Day 1 Thursday 24 June 2021 

09:00-9:30 | Welcome and announcements 

Prof Sarah Barrow (PVC, UEA Arts and Humanities) 

Dr Matt Taunton (Associate Dean Postgraduate Research, UEA Arts and Humanities) 

Dr Rachael Mclennan (UEA CHASE academic lead) 

09:30-11:00 | Parallel sessions 1 

1A. Room 1 | Community | Chair TBC 

Joseph Williams | University of East Anglia 

Is There an Author in This Class? Malcolm Bradbury and the Death of the Author (20-minute paper).  

Malcolm Bradbury was a prolific novelist, critic, and academic, who alongside Angus Wilson founded the University of East Anglia’s MA in Creative Writing in 1970. One of Bradbury’s key motivations behind establishing the course was an attempt to re-assert the importance of the author at a time when the intellectual currents of structuralism and deconstruction were dominating Western literary thought, in particular Roland Barthes’s influential essay ‘The Death of the Author’ (1967). This paper will consider the ways in which Bradbury resisted the Death of the Author in his novels, his academic criticism, and his university teaching, drawing specific attention to archived teaching notes from the MA in Creative Writing workshops as well as Bradbury's innovative 'Fiction and the Creative Process' module from 1989. This module, designed to ‘move between a “creative” and a “critical” perspective’, resisted the influence of literary theory by re-asserting the importance of the author. Whilst undoubtedly the source of much humour in his writing, Bradbury’s resistance to the Death of the Author was also part of an ongoing, highly sophisticated attempt to theorise the creative process and the imaginative work of the author.  

I am a CHASE-funded postgraduate researcher at UEA’s School of Literature, Drama, and Creative Writing.  My PhD research examines the creative, critical, and educational work of Malcolm Bradbury, Lorna Sage, David Lodge and the literary journal Critical Quarterly, founded by C. B. Cox and A. E. Dyson in 1958. The project will consider how these figures shaped the direction of literary studies in the United Kingdom, most notably by establishing creative writing within the discipline; it will also consider their attempts to cultivate a plural and democratic literary culture outside of the university, through their engagement with contemporary writing, television, magazines and secondary schools.

Eleanor Kilroy | Goldsmiths, University of London 

Performance, perfection, and feminism in social media 

The paper examines some of the outcomes of a performance workshop project that took place with young women aged 17-18, based at a performing arts college in Liverpool. It explores what is unearthed when live and embodied theatrical processes are used to explore the digital performances of heightened femininities on Instagram. Despite the transition from a postfeminism moment, to a period when feminism is extremely popular, Instagram has become a platform to ‘prove’ the accomplishment of what Angela McRobbie has described as 'the perfect' (2020). This involves portraying beautified faces, sculpted bodies, stylish spaces, sparkling social lives and traditional middle class family values (Ibid). Instagram, then, demands a heightened degree of visibility with the directive to ‘put oneself out there’, in a way that tethers performance and curation to the quest of portraying the perfect. In this respect, the visual content sharing platform intensifies the postfeminist address, encouraging young women to be in a constant state of self-improvement and self-production. Much of the feminist cultural research in this area focuses on digital profiles and interviews with influencers. Contributing to new ground across the fields of theatre and performance and feminist cultural theory, participatory performance is positioned in this paper as capable of facilitating an exploration of Instagram’s deeply dramatic qualities.  

This paper will demonstrate how this project has used performance processes to explore the lived negotiations of the perfect from the perspective of young women living in Liverpool from working class backgrounds. The term performance is used to cover the scope of a mixed-method combining performance art processes, the Theatre of the Oppressed and Drama in Education. All of these different performance forms point towards raising dialogue, critical reflection and challenging abuses of power. Group discussion and participatory performance are situated as open and emancipatory modes of knowledge production, that resist the postfeminist individualisation of gendered struggles. Further, this mixed method is used to provide opportunities for young women to grapple with issues collectively, in a way that allows them to share common ground and observe difference. While practice is crucial to this research, it is an interdisciplinary project that prioritises the theorising of performance work, to vibrantly bring the fields of theatre and performance and feminist cultural studies into conversation. 

Marleen Boschen | Goldsmiths, University of London 

Undoing ‘Forever’ from within the Millennium Seed Bank: How to decolonise a global botanical collection? 

