures that internalised military perceptions of life, space and time. Here, in the Anti-Lebanon Mountains, in the middle of a landscape that drastically changed over the last 30 years (a landscape too often perceived as the result of an uncontrolled, sprawling semi-urban chaos of low quality construction or as the epitome of the decay of a century-long agricultural region) what really plays out are well-rehearsed strategies, un-written rules, and their genealogies where architecture, understood as the larger field of construction, is fully used as a “field of forces”, as “politics of the material” (M’Bembé, 2019), carving out dividing lines, re-shaping a land that can be mobilised, breeched and abused, a land where the split-second is made ubiquitous.
Biography: Nastassia is a trained and practicing architect and a current PhD student in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths. Her practice-led research navigates, through video, drawing and construction, the aftermath of military occupation in Lebanon on the border with Syria. She is currently collectively building, based on traditional know how, the only public space in her village of the Anti-Lebanese mountains.
Jonn Gale (Birkbeck): ‘Visual Ethnography Practice in Botanical Archival Research’
Abstract: Visual Ethnography, the creative practice guiding this PhD research aids the development of strategies for stimulating a multiverse of relational process focused, and horizontal historical interventions across botanical collections, and specifically within the context of the Linnean Society of London, where the research is based. The research engages botanical objects and
specimens in order to investigate hidden (or concealed) histories, and by centring the endurance and the affective temporalities of such historical actors I illustrate how and why they could be
engaged as narrators of alternative histories. Visual ethnography as employed here is also a tool that makes possible a mediation between, and dialogic engagement with, the different stakeholders of the histories researched. Thus, visual ethnography will serve as an essential component to aid the development of a transitional space as part of this research, one that can effectively accommodate the kinds of natural history knowledges and perspectives that botanical collections as spaces, and organisations, cannot. The practical component constitutes a vital part of the Speculative Ethnobotany framework developed throughout this research comprised of speculative archival research, a sensory ethnobotany practice, and field-based ethnographic research in Sierra Leone. A principal output of the research will be developing, and the activation of a type of transitional space - an online platform. Visual ethnography epitomises the ‘reflexive process’ of artistic research methodologies, that prioritises an ‘emergent and subject to repeated adjustment’ approach, ‘rather than remaining fixed throughout the process of enquiry’ (Barrett 2007, p.6).
Bio: Jonn Gale is a London-based, Bulgarian-Nigerian ethnobotanist who combines ethnobotany, archival research, visual ethnography and speculative frameworks as means for conducting hidden histories research across botanical collections. Their work centres nonlinearity, multi-species justice and the sensorial. Jonn is currently undertaking an AHRC/CHASE CDP PhD studentship in collaboration with Birkbeck, UoL and The Linnean Society of London, investigating a history that has long remained hidden: that of the contribution of Black and Indigenous collectors and naturalists to eighteenth and nineteenth-century natural knowledge. Their research involves the study of manuscript and material archives held at the Linnean Society, identifying and tracing collectors and naturalists, mapping knowledge networks, and developing a new decolonial approach to recovering and sharing information from this archive.
12.00 - 13.30 - Parallel academic paper presentations
Session 2 - Selfhood, Stigma, and Space
Chair: Prof John Drever (Goldsmiths)
Naomi Morris (UEA): ‘Still Ill: Recovery Narratives and their Alternatives’
Abstract: It could be argued that illness is now among the prime themes of autobiographical writing. My research asks how anglophone illness memoirs are being written by looking at mainstream expectations of medical narrative and the typical sickness to health trajectory, as well as alternatives that reflect the chronicity of illness, consider socio-economic factors, and experiment with form and voice. In order to reflect these concerns, the creative component will reflect the tussle between self-expression and the pressures of categorisation by switching between the personal and the impersonal in a series of essays that overlap.
Bio: Naomi Morris is a writer originally from Birmingham. Her first poetry pamphlet Earth Sign won the Hollingworth Prize in 2019 and was published by Partus Press and Sine Wave Peak. Her second, Hyperlove, was published by Makina Books in 2021. She has written for ArtReview, i-D, The Wellcome Collection, Dazed, and The New Statesman, among others. She is currently studying for a PhD in Creative-Critical Writing at UEA.
Zoë Glen (Kent): ‘Stigmatising narratives from autism research and their impact on autistic experiences of performing arts training’
Abstract: In this paper, I discuss how psychological theory about autism has created a stigmatising narrative; particularly regarding autistic peoples creative capabilities. I discuss the role of stigma in autistic peoples experience of performer training, and how critical autism studies and ideas from the neurodiversity paradigm can allow us to reframe and rethink.
Bio: Zoë Glen (she/they) is a PhD student at the University of Kent. Their research explores the experiences of autistic student-actors in conservatoire settings. Within this research they explore pedagogy, practice and culture. Zoë also works as a theatre-maker, facilitator and visiting lecturer.
