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This paper will discuss my work-in-progress PhD novel Composition, specifically in relation to the formation of the child’s narrative voice in experimental writing by women. Focusing on Julia Kristeva’s conception of the ‘semiotic’ realm of language, I will analyse elements of poetry, prosody, and formal innovation in my creative work. Through the female child’s playful voice boundaries are questioned and collapsed; the self-referential protagonist interrogates the logic of the ‘symbolic’ order, jumbling words and their associative meanings, reconstructing her own, and ‘composing’ a version of her self as she finds her space, as separate to her (artist) mother, in the world.

My paper will examine how feminist forms of the bildungsroman genre and the metafictive child’s voice can act as subversive tools in contemporary discourse. Contemporary writers such as Eimear McBride, Bernadine Evaristo and Margaret Atwood explore the possibilities of the bildungsroman genre through a hybrid form of poetry and prose, and I will demonstrate how my own work utilises this hybrid form in order to unsettle standard literary conventions and to disrupt the phallogocentric discourse that has misrepresented and oppressed the female voice.

Rosa Lucy Rogers is a third year Practice as Research PhD candidate in the Contemporary Novel at University of Kent. Her interdisciplinary work has been published and/or displayed in Stirred Press Poetry, The Menteur, The Media Centre, Saving Grace and Rattle and Thud.

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Home is both site and process, both physical place and imagined space; it is made, un-made, made again; left, returned to, left again. It is intimately connected to who we are and who we aspire to be. It is a story we tell and retell, embellish and edit. Home is a narrative project; something that happens over time as well as space; a process that looks to hold past, present and future together, and through doing so generate meaning and connection.

Taken from the final chapter of my PhD critical commentary, this paper examines the relationship between writing and home. It explores the idea of the novel as a house — a metaphor used by Henry James and Alice Munro among others — and asks whether we might extend this analogy to the novel as a home, with all the complexities that term encompasses. It argues for reclaiming domestic fiction as a political space, and finally turns to the process of writing itself as a means of home-making.

Sarah Butler has three novels published by Picador in the UK and with fourteen international publishers: Ten Things I’ve Learnt About Love (2013), Before The Fire (2015) and Jack and Bet (2020). In November 2018, she published a novella, Not Home, written in conversation with people living in unsupported temporary accommodation in Manchester. Sarah's work explores ideas of home, belonging, identity, family, and urban landscapes. She is currently a CHASE Scholar in Creative Writing at the Open University and lectures part-time in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University.

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For several years, my professional life as a psychiatrist was concerned with interrogating mother-child relationships. While working as a medical expert witness for the family court, I routinely made recommendations to judges who were deciding whether children should be removed from their mother’s care. On rarer occasions, I was asked to conduct a pre-birth assessment, which involved evaluating a pregnant woman’s ability to parent a child who was not yet born. During that time in my professional life, I experienced recurrent miscarriages and was treated with an unproven drug regime in an NHS recurrent-miscarriage clinic. Almost all my professional conversations were about motherhood, about what makes a good enough parent and what causes harm. Away from work, I was preoccupied with the smallest physical signs of life and those signs that might herald impending foetal death. These collisions, of private experiences as a woman miscarrying, and my professional experiences as an expert witness made me curious about how stories are told by parents, by professionals and by the courts. Being a patient myself, albeit an obstetric one, made me construct assessments differently. My obstetrician used military metaphors to describe his treatment plans. My immune system, he postulated, was mounting an attack on embryos, identifying them as enemy invaders. The consultant suggested I had high numbers of cells called natural killer cells and his proposed treatment was presented as a counterattack. Throughout that pregnancy, I lived with my husband, an army officer, on a large military headquarters. The politics and poetics of war were part of my life during that pregnancy. For the creative component of my PhD, I am writing a memoir to explore these personal and professional collisions. I will be reading an extract of my creative non-fiction, which investigates the language used in the recent British medical literature and in the writing of women in memoir and fiction to describe foetal death, with a particular focus on deaths in early pregnancy.