This presentation explores one of the case studies of my PhD research on seed banking practices, namely the Millennium Seed Bank at the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew. In particular I trace the very recent beginnings of the ‘Kew Decolonisation working group’, its questions and challenges to observe how processes of decolonisation are entering an organisation built on a history of imperial plant collections and the displacement of plants. As the seeds of wild plants from across the globe enter the Millennium Seed Bank they are frozen for indefinite periods of time, awaiting when they might be needed in the future. I suggest that these liminal, suspended states can be a useful for thinking through the multiplicity of futures for seeds, and importantly how they exit seed banks and re-enter into life worlds - and how organisational custodianship is envisioned here. Listening ’against mastery’ I analyse a selection of interviews with plant scientists, conservationists, cryotechnology specialists and science education workers alongside visual materials and science and collection strategies to ask how organisational vulnerability and precarity can lead to the development of new relations from within organisations that have taken on the global care for seeds. 

1B. Room 2 | Decolonising | Chair: Augusta Ivory-Peters 

Sandra Sattler | SOAS, University of London 

Fierce Hindu Goddesses: From Colonial and Postcolonial Perceptions Back to the Medieval Temple Setting 

Fierce Hindu goddesses, most commonly known as Kālī and Cāmuṇḍā, became increasingly popular from the early medieval period throughout India. The latter is depicted as a 'skeleton goddess' with several distinctive attributes such as skull garland and skull cup. She haunts the cremation grounds, wields severed heads and dances triumphantly on a corpse.  

Their striking depictions, as well as their exploits in mythology and role in ritual practice, have granted them the status of 'fierce goddesses', who are regarded as a frightening aspect of a universal Great Goddess in Hinduism. Not least because ferocious goddesses challenge conceptions of a female godhead as submissive, passive, dependent, and benign, they have become an emblem of an 'extreme Orient' or 'Other', primarily in the colonial period. From the mid-20th century onward, Kālī in the West has also been appropriated as an icon for female empowerment. In this talk, I want to briefly outline these perceptions by presenting a selection of examples from textual and visual sources. Subsequently, we will look beyond (neo)colonial representations and turn towards the Goddess Cāmuṇḍā in her actual temple setting. Through her place in the temple and her iconography, I want to explore the function she fulfilled in a greater temple programme and how the tradition itself grappled with her fierceness in a more orthodox context. 

Tariq Mir | SOAS, University of London 

Listen To The Nay, How It Still Laments! A Meditation On Untangling Coloniality From Islamic Thought 

It is clear that the contemporary study of Islamic thought—established through the Orientalist and Colonial projects in the late 19th and early 20th centuries—continues to be riddled by a number of methodological problems. However, it is also clear that these analytical and theoretical tools, coupled with the contemporary discomfort with these approaches, has also prompted students of Islamic thought to challenge and undo some of these setbacks and biases. 

Provoked by the modern mistranslations of the famed Persian poet Jalāl al-Dīn al-Rūmī (1207-1273), I hope to offer a short meditation which outlines some of the problems in the contemporary study of mediaeval and premodern Islamic thought. In the process, I hope to offer some possible solutions as found in the study of “the history of ideas” which I am currently applying in my own study of the theological enterprise of 14th century Central Asian Muslim thinker Saʿd al-Dīn al-Taftāzānī (1322-1390). In doing so, I hope to highlight how the contemporary study of Islamic history of ideas can offer a decolonial approach in the study of Islamic thought. 

Tom Peterson | SOAS, University of London 

From Cosmopolitan Court to Sinhala Folk: Colonialism, Folklore, and a Shifting Musical Landscape in Sri Lanka 

The Sri Lankan court of Kandy was elite and cosmopolitan and its music was no different. But today, genres that thrived there are routinely seen as the 'folk' music of a particular ethnic community. I discuss some of my initial explorations into these shifts of musical meaning, the role of British colonialism and folklore in these changes, and a nineteenth century Sinhala songbook that complicates modern ‘folk’ interpretations.  

Key words: Music history, ethnomusicology, Sri Lanka, colonialism, folklore, 19th century, songbooks. 

1C. Room 3 | Futures | Chair: Janet Morrison 

Danielle Cameron | University of East Anglia 

New York Ruins and the Future of Adulthood in Colson Whitehead’s Zone One  

By engaging with age studies, spatial theory and literary analysis, my presentation examines the symbiotic relationship between urban environments and understandings of adulthood in Colson Whitehead’s Zone One (2011). I seek to contribute a twenty minute presentation and, by focusing on Zone One, I offer a reading of one of my project’s central texts. In its consideration of adulthood in the twenty-first century, my presentation corresponds with Virtual Encounters’ ‘futures’ theme.  

