7A. Room 1 — Going Virtual: Research, Dissemination, and COVID-19
Chair: Anita Strasser, Goldsmiths,
Dickon Edwards
‘#CaMoAdCal: A Camp Modernism Advent Calendar’
Emma Winston
’These Uncertain Times: Ethnography of Community Ukulele Groups during the COVID-19 Pandemic’
+ Abstract
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).
+ Abstract
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.
7B. Room 2 — Creative Writers Network Session
Ellen Hardy, Martin Munroe, Sharlene Teo
The Creative Writers Network arose from discussions amongst Creative Practice PGRs to provide a space to collaborate, support and learn from each other. The network is open to all researchers with an interest in creative expression. It will provide a forum for researchers to suggest and organize projects and events between and beyond CHASE-affiliated institutions. A platform to organize events and workshops, and training for everyone.
+ Session info & bios
The Encounters event will launch the network with a presentation of the network (its aims, how to get involved with contact details) followed by a guest speaker, Dr Sharlene Teo, an award-winning novelist and academic. Dr Teo is a former Creative Critical UEA PhD student; Sharlene will discuss completing her Creative Critical research and creative writing craft and pedagogy.Ellen Hardy worked in digital media in Beirut, London and Paris before returning home to Oxfordshire in 2016 and studying for the MA Creative Writing part-time at Birkbeck. In October 2019 she joined UEA as a CHASE-funded postgraduate researcher in Creative-Critical Writing. Her research project at UEA is a historical novel based on the true story of a 17th-century cabinet of curiosity.Martin Munroe is a former student adviser at Goldsmiths. A 2018 MA Creative Writing graduate of Royal Holloway. In 2020 he joined UEA as a CHASE-funded PhD candidate in Creative-Critical Writing under supervision of Professor Tessa McWatt and Professor Alison Donnell. His novel examines themes of black male masculinity.Dr Sharlene Teo‘s novel Ponti (Picador, 2018) won the inaugural Deborah Rogers Writer’s Award, was shortlisted for the Hearst Big Book Award and Edward Stanford Fiction Award, longlisted for the Jhalak Prize and selected by Ali Smith as one of the best debut works of fiction of 2018. Her work has been translated into eleven languages and published in places such as the TLS, Lit Hub, Vogue and the Daunt Books anthology At the Pond.She is the recipient of the 2012 UEA Booker Prize Foundation scholarship, 2013 David TK Wong Creative Writing fellowship, 2014 Sozopol Fiction fellowship and 2017 University of Iowa International Writing fellowship.
7C. Room 3 — Work-in-Progress 3: Language and Narrative
Chair: Jilliene Sellner, Department of Music, Goldsmiths
Harry Acton, Department of English, Theatre and Creative Writing, Birkbeck
‘Reading the Nonhuman: D. H. Lawrence and American Nature Writing’
(embodied reader experience; ecocriticism; modernism; nonhuman)Hannah Davita Ludikhuijze, Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research, Sussex
‘The Literary Voluntourist — Revisiting NGO Reading Practices in Rural Malawi’
(post-colonial; literary criticism; critical autobiography; reader-response)Serena Ceniccola, Department of Cultures and Languages, Birkbeck
‘Beyond Japanese American Literature: Transnationalism, Translation, and Bilingualism in the Literature of Japan and America’
(Ekkyō Bungaku; Japanese American literature; language contact; popular culture; Levy Hideo; Julie Kagawa)Mischa Foster Poole, Department of English, Theatre and Creative Writing, Birkbeck
‘Nonsense Versus’
(language art; political discourse; audience engagement; activism) Miho Zlazli, Department of Linguistics, SOAS University of London
‘A Case Study of Master-Apprentice Initiative with New Speakers of Ryukyuan Languages’
(language revitalisation; ethnography; language acquisition; indigenous voices)Chun Fung Yee, Department of Applied Linguistics and Communication, Birkbeck
‘Do Multilingual/Bilingual Chinese Express Pride the Same?’
(Chinese diaspora; multilingual; emotions studies)
7D. Room 4 — A PhD Researcher’s Guide to Scrivener: Why Choosing the Right Tools for your PhD Matters
Michael Askew
I will present a pre-recorded video in which I discuss my experience of using the long form writing app Scrivener to write my PhD thesis. I discuss the ways in which Scrivener has helped me organise my thoughts, structure my work, and improve my redrafting process. I outline the software’s key features within the specific context of academic writing. I also discuss more broadly how to choose the best tools to write your PhD, and how to make sure you’re using the right tool for the right job. In the live slot, I will be screening the video and will be available to answer questions afterwards, both on Scrivener specifically and on the practical process of writing a PhD thesis more generally.Scrivener video by Michael AskewScrivener website
+ Bio
Michael Askew: I’m based at the Literature, Drama & Creative Writing department at the University of East Anglia (UEA). I’m in the final year of writing my CHASE-funded PhD on the lyric essay.
7E. Room 5 — Feminist Network Session
Cleo Madeleine and Natasha Richards
The CHASE Feminist Network is a CHASE-funded group of feminists with over 250 members both within and without the institution. As well as connecting feminist academics we host an annual conference and a monthly feminist consciousness-raising event called Flow n Flux, and we provide opportunities for funding to feminist projects through our Small Projects Fund. We also run activist campaigns, particularly around inequalities in academia, and endeavour to hold our institutions to account.The Session