Olivia Andrew (Kent): ‘Informed by Experiences: How my research has developed and why we should not be afraid of change.’
Abstract: The first stage of your PhD journey, before you begin to look at funding options, is to write a research proposal. To think that your project will be the same after three to four years of research is unrealistic, so why is a change to your project such a nerve-wracking thing?
Informed by the oral history interviews I have conducted this year, which have highlighted underexplored avenues of research I had not anticipated, my research focus has shifted in numerous ways. Starting my PhD focusing upon ‘Experiences of Cerebral Palsy and Multiple Sclerosis in Britain Between 1980 and 2010’, I end my second year examining ‘Experiences of Multiple Sclerosis’ alone.
At first fearful of this change, I put off admitting that this was necessary. Now my research has been strengthened and new insights and opportunities have opened to me. Within this 10 minute ‘Work in Progress’ I will detail how my research project has changed and why this will strengthen my project and impact goals in the long run. Throughout I argue that instead of fearing change it should be embraced for the critical and creative new insights it will inevitably provide.
Biography: Olivia is a second year PhD Researcher at the University of Kent in History. Seeking to influence change through her PhD, Olivia is conducting oral history interviews to examine ‘Experiences of Multiple Sclerosis in Britain Between 1980 and 2010’ from the first-hand perspective of those who have often been overlooked.
Keiran Wilson (Birkbeck): ‘Conceptualising the Psychiatric Ward as a Carceral Space’
Abstract: In this short talk, Keiran will challenge normative approaches to researching psychiatric treatment and present an alternative theoretical framework for thinking about the psychiatric ward as a carceral space. This presentation draws on key ideas from an in-progress theoretical chapter of his thesis, Carceral Power and Compulsory Inpatient Psychiatric Treatment: Queer(ing) Narratives of Detention under the Mental Health Act.
Biography: Keiran (he/him) is a second year PhD researcher in Criminology at Birkbeck. His doctoral research draws on queer narratives to explore compulsory inpatient psychiatric treatment through a queer, anti-carceral lens. Alongside his PhD research, Keiran is involved with the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Mental Health at Birkbeck, and he is also affiliated with the Mental Health Nursing Research Group at King’s College London.
Amilia Gillies (Kent): ‘Sex, Scandal and the State: Contextualising the "Scandalous" Spate at the British Court, c. 1614-1621'
Abstract: At the British court between c.1614-21, there was undeniably a ‘scandalous’ culture: a spate of shocking crimes; high-profile family feuds; remarkable falls from power; and financial disasters. It has been reaffirmed that a series of scandals ‘rocked the Jacobean court… [and] did harm to its reputation’; however, a closer look at contemporary responses to these ‘scandals’ reveals a complex reality. In this paper, I will zoom in on a key strand of my thesis: placing the scandals within the social, political and religious contexts of their day. I will firstly explain how the language that is still being used to describe this period is inaccurate and distortive, as the concept of 'scandal' is culturally contingent. Secondly, I will emphasise the importance of looking closely at the content of the sources in which references to scandal appear. What were these commenters really saying about the scandals, and why were they talking about them? In this section, I will zoom in on Thomas Alured's popular anti-Spanish Match pamphlet, which demonstrates how Jacobean scandals were heavily shaped by popular sentiments - namely anti-Catholicism and dislike of powerful women. I will close by briefly supporting this observation with some findings about the Lake-Cecil affair, of c.1616-19 – the focus of the first chapter of my thesis. Contextualising the overlooked scandals of the 1610s enriches our understanding of the events themselves, the strength and awareness of popular sentiments and views of royal policy, and the ever-changing and ever-present themes of scandal and corruption.
Bio: Amilia Gillies is a second-year doctoral researcher at the Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies at the University of Kent, supervised by Professor Kenneth Fincham. Her thesis – currently entitled ‘Sex, Scandal and the State, c. 1614-1621’ – focuses on a series of salacious scandals that occurred between those years.
15.30 - 17.00 - Academic paper presentations (two parallel panels)
Session 3 - Languages, Technologies, and Decoloniality
Chair: Aadhavan Pazhani (Goldsmiths)
Craig Ryder (SOAS): ‘Creative Data & Critical Interlocuters. A decolonial approach to the study of social media’
Abstract: So-called “big data” creates an undeniable reality: who did what, when, and for how long. A residual of the European Enlightenment that legitimatized the colonialisation of irrational others, today, the datafication of digital technologies renews and perpetuates colonialism’s historic relationship with the extraction of indigenous resources through the “external appropriation of data on terms that are partly or wholly beyond the control of the person to whom the data relates” (Couldry & Mejias, 2019, 5).