Set over three days in a zombie apocalypse, Whitehead’s novel follows a protagonist nicknamed Mark Spitz, who is tasked with patrolling Lower Manhattan. I argue that Whitehead positions the deteriorating city as signifying the ruination of the traditional markers of adulthood – including employment, the accumulation of capital and its conversion into real estate – in late capitalism. Thus, I identify Whitehead’s engagement with age and space in Zone One as encouraging a reconsideration of certain markers of adulthood, and their increasing unsustainability in the twenty-first century. 

By tracing the evolution of Mark Spitz’s relationship with the city in Zone One, I demonstrate that Whitehead initially positions Manhattan as an aspirational site where markers of adulthood are enshrined. While scholars including Camille Fojas, Erica Sollazo and David McNally have engaged with Zone One’s and the zombie trope’s critique of late capitalism, the relationship between space and age in the novel remains overlooked. Thus, by assessing how spatial ruination signifies shifting understandings of adulthood in Zone One, this paper builds upon Sari Edelstein’s assertion that ‘adulthood functions less as a biological status than a social achievement; it is best understood as an ideal rather than an inevitability’ (Adulthood and Other Fictions, 3).  

Through examining how domestic spaces, workplaces and subway tunnels shift from the aspirational to the horrific in Zone One, I argue that Whitehead employs a dualistic function of space to reveal a duplicitous function of age categorisation: while adulthood appears to offer stability, Mark Spitz comes to realise that this stability is illusory. Finally, this paper evaluates whether Zone One proposes an alternative model of adulthood outside of employment and real estate. Thus, I argue that – in portraying a millennial grappling with an eroding city and an eroding sense of age – Whitehead’s work resists an enshrinement of adulthood and offers a literary reconsideration of age-related power.  

Bio: 

Danielle Cameron is a second-year American Studies PhD student at the University of East Anglia and a recipient of the university’s Faculty of Arts and Humanities Postgraduate Research Studentship. Her project focuses on representations of childhood, adulthood and spatiality in post-1970 New York literature. More broadly, her research interests include life writing, horror literature and film and depictions of family in American literature. She holds an MPhil in Education from the University of Cambridge and an MA in American Literature from UEA. Danielle’s writing appears on U.S. Studies Online, and in Dear Movies and the European Journal of American Culture.  

 Li Li | University of East Anglia 

The Languages of COVID-19: a complex and shared responsibility for healthcare interpreting provision 

Interlingual and intercultural mediation is fundamental to accessing healthcare among culturally and linguistically diverse populations (CLDPs) in our super-diverse societies. Its complexity is well-acknowledged in healthcare provision (Vertovec, 2007), including maternity care (NICE, 2010; Phillimore, 2015; Higginbottom et al., 2019), in bilingual/multilingual healthcare communications (Hsieh, 2016; Angelelli, 2019; Krystallidou, Langewitz and van den Muijsenbergh, 2020), and technology-assisted remote interpreting (Moser-Mercer, 2005; Braun and Taylor, 2011; Skinner, Napier and Braun, 2018; Boe, 2019). Moreover, the global pandemic adds another layer of complexity for healthcare providers and language support staff. For spoken languages, before COVID-19, remote healthcare interpreting in the UK mainly referred to telephone interpreting and little was known about video interpreting in the NHS (ATC and Nimdzi, 2019). In response to the pandemic and the need for self-isolation and social distancing, the rapid and widespread adoption of healthcare and communication technologies, such as NHS video consultations (Greenhalgh et al., 2020) or remote video interpreting (Hickey, 2020), has become the new normal.  

Taken COVID-19 as a turning point for video interpreting in health and social care in the UK, this paper investigates the impact of this global pandemic on language support staff such as in-house bilingual health advocates (BHAs) at an NHS trust in east London and freelancer interpreters in the UK for the last 18 months. Qualitative semi-structured interviews were conducted, transcribed and analysed using thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2006).  

This paper challenges the stigmatised narrative of ‘loss’ of information via interpreting and highlights the complexity of providing healthcare interpreting remotely during a pandemic and re-enforces that providing quality care to CLDPs via language services during COVID-19 is a complex and yet shared responsibility for all parties: healthcare professionals, patients/maternity service users, language support staff, language service providers, technical support and the NHS institutions. The findings from this empirical case study might shed lights on the strengths and weaknesses of the current NHS remote communication technologies. More importantly, these findings may inform future remote video interpreting project by identifying any which might not reach large-scale, sustained adoption so that a successful implementation, scale-up, or rollout of video interpreting technologies is achievable in the NHS. 