Sabina Dosani: I am a consultant child and adolescent psychiatrist and a writer, in my second year of a CHASE-funded PhD on the creative and critical writing programme at UEA. While working as a junior doctor, I had a parallel career in medical journalism, working both freelance and as an editor at the British Medical Journal (BMJ). In 2013, I was appointed by the Lord Chancellor as a Medical Member of the First Tier Tribunal (Mental Health). I have MSc degrees in Mental Health Studies and in Medical Humanities (with distinction) from King’s College, London.

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The parishes (secular and ecclesiastical units of local government) beyond the walled city of early modern London were ever-growing and fluid communities. By the 1630s, most in the suburban environs contained populations greater than many of England’s provincial cities and those populations tended to be balanced toward the ordinary poor. This group were largely self-sufficient but easily swayed toward the need for parish relief by a change in life circumstance or crisis event. The cumulative impact of accelerated population growth, a changing built environment and poverty had coalesced in the 1630s and 1640s and, alongside the long-term problem of plague, placed acute stress on parishes in the suburban environs. Whilst select parish vestries (a socially exclusive and co-opting group of men who governed the parish) were handed enhanced powers to manage their local problems by the Plague Orders in 1578 and 1583 and the Poor Laws in 1598 and 1601, this also carried great responsibility and was an ever-increasing burden. The interpretation of community by vestries in the suburban environs after 1600 was necessarily narrow and situated within the formal and traditional construct of the parish boundaries, that failed to or could not practically take into account the fast-changing demographic and social situation. This manifested in ever hardening perceptions of belonging and discretion in who the parish was responsible for, which was driven by practical considerations of matching limited resources to ever-growing need. Plague, as a long term problem, amplified this outlook. For the greater population in the suburban environs though, the perception of parish community was imagined on a different plain to that of parish government and the practical concerns that guided their response to the poor and plague. This short paper will consider the impact of plague and the poor in shaping perceptions of community in the suburban environs between 1600 and 1650, and will explore the conflicting perceptions of community that existed between parish government and other individuals and groups in the parish.

Aaron Columbus is a final year PhD candidate at Birkbeck. His research is focused on plague and the poor in the suburban environs of early modern London c.1600–1650. Aaron completed a BA in Classical Studies and Diploma of Teaching at the University of Canterbury (NZ), then later, an MA in London Studies at Birkbeck.

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London’s heterogeneity lends itself to a study of marginalisation, especially across the seventeenth century and especially when epidemics hit. The dead mattered but not all the dead were treated the same.

During the 1650s, at a time when political uncertainty and religious expectation was rife, several dissenting groups sprung up; one of these groups was the Quakers. Quakers established their own practices around the disposal of the dead, and these practices were influential in promoting the movement’s unique identity. Not long after the emergence of the Quaker movement, in 1656, Jews were informally readmitted to England and small groups of Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews settled within the metropolis. These Jewish communities brought with them pan-European traditions around the disposal of their dead, and these traditions were placed fully formed upon the landscape of seventeenth-century London.

This short paper will explore how these religious ‘outsiders’ dealt with the 1665/6 plague and their own plague dead. Did the outbreak of plague allow them the freedom to set up independent burial grounds with little to no opposition from parish authorities? Were these same authorities happy to turn a blind eye to the disposal methods used by these communities, as it lessened the pressure upon them and the pressures on the parish’s fiscal resources? What were the challenges faced by these marginal groups when dealing with their dead during such an epidemic? Not all dead were treated the same and not all plague dead were treated the same, as this paper will illuminate.

Anna Cusack is a final year PhD candidate at Birkbeck. Her research is on the marginalised dead of London c.1600–1800. Anna completed a BA (Hon) in History at Birkbeck in 2016 then undertook an MPhil in Early Modern History at the University of Cambridge before returning to Birkbeck for her PhD which is funded by The Mercers' Company.

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How did those who did not have the resources to leave London for the relative safety of the country during the 1665 epidemic use the range of news and information sources that were available to them to navigate the dangers of life in the capital?