This chapter of my thesis interrogates the creativity of big data by implementing the critical faculties of my human interlocuters into the research process. By asking Sri Lankan social media activists to make sense of data visualisations of Twitter political commentators around protest hashtags, together we co-produced a new epistemological perspective on the big data that Twitter relies on for commercial aims, content moderation, surveillance and other opaque processes. The methodological innovation of augmented ethnography (Ryder, 2024) leads me to argue towards a decolonial pursuit of data entanglements because local Sri Lankan interpretations deconstruct big data’s “aura of truth, objectivity, and accuracy” (boyd & Crawford, 2012, 663). By reproducing Twitter data into subjective and emergent “data realties” (Knox, 2021, 108) of my Sri Lankan participants, a potential roadmap for how anthropologists can develop decolonial processes to social media is laid out.
Bio: Craig Ryder is a digital anthropologist investigating the widespread proliferation of social media in Sri Lanka and how people use platforms for political participation. Ryder is also the founder of the DiSCo (Digital Studies Collective).
Adeyemi Awomodu (Essex): ‘The impact of the Language of Instruction on educational experiences and attainment in Nigerian primary education’
Abstract: The language of instruction (LOI) in multilingual and multicultural Nigeria has always been a concern to stakeholders in education. This study will investigate the current LOI situation in Nigerian primary schools, highlighting the challenges it poses to students and providing a clear understanding of the impact of LOI on educational experiences and attainment. This study will use ethnographic methods to observe and document language practices in three primary schools in Lagos State, Nigeria. The project will involve semi-structured and informal interviews with primary school pupils, their parents, guardians, and teachers and a questionnaire to be completed by the same groups. Findings will allow us to understand better the role of LOI in the Nigerian education system and learners' experience. The insights will inform policies on multilingual education and how best to support education in Nigeria.
Biography: Adeyemi P. Awomodu is a Doctoral Researcher in Linguistics at the Department of Language and Linguistics, University of Essex. His research focuses on language-in-education policy in Africa, particularly the impact (or lack thereof) of the language of instruction (LOI) on the educational experiences and attainments in Nigerian primary education.
Eleanor Hex (Kent): ‘The Church and the Plantations: An Examination of the Bishops of London and their Workforces in the Tobacco Colonies, c.1680-1800’
Abstract: In 1675 the Right Reverend Henry Compton became the Bishop of London. His instalment as the Bishop of London was the catalyst of a new age for the diocese, as during his tenure Compton firmly solidified a previously proposed idea that the bishop was the head of the Church of England in the colonies. Historiography connecting the Bishop of London to the colonies focuses on the flow of power that this jurisdiction gave to ecclesiastical figures at the time. Questions are raised in the literature regarding the origins and legitimacy, with various ventures into finding the ‘true’ origin of the bishop’s authority. While this is important, it creates a euro-centric, metropolitan understanding of the topic that firmly centres itself upon the upper echelons of the church hierarchy. Missing from these narratives are the enslaved people under Anglican colonial rule who were working on the plantations. This paper shall propose methods to invert this method of study in order to create a new, decolonized lens that looks at the bishops’ influence on the Christianisation and overall treatment of the enslaved. The paper shall discuss the sources and potential frameworks for research that will allow this vital work to be done.
Biography: Eleanor Hex is first-year PhD research at the University of Kent, undertaking a CDA project with the Fulham Palace Trust. Eleanor’s project looks at the Bishops of London of the long-eighteenth century and their role as the head of the Church of England in the colonies, exploring the effect this had on enslaved workers.
Session 4 - Sense and Experience
Chair: Benedict Welch (Sussex)
Clara Rawlings (Birkbeck): ‘Medieval smell and spiritual progress’
Abstract: Within the medieval sensory model that understood the senses as functions of the soul, how did olfaction express the ineffable in written encounters with the divine? While mystics such as Margery Kempe and Richard Rolle embraced highly symbolic stenches and perfumes as connections to Christ, guidance for anchorites (religious hermits) emphasised personal responsibility to guard one’s sense of smell against harmful influences. This ten-minute work in progress presentation compares how odours feature in two genres of late medieval religious writing – mystical and instructional texts – and argues that olfaction was understood to be a principal tool for developing spiritual knowledge.
Bio: Clara Rawlings is a second-year MPhil/PhD researcher at Birkbeck, University of London. Her CHASE-funded project, Reading Scent in Medieval England, interrogates smell as a social, historical and literary phenomenon in the middle ages, investigating the meanings of scent first emerging in vernacular English.
Amber Butchart (Essex): ‘Fabric of Democracy: Textiles as Propaganda’
Abstract: Exhibitions, as a conduit for research and with requirements for diverse audiences, necessarily intersect with both the creative and the critical in their construction. This WiP presentation provides a brief overview of the exhibition 'Fabric of Democracy: Propaganda Textiles from the French Revolution to Brexit', which ran September 2023-March 2024. It considers the creative context for the show and offers some reflections on textiles as propaganda and the critical framework for presenting political objects within the gallery space.