 
Lucy Taylor | University of Essex 

To B or Not to B – Publication of Melanie Klein’s Psychoanalytic Material Relating to Patient B 

Psychoanalytic practice is frequently represented in the publication of clinical case studies that contextualise clinical experiences and theoretical formulations, but fuller, comprehensive accounts of analysis and publication of analyst clinical notes are rare.  This paper will explore some of the challenges and opportunities involved in attempting to bring Melanie Klein’s clinical notes from her 5-year analysis of an adult into wider readership.    Through close reading of Klein’s unpublished clinical notes held in the Melanie Klein Archive at the Wellcome Trust, relating to this analysis that took place between 1935 and 1945, this paper will consider important relatively unexplored themes on the issues of pseudonymisation and the ethics of clinical note publications and attempts at client identification.  As well as providing new insight into the specific clinical practice of Melanie Klein, discussion of these issues of publishing B’s clinical notes, will have implications for historians of psychoanalysis, and it will evidence the value of psychoanalysts’ archive papers, which in general remain relatively unexplored.  This will have wider implications for the historiography of psychoanalysis, as I question how clinical practice gets represented beyond the psychoanalytic theoretical frame.  While short case studies can be useful in understanding individual clinical situations, the long case will serve to emphasise the overarching stance and attitude taken by clinicians such as Klein that pervade their work above the application of any specific theory or formulation. This may in turn contribute towards the broader debate on client identification in the wider field of health humanities that includes the clinical practice of psychoanalysis. 

Lucy Taylor is a part time 2nd year PhD candidate in the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex. She is also a 2nd year Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy training candidate of the British Psychotherapy Foundation/University of Exeter. She previously qualified as a Chartered Accountant and spent 15 years working as an Internal and External Audit Manager for KPMG and HSBC Global Insurance Operations. 
 

1D. Room 4 | Communities | Workshop  

Kate Meakin, Heather McKnight, Irina Bucan 

Reimagining communal spaces, academia and society 

This panel will take the form of an interactive, participatory workshop that looks to initiate the collaborative creation of a utopian manifesto for, and with, its participants. The workshop will be divided into three areas which broadly cover our research topics: utopianism and communal spaces, utopianism and academia, and utopianism and social justice. Irina's research is on the state-funded model of 'cultural houses' in Eastern Europe, focusing on public homes that provide intimate, 'homely' feelings and an environment for negotiating what culture can be. Heather’s research focuses on reimagining the university through resistance, and the shared ideas of freedom, alternative pedagogies and inclusiveness emergent through spaces of protest and debate. Kate is working on speculative world-building in both fiction and social movement organising, and the ways in which political change can be impacted and inflected by particular speculative fiction in order to speculate on possible futures. 

Each section will be approximately 30 minutes each and will be run by one of us: Irina on imagining communal spaces, Heather on re-thinking academia and Kate on transforming society. This will be an opportunity for each of us to share our projects and productively 'test' our methodologies on fellow researchers. Each section will be devoted to inviting participants to collectively negotiate, discuss, reimagine and world-build different ways of being. It will also be interrogating problematic, and arguably dystopian, areas that we've been facing in both the recent pandemic (e.g.: being limited in our interactions in communal spaces) and more broadly around campaigns to decolonise the university along with practical tools and strategies to implement political change.  

We will start by inviting participants to consider how things are, what we might want instead and how we might get there, in individual and collective ways. We will be facilitating small group exercises using Jamboard collage software. The session will provide a shared space to identify and confront anxieties of the present moment, as well as to engage positively around future plans that can challenge and transform academia and the world around us. 

Our key output will be to collectively author a utopian manifesto. This will include practical steps for more participatory communal spaces for culture, decolonising the university, reimagining and reclaiming academic freedom and possible direct action intervening into structures of oppression. We also envision the format of the workshop constituting a model for subsequent working groups, that could discuss these topics further and take practical steps towards these imagined futures. 

Structure: 

Reimagining Communal Spaces - 20 minutes 

*Break* 

Reimagining Education - 20 minutes 

*Break* 

Reimagining Society - 20 minutes 

*Break* 

Summary of our Collective Manifesto for Action - 15 mins 

11:00-11:30 | Break

 11:30-12:30 | Keynote 1: Hallie Rubenhold 

Chair Jasmine Kirkbride 

“The historian Hallie Rubenhold is the author of three works of non-fiction and two novels, of which two, The Covent Garden Ladies and Lady Worsley’s Whim, have inspired television dramas; Harlots (Hulu/Amazon) and The Scandalous Lady W (BBC2). Her debut book, The Covent Garden Ladies, captured the imagination of millions when it brought to public attention the history of the Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies, an infamous 18th century guidebook to sex workers. 