By the 1660s even London’s most deprived citizens were living in a multimedia world where news came via complex networks of oral, print and manuscript transmission. Consumers of the period were accustomed to managing a range of sources, which could inform their decision making and perhaps give them some agency in a situation where they had a very limited number of options.

How did people compare their own direct newsgathering, counting the number of red crosses on doors in the neighbourhood and the number of times the passing bell rang, to what the weekly Bills of Mortality said? Were people more inclined to believe their family, trade or religious networks, than City proclamations? What impact did public health restrictions on normal methods of oral news transmission — from hawkers to coffee shops, markets to religious meetings — have on the way people consumed news?

Finally, how did people judge the accuracy and reliability of their plague news, and did they trust sources that had been reliable on other news in the past? Were they inclined to trust print adverts for new medicines and preventatives more or less than the local apothecary who stayed in the neighbourhood through the plague, or was the situation so dire that they would try anything they could afford? This paper will suggest that the variety of sources available did allow London’s citizens to make their own assessments of the crisis. Nikki Clarke is a second year PhD student at Birkbeck, researching accuracy and its value in seventeenth-century English news sources. Nikki completed an MA in Early Modern History at Birkbeck, where her research focused on the working lives of professional musicians in Commonwealth and Protectorate London.

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This paper explores the epistemological and pedagogical challenges to creating a ‘just culture’ in the NHS. It is known that disciplinary action following patient safety events can have deleterious impact on practitioner wellbeing, and on occasion lead to doctor feeling ‘burnt-out’ depressed and in extreme cases suicidal.

Dr Cicely Cunningham’s definition of a ‘just culture’ describes an organisation that treats staff and patients ‘consistently and fairly’ demonstrating the ethos of Learn Not Blame, a campaign launched by Doctors Association UK (DAUK) in November 2018. In response to this call for a ‘just culture’ NHS Resolutions published a charter, Being Fair: supporting a just and learning culture for patients and staff following incidents in the NHS. This charter has identified three areas for change — addressing the fear around disciplinary action; addressing inequity and discrimination; tackling incivility and bullying within healthcare. The implementation of the charter and campaign is dependent on developing an alternate episteme and pedagogical approach to develop a culture of ‘learn not blame’.

I offer two concepts from a critical practice-based medical humanities episteme that have the potential to develop a vocabulary that moves away from inarized scape-goating. Firstly, Julia Kristeva’s concept of the ‘subject in process’, which suggests that the person-centred approach of clinical care is one of ‘becoming’ so that clinical practice can be mapped on a continuum rather than a dichotomy of cure or care, and secondly, Donna Haraway’s concept of ‘tentacular thinking’. This describes ‘life lived along lines’ but supported by deep unseen structures. Both these concepts enable a productive dialogue of restorative just culture which asks ‘who are hurt, what do they need and whose obligation is it to meet that need?’

Niro Amin: I am a practising primary care physician and medical educator. The focus of my thesis is physician wellbeing and how this is enacted in intersubjective relationships in clinical practice. I am keen to disclose the narrative voice of the wounded healer.

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Mental health amongst imprisoned people in the UK is in a state of permanent crisis. For several years, self harm rates have been at record highs, and the vast majority of imprisoned people carry some form of mental health diagnosis with them throughout their time in prison. The conditions of prison itself are evidenced to contribute to this crisis, and access to mental healthcare remains slow, sparse and fraught with concerns around ‘offender management’; prisoners' punishment and governance are always bound up with attempts at care.

Over the course of the Covid-19 pandemic, these conditions have significantly intensified. Lockdowns see imprisoned people in their cells for upwards of 23.5 hours a day, no visitation from friends and family and increasingly restricted activities. This year, over 80,000 people have been held in de facto solitary confinement for months, and recent data on self harm in prisons shows this is having detrimental effects on imprisoned people’s health.

This contribution to the Encounters conference considers what prison research of value and integrity looks like under these conditions. Covering methodological and political concerns from the tradition of prison ethnography, and drawing on the work of disability justice and prison abolitionist scholars, I reflect on the metamorphosis of my own PhD research over the last year to assess some methodological and political implications of prison research in a pandemic. Ultimately, I ask what happens to prison ethnography when the very conditions such research seeks to investigate preclude meaningful contact with a field site, and what this double lockdown means for researchers interested in accurately representing prisoners’ struggles.