Bio: Amber Butchart is a CHASE-funded practice-based PhD researcher at the Centre for Curatorial Studies, University of Essex. Her research considers Cold War-era textiles as propaganda in both discursive and material contexts, and how the curation of propaganda objects involves a critical engagement with the intersecting space they occupy between multiple disciplines and dynamics.
Frankie Wakefield (Birkbeck): ‘Monstrous mushrooms and mycological understandings’
Abstract: How do we think about fungi? As accelerating climate change forces a reconsideration of existing understandings of the natural environment, there is a growing imperative for the humanities to rethink the theoretical, cultural and creative divides between human and nonhuman. Within this, a recent explosion of interest in the fungal kingdom has sparked a ‘mushroom renaissance’, bringing new perspectives on fungi from across popular science, cultural anthropology and the environmental humanities (Tsing, 2015; Sheldrake, 2020; Hathaway, 2022). Yet across these discussions, there is a lack of attention being given to the role of fungi in fiction and narrative. With genres such as sci-fi and horror acting as longstanding sites of negotiation for the boundaries between human and Other, examining fungi in such realms offers a productive space within which to consider the possibilities and potentialities of this nonhuman lifeform. Drawing on examples from 20th and 21st-century visual media, this presentation examines how fictional depictions of fungi can help to address the critical challenges of exploring the nonhuman, while simultaneously speaking to the historic and emerging cultural anxieties which surround the category.
Bio: Frankie Wakefield is a doctoral researcher in English and Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research examines the depiction of fungi in contemporary horror and science-fiction narratives, working across the environmental humanities, genre studies and critical posthumanism.
Adam Simcox (Kent): ‘The Contours of Fear: Investigating Affective Experiences of Horror Films’
Abstract: Scholarship on viewers’ emotional engagement with audiovisual fictions, specifically films, tends to derive from several theoretical camps. My research is particularly interested in the moderate interventions made by cognitive film theory (CFT), which draws on cognitive psychology and analytic philosophy as well as many other related fields. In particular, I seek to challenge the orthodox position within this field, which emphasises an idealised model of the viewer, thereby disregarding the potential variability of experience between different kinds of viewer. My research does this by engaging with both this scholarship relating to emotional engagement generally as well as the extensive scholarship interested in the horror genre. While much has been made of the way that the horror genre is uniquely rooted in bodily, somatic and affective responses, much of this work has accepted a particular view of those responses which often boils down to the detection of threat and subsequent elicitation of fear. By unpicking the presuppositions that underly this position as well as utilising a novel phenomenological interview method, I intend to test and nuance the homogeneity of experience that CFT models predict. More precisely, I will investigate any detectable interpersonal variability of experience specifically on the edges of the preferred viewing position that CFT has traditionally investigated. Such an investigation will have consequences for numerous significant debates, particularly that concerning the ethical effects of media spectatorship generally and horror specifically where such effects are increasingly frequently tied to affective intuitions and heuristics derived from consumed media.
Bio: After the COVID-19 pandemic, Adam Simcox completed an MA in English Literary Studies (with a focus on film) at the University of Exeter. His research is conducted at the University of Kent, from where he originally obtained a BA in Film in 2020.
Mick Feltham (Sussex): ‘Ghost in the Beat: A Short Biography of the Roland SP404 in Experimental Hip-Hop'
Abstract: An exploration of the iconic Roland SP404 sampler and its unique place in the machine-based music practice of Experimental Hip-Hop and millennial L.A. Beat Scene. This performance/presentation will look at a particular creative, material process whereby producers, keen to emulate and develop the same sonic language, acquire the same machines which, in turn, leads to the workflow/audio idiosyncrasies of these machines coalescing into the identifiable sound of a genre. A practical, sonic walkthrough of the SP404 will provide both context and insight to its agency and impact on the L.A. beat scene which can be seen as an exemplar of the creative practice of millennial machine-based music. The conclusion suggests that any social/ethnographical/historical study of these genres must also consider these machines as more than mere tools and that their sonic characteristics and workflows, alongside their reception and adoption by a creative community - (in essence a machine biography) - should be included alongside the biographies of the artists and the movements themselves.
Bio: I am a writer / producer of experimental hip-hop and spoken word and an improvising saxophonist with a particular love of the harmonic language and phrasing of BeBop. My current practice centres around creative sampling, improvisation and prose. My doctoral research is concerned with the materiality of machine - based music practices, the inherent resistance embodied in experimental and left-field music production and how this millennial and essentially posthuman creativity can become an effective site of contestation against the prevailing socio-political hegemony.