Alongside her writing, her extensive experience extends to presenting TV documentaries, advising on period dramas, teaching, lecturing and curatorial work” 

(https://www.hallierubenhold.com/)  

Hallie will talk about The Five, research methodology, and history as something live and relevant, incorporating the conference themes of ‘futures’ and ‘community’. 

12:30-13:30 | Lunch Break

13:30-14:30 | Parallel sessions 2 

2A. Room 1 | Communities | Panel discussion: Belonging and identity 

Sabina Dosani, Martin Munroe, Karítas Hrundar Pálsdóttir | University of East Anglia 

We are three students on the PhD in Critical and Creative Writing at UEA and would like to propose a joint themed panel/ roundtable discussion on belonging and identity within three different communities: 

Martin Munroe is a former student adviser at Goldsmiths, University of London. A 2018 MA Creative Writing graduate of Royal Holloway. In October 2020 he became a full-time CHASE funded PhD candidate in Creative -Critical Writing under supervision of Professor Tessa McWatt and Professor Alison Donnell at the University of East Anglia. His novel examines themes of black male masculinity, class, colonisation, and family.  

The creative project is inspired in part by the number of murders of black teenage boys in London and the rise of black churches in inner London. It is also a comment on the limitations and contradictions of black masculinity and black male sexual identity as expressed in a range of contemporary London locations – across the sexual continuum.  The synopsis of the novel: Three black brothers are haunted by their dead father, a Windrush generation immigrant from the Caribbean. 

An aspect of the piece examines Caribbean culture, as a hybrid culture of the colonized and in conflict with the culture of the colonizers. It is this aspect that led me to participate in this panel.  

Through the medium of short stories, Karítas Hrundar Pálsdóttir’s work explores the phenomenon of reentry, that is sojourners’ readaptation to their homeland after living for a period of time abroad. In her short story collection, focus is put on specific emotions and events, including for example: confusion, sorrow, loneliness, starting a new school, returning to an old workplace, and having a baby. The story presented in the panel tells the tale of a new British mother and her past adventures in Japan, raising questions about the issues of belonging and exile. 

When psychiatrist and expert witness, Sabina Dosani, is referred to the recurrent miscarriage clinic after a series of devastating losses, she finds herself undergoing invasive tests and intrusive scans. Sabina starts to scrutinise the medical systems she worked and trained in. What she discovers overturns many things she had taken for granted. Dosani’s memoir explores whether it is possible to be a compassionate, yet emotionally-uninvolved, witness to family tragedy.  Weaving professional encounters in the family court, with personal experiences of foetal loss, Flesh and Blood is an exploration of maternal attachment and clinical detachment. 

Flesh and Blood takes the reader on journey through a medicalised pregnancy, which unfolds under the bright glare of medical examinations, alongside a parallel, professional journey with families eviscerated by illness, adversity and addictions. Tracking the conflicts, collisions and concerns of medical professionals, social workers and lawyers, Flesh and Blood asks readers to consider what it would mean if clinics and courts were places of greater compassion, or whether too much emotion stalls the difficult and often devastating interventions designed to keep children safe, often leaving mothers in the shadows. 

 2B. Room 2 | Panel discussion: Doing research in a pandemic 

Tim Galsworthy (Sussex), Sarah Smeed (Kent), Kitty Shaw (Birkbeck) 

In this roundtable, three researchers will discuss issues connected to “doing research” during a global pandemic – or, more accurately, trying to do research during a global pandemic. The three speakers are Tim Galsworthy (Sussex), Sarah Smeed (Kent), and Kitty Shaw (Birkbeck). Taking turns to offer comments, before engaging in a free-flowing conversation with each other and with attendees, the three speakers will offer insights onto the challenges they’ve faced and the strategies they’ve devised to try and overcome those challenges. Matters discussed will include engaging with archives (especially overseas institutions), remote research, external funding, mental health, and planning. This discussion will cover the practicalities of trying to be an effective researcher during the pandemic, while also considering the mental health difficulties which are part and parcel of this story. Tim and Sarah are third-year researchers, while Kitty is in her first year, meaning the speakers will be able to give differing perspectives on doing research during a pandemic. In particular, Tim and Sarah will be able to be discuss life as a researcher before and after the pandemic began – a shift which may be interesting for other CHASE students to discuss. This panel gives Tim, Sarah, and Kitty – along with other Encounters attendees who take part – the opportunity to talk through difficult but important obstacles we are all facing and trying to navigate. 