Becka Hudson is an MPhil student in the second year of her studies for a Research Degree in Birkbeck Law School’s Criminology Department. Her research considers the conditions in which the majority of people imprisoned in the UK are diagnosed with some form of personality disorder, placing the development of British psychiatry and its prison estate in the historical context of Empire. Becka also works as a campaigner on issues around state racism and civil liberties in the UK.

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I will present a brief overview of my research and read an excerpt of recent experimental writing. In my project, I examine the embodied experience of the congregant within the spectacular site of the Evangelical megachurch (defined as 2,000+ congregants in weekly attendance). Evangelicalism is a world-wide, rapidly spreading movement with megachurch congregation size reaching to the tens and hundreds of thousands globally. My writing practice draws on the specific site of North America’s largest megachurch, Lakewood in Houston, Texas, which has a weekly attendance of up to 52,000 congregants. I combine several threads: the mythic history of Lakewood and the Osteen family within the context of Houstonian/ Texan history; an account of a tropical cyclone bearing down on the site, based on research into Hurricane Harvey; and lastly the megachurch site as a building-body that gradually develops self-awareness. The site eventually floods and is submerged, the water bringing with it a transformation of the site and a reorientation toward ‘gaia’.

Kate Pickering is a London based artist, writer and CHASE-funded PhD researcher in the Departments of Art and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths. She investigates the entanglement of body, belief and site through research into American megachurch Evangelicalism. See kate-pickering.com and instagram.com/writing_a_body_of_belief.

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‘We’re living on the borderline between the natural world...and that other world which is generated by our brain cells. And so clearly that fault line runs through our physical and emotional makeup…where these tectonic plates rub against each other are the sources of pain.’ —W.G. Sebald

This paper will discuss the evolution of my research project, The Same River Twice, a creative/critical journey along the real and imagined pathways of the Thames Estuary. Subject to the twice-daily inundation of the tides, the estuarial edges of Kent are shifting terrains where land and water meet and part. Neither wholly land nor sea, they are in between, liminal places of instability and mutability, a place where borders and boundaries fluctuate and reshape.

During this paper, I will read an excerpt from my work in progress and discuss some of the tensions inherent in navigating a real and imagined place; tensions between embodied experience and imagination, historical research versus freedom to reimagine the past, tensions of form (am I writing fiction, autofiction, creative non-fiction and what do these labels mean?), permission and transgression. I will also discuss how my methodology has evolved over the past year and is helping to shape the voice and form of the creative work.

Caroline Millar is a second year PhD candidate in Text, Research and Practice at the Centre for Creative Writing at the University of Kent. Her work has been published in The Guardian, Elsewhere: A Journal of Place, The New Writer, Poetry News and Litmus. She teaches English Literature and Creative Writing at Canterbury Christchurch University.

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This paper discusses why Richard Marsh’s big bug might evoke terror whereas the big bug of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis evokes mainly pity. No prior knowledge of the texts is required since for those unfamiliar with the 1897 bestseller or the 1912 novella, the presentation incorporates a very brief summary of the plots. The paper explores how insect imagery is deployed by both authors, and the extent to which the dominant perspective within the respective narratives is linked to contrasting emotional reactions to the humans turned beetle at the centre of each tale. The two shapeshifters bear a marked similarity to one another, yet readers feel differently about them. Who’s afraid of the big bad bug and why don’t they feel the same way about the other one? That is the question, and it is addressed in terms of otherness manifested in insect form as well as the degree of access to the interiority of the respective characters and their retained humanity. Why might fellow feeling be denied entry through a late-Victorian monstrous carapace yet be able to penetrate an alternative exoskeleton with ease?

This research arises out of early editions of the fifth chapter of Janette’s thesis ‘Locating the Sympathetic Insect: Cultural Entomology and Emotional Responses to Richard Marsh’s The Beetle’. It is very much a work in progress.