2C. Room 3 | Works in progress | History | Chair: Mina Radovic 

Elizabeth Webb | Open University 

Ancient community: illuminating hidden figures in Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War 

The fifth century BCE ancient Greek historian Thucydides is best known for his account of the war between Athens and Sparta. His work has been widely used in the field of International Relations and has more recently been considered the foundation for analyses of modern political issues; an example of this is Graham Allison’s contemporary work on ‘The Thucydides Trap,’ in which he applies the paradigm of rivalry between a rising power (China) and an established one (the United States). 

However, there is more to Thucydides’ writing than its political dimensions. Although he is considered to be a sparse conceptual writer, his narrative is full of sensory detail and contains episodes which give us insight into communities under the existential pressure of war. Furthermore, in spite of the traditional focus given to prominent figure such as the Athenian politician Pericles, certain episodes illuminate the actions of figures traditionally marginalised in accounts of this conflict, particularly women and enslaved people.  

My paper explores how we can draw out the implications of sensory aspects of Thucydides’ narrative to develop a richer understanding of elided figures in communities at war. Moreover, it also challenges the binary polarity which sets Thucydides’ conceptual and political narrative against Herodotus’ more inclusive historiography.  


Edward Shepherd | Birkbeck, University of London 

John Berger’s ‘Ladder’ and the entangled experience of domesticated sheep, the red fox and humans in Neolithic Britain. 

In Britain, the red fox (Vulpes vulpes) is infrequently recovered from the built environment of the Early Neolithic. When encountered, it is either considered ‘intrusive’ (due to its burrowing behaviour) and quickly removed from archaeological histories or is theorized as either technology (fur) or playing a role within human cosmologies (Serjeantson 2011, Pollard 2008). This paper is a creative attempt to move away from what Tim Ingold (1996) terms “culturally perceived” nature (studied by social anthropologists and archaeologists) and instead write archaeological narratives which position at its centre a sense of “really natural” nature (studied by natural scientists). Influenced by the writings of John Berger (1979) and in particular his poem ‘Ladder’, I will move away from the scenario of - human thinks and/or uses fox -, a position which inadvertently implies a ranking of animal species (with human animals at the very top), but instead I will write histories which approach all animal species (here I include human) on level terms, exploring the entangled behavioural relationships between the red fox, sheep and humans during the Early Neolithic in Britain; using extracts from an oral interview (conducted during the Spring 2021 COVID lockdown via Skype) with a working hill shepherd; alongside published research from the natural sciences, ethnozooarchaeology, applied ecology, veterinary science and  environmental management. 

Edward Shepherd, Department of History, Classics and Archaeology, Birkbeck, University of London, UK. Second-Year CHASE funded PhD candidate 

2D. Room 4 | Network event: Gather.town 

Marleen Boschen | Goldsmiths, University of London 

CHASE Climate Justice Network Session 

Accessing the environment works best on Google Chrome* 

The CHASE Climate Justice network recently organised its first sharing event '(Taking) Care in the Climate Crisis'. For this event we created an environment on Gather.town which was designed and built by artist Andrea Khora. Gather.town is a platform that allows to experiment with creative online gatherings and exhibitions. In this session at Encounters we will share and discuss some of the learnings, let participants wander through the environment as well as talk about future activities of the network, open questions for future discussions and ways to get involved. 

Please note that this session will take place in a Gather.town environment accessible via this link: https://gather.town/i/OCsKkck4

Password: Encounters 

14:30-15:00 | Break

15:00-16:30 | Session 3: Training session

'Presenting Your Research to Non-Academics’

This session is designed for those who wish to share their research with non-academics but would benefit from some support and training in doing so. We will consider how our delivery should be adapted for different audiences and you will plan a session to deliver based on your research. 

16:30-17:00| Session 4: Creative work and video posters Q&A - Main room

Elizabeth Chappell | Open University 

'The Day War Broke’ Out  

We aim to create a 'video poster' of our film 'The Day War Broke’ Out [https://www.chasevle.org.uk/archive-of-training/archive-of-training-2019/film-summer-school/] alongside a short filmed podcast discussion between the makers of the film about the themes raised in the film and its implications for research.  

The film was made by Walking Arts Practitioner and Birkbeck Researcher Simon King; Open University Researcher and writer Elizabeth Chappell and artist Dominique Baron-Bonarjee in the summer of 2019 as part of a CHASE film-making training course led by film-maker Karen Boswall at The University of Sussex. It focuses on the way in which the Mass Observation (MO) Archive came about and what its relevance is today. The film brings to life the materiality of the archive through voice, music, hand-written letters, historical objects and setting as well as through an interview with one of Mass Observation’s curators, Kirsty Pattrick. But what can we understand from the stated intentions of MO’s founders for anonymous volunteer contributors to write diaries ‘so that their [the public’s] environment may be understood and thus constantly transformed.’? In our discussion we will draw out the idea that the view that the ‘single voice’, i.e. in this case the personal reflective narrative, can offer a ‘way in’ to understanding collective lived experience. At times of crisis, whether 1945 or 2020-21, such 'unknown' or 'previously unknown' voices can come to the fore, as they articulate a shared experience in the moment. As practitioners we offer up a dialogical approach exploring the parallel and overlapping questions of how past lived experience can be brought to life on film as well as how researchers can use materiality to access the context of lived experience. We ask whether the the creative exploration of the archive through film offers one of the best ways to open up a rich dialogue between researchers, curators and the public? Also, more broadly, how can film-making open up new vistas and avenues for researchers to share findings as well as to transform their own field of research? 

Please access this poster before the Q&A session at: https://vimeo.com/564127705/864822b3ad

Lilith Cooper | University of Kent 

Zine Making as Method 

This video will explore the potential of zine making as a research method.  Zines are self-published, DIY, not for profit, booklets or pamphlets, often with small distributions. They are widely acknowledged as being made by and within communities marginalised by traditional publishing, media or dominant discourse. I will briefly discuss the ways zine making has been used in contemporary research in the arts, humanities and social sciences. I will share different ways I have explored zine making as a method in my project, and how it relates to broader methodological questions and considerations. I will consider the possibilities of zine making as a creative and sensory method, as collaborative auto-ethnography, as dissemination, and as action. I will demonstrate the ways that zine making offers us a way to build community and imagine different futures. 

Lilith Cooper (they/them) is a first year PhD student in the School of English at the University of Kent, working on working on a CHASE AHRC funded collaborative PhD project: The Culture, Politics and Lived Experience of Health: Zines at the Wellcome Collection. 

Please access this poster before the Q&A session at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHlgHFaZR2c  

John Evans | University of East Anglia 

Using Bruno Latour's modes of experience to analyse a historical community. 

Short description: This will introduce how to analyse any material using the method set out in Latour's 'An Inquiry into Modes of Existence' (2013). A collection of maps and plans from the British Museum will be used as an example of how a historical period can be recreated from visual material. 

The format will be a prerecorded 10 minute video 'poster' that combines images and text with a voiceover to demonstrate the method in an accessible way. To be hosted on the conference site for the duration of the conference. The theme it relates to is Community. 

Speaker Biography 

Year of study: 5 (p/t) 

Institution: UEA 

Department: School of Art, Media and American Studies 

Please access this poster before the Q&A session at: https://youtu.be/Dk5Jy8Z9VEs

Jacob Rollinson | University of East Anglia 

Late King in Yellow Woods by Jacob Rollinson 

I present a reading from my book Late King in Yellow Woods (www.muscaliet.co.uk/product/late-king-jacob-rollinson/), a literary novella set in Trump’s America, pre-COVID, dealing with popular horror, culture wars and the Internet. I am a former CHASE scholar at UEA, and recently graduated with a PhD in creative and critical writing. However, this piece derives only indirectly from my thesis. I was spurred to write it by my post-viva thesis corrections, which included the general admonition to read more around the subject of World Literature, and anxieties attendant to the project of decolonising the curriculum. Thanks to this story’s experimental form – morphing between academic paper and fictional narrative – it fit the brief of Muscaliet, a small press also connected to CHASE, which aims to publish hybrid or otherwise uncategorisable work. So I present this work as an unexpected bounty of the consortium’s support and network building, and as an example of the ways in which research and connections fostered by CHASE continue beyond the arbitrary boundaries of the thesis, the viva, or graduation.  

The blurb:  

Sam, a brooding and reactionary academic, feels left behind by politics and culture in the internet age. As he travels through the New England woods to meet a dying relative, he starts composing an essay on popular horror. Pursued by guilt and lured by nostalgia, he hopes to write his way to vindication in the face of real and imagined enemies. But the mind is treacherous, and the culture wars are all-encompassing, and the woods are full of traps… 

Please access this poster before the Q&A session at: https://vimeo.com/564549777/dc79cc7307

Andrea Smith | University of East Anglia 

Hamlet on air: Shakespeare’s ‘sweet prince’ on radio. 