Janette Leaf is a PhD researcher at Birkbeck’s Department of English, Theatre and Creative Writing. She has presented conference papers to Urban Weird, London Victorian Studies and the Institute of English Studies among others. She reviews for the British Society for Literature and Science, and is co-editing an anthology for British Library Publishing, Crawling Horror: Creeping Tales of the Insect Weird.

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In his researches into nineteenth-century Paris during the 1930s, Walter Benjamin used the concept of phantasmagoria as critical tool for interpreting ideological consciousness under the capitalist mode of production. Taking influence from Marx, Benjamin drew on the illusory effects of optical devices to critique the dominant modes of perception that emerged from urban life. In the contemporary context, our entrenchment with technological forms is ever deepening. Yet, much like the phantasmagoria shows of the eighteenth century, the technical processes of global technology corporations are occulted by the outward appearance of the product. In this paper, I use Benjamin’s phantasmagoria thought figure to work through the senses in which Google’s Page Rank and DeepDream algorithms can be understood as phantasmagorias of the digital realm. I explore the ways in which Google’s ethos contributes to the shaping of the neoliberal (the digitally tracked, auto-exploiting) subject through what I argue is a phantasmagorical presence.

Mary Newbold: I am a third year (part-time) doctoral student at Birkbeck College, within the School of Arts. In my thesis I examine the relationship between visual technologies and human sense perception. I engage with the materialist philosophy of Walter Benjamin in order to critically interpret contemporary technological forms and to speculate on their effects on human sense perception.

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This paper is a timely review of my social media project from last December, ‘A Camp Modernism Advent Calendar’. Camp modernism, the concept investigated by my PhD thesis, is the intersection of camp, being a style of exaggerated, parodic humour, often with queer implications, and modernism, as in the early twentieth-century spirit of formal innovation. The term is starting to be discussed in academic journals like Modernism / modernity, which put out a special issue on the subject in January 2016 (issue 23.1). In this project, I was attracted to the idea of explaining camp modernism to the world via the visual medium of an Advent calendar. As per the tradition of such calendars, this meant locating 24 images based on my research, in my case portraits of writers, artists and actors, to be revealed over the course of 24 days, at the rate of one image per day, from December 1st to December 24th. Rather than create a physical calendar of cardboard and paper, though, I made the calendar entirely virtual and public, using a series of posts on social media, namely the Instagram platform. Each image was lightly annotated, with a brief explanation of how it related to camp modernism. Sometimes the relation was more instinctive than directly illustrative, as I was driven by the Instagram sentiments of visual impact and the need to connect. Today, with the pandemic, this project now touches on a contemporary PhD candidate’s need to balance the traditional isolation of their research with the COVID-informed urgency of needing to feel connected and supported, or just ‘liked’.

Dickon Edwards is a CHASE-funded PhD candidate in his fourth year, including two years part-time. Supervised by the English and Humanities department of Birkbeck, University of London, he is researching camp modernism in literature, with a focus on Ronald Firbank (1886–1926).

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In the springtime of 2020, amid what I felt sure were the final throes of my research into the contemporary resurgence of the ukulele, my timeline (and, like millions of others, my world) was thrown into disarray by the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic. Separated from my familiar support networks, I found myself invited by a London-based ukulele group I had conducted fieldwork with years previously to join their nightly online jam sessions. The experience would prove transformative not only for my own social experience of the pandemic, but for the entire narrative of my research.

This presentation will examine the development of the in-progress final chapter of my thesis, exploring my motivations for documenting the rapid shift of a musical social world which had previously positioned itself firmly in the offline sphere. It will consider what we might, collectively, learn from the group’s surprisingly low-tech workarounds for the limitations of virtual musicking, and will re-emphasise the significance of documenting, in the words of Finnegan (1989), ‘hidden’ amateur artistic activity, more vital than ever during a time of global crisis.

Emma Winston is in the final year of a PhD in the Music department of Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research concerns the twenty-first-century resurgence of the ukulele with particular reference to identity, and to the separation and convergence of online and offline amateur musical activity.