Hamlet is one of the most performed plays on BBC radio. Leading actors from John Gielgud to Kenneth Branagh have played the tragic hero. This video poster will examine how Hamlet has been presented in audio form during the BBC’s near 100-year history. The video will include illustrative audio extracts. 

Please access this poster before the Q&A session at: https://vimeo.com/563297200/d786ac6559

Jemma Stewart | Birkbeck, University of London 

A community of flowers? Floral symbolism in the Victorian Gothic 

The publishing phenomenon of the language of flowers anthologies spanned the breadth of the nineteenth century. As a cultural fad and popular form allied to the gift annual, the language of flowers books were well-known and prolific. The floriography of the flower 'vocabularies' became diffused and disseminated within the cultural imagination, yet, the anthologies were marketed primarily at a female, middle-class, 'genteel' readership, with the broad aim of advancing the romantic endeavours of the reader. In this paper, I ask whether there is a community of meaning, authorship and readerships within the language of flowers. This paper will also discuss occurrences of floral symbolism within the Gothic, another popular cultural form.  

Which flowers are represented in the Victorian Gothic, and do their meanings and significance adhere to the popular codes established by the language of flowers, or, do traditional meanings become subverted or extended to complement the dark tone of the Gothic narrative?  

Do the flowers of the Gothic break away from the community of flowers that had evolved within the language of flowers vocabularies throughout the nineteenth century?  

Which flowers appear in the Gothic, and do not appear in the language of flowers? And vice versa? Why might this be?  

Through a consideration of select examples of flowers, Gothic fictions and flower anthologies, this paper will aim to shed light on the significance of floral symbolism in nineteenth-century Gothic fictions, and question whether there might have been a community of flowers blooming there.  

Please access this poster before the Q&A session at: https://vimeo.com/563293492/6239d56810

Alan Warburton | Birkbeck, University of London 

I'm an artist-researcher doing a practice-led PhD in Film and Media at Birkbeck. Part of the first year of my research project involved creating an immersive 'spatial' video essay at Arebyte Gallery in East London, which explored my research topic of computer graphics, art and simulation (or 'future art histories'). The exhibition went ahead despite Covid-19, though it was significantly affected by lockdowns and related restrictions. The exhibition finally opened again in May 2021 for two weeks, but now primarily lives on as video documentation which includes a prologue that contextualises it as a research activity. 

Please access this poster before the Q&A session at: https://alanwarburton.co.uk/rgbfaq/  

Emma Winston | Goldsmiths, University of London 

Please access this poster before the Q&A session at: https://emmawinston.me/pathways-desire-lines  

Elaine Rushin | University of East Anglia 

‘Mary Reading’ by Elaine Rushin 

The episode of the Virgin Mary reading her Psalter is a focal point in the N-Town ‘Marriage’ play. It spans thirty-four lines altogether (10:423-56) signifying the importance of the Psalter in devotional practice. It also demonstrates how lay individuals, and more specifically women, should employ it in their own devotions. The way in which Mary reads the Psalter is remarkable because it is reminiscent of 'lectio divina', a monastic manner of reading scripture in a slow, unhurried fashion which promotes meditation and prayer. 'Lectio divina' is a practice which has its root in the cloister, although the extent to which it survived into the late middle ages is a moot point amongst scholars; some of whom believe it declined in the early thirteenth century, while others contend that it developed a second life as a lay form of devotional practice. The practice of meditation or mindfulness has increasingly become a feature of our own times. It is a practice which works to sustain those endeavouring to cope with increased stress, particularly as a result of the pandemic and the ensuing lockdowns. In the light of this Mary’s example may shed light on our own struggle to achieve peace of mind.     

This video ‘poster’ will be approximately 20 minutes in length and will consist of an illustrated Powerpoint presentation with voice over. I will employ textual and contextual analysis to examine the significance of the Virgin Mary reading the Psalter. I will explore how this exemplum may be interpreted as both model of meditative practice and focus for the act of meditation. I will also consider the extent to which Mary was a model for late medieval women. 

Speaker Biography 

I am a PGR at UEA in the Department of Literature, Drama, and Creative Writing, and I am currently in my third year of study. My research focuses on a compilation of fifteenth-century devotional plays known as the N-Town plays. There are forty-one plays altogether, and, although it is difficult to be certain about where they were written, by whom, or for what purpose, it is clear from dialectical analysis that they originated in East Anglia. My research addresses the role of the plays as a teaching mechanism for devotional practice and determining the most likely composition of their audience. 

Please access this poster at: https://vimeo.com/563295654/2ab44eb7e7

Please note that Elaine is not available for the live Q&A, but can be contacted via chase.dtp@uea.ac.uk 

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