4A. Room 1 | Researching the contemporary | Chair: Jane Davidson
Siân Hunter | University of East Anglia
Chasing a wave: keeping up with contemporary feminist discourse
A discussion of the challenges of undertaking research on the contemporary: through exploring the ways in which authorship in contemporary film and television shapes, and is in turn shaped by, popular feminist discourse. This session examines the difficulties experienced while following five women currently working in film and/or television who can be seen as actively participating in feminist discourse, either through their work or through their off-screen activism. The aim of this reflective session is to unpack the demands of studying not only active actors, writers, and directors who are constantly engaging in new projects but the ever-changing cultural environment – from #MeToo, to Black Lives Matter, to the rising prominence of transphobic discourse.
Rachel McNair Smith | University of East Anglia
Reflecting on change: challenges, discoveries and new perspectives during a pandemic.
Change in a PhD can be nerve-wracking and a challenge to overcome, but it can also be freeing, providing an opportunity to explore new discoveries and perspectives, and strengthen the originality of a thesis. This short ‘Reflective’ session will focus on my individual experience of change in my second year, during a pandemic, when the cancellation of an international Fellowship, and research and fieldwork, along with methodological issues and chance findings of new material, led to my modifying my research project; something that I am continuing to work through today and into the future.
Rachel McNair Smith is a current third-year PhD candidate in the Sainsbury Research Unit for the Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, where she completed her BA and MA in 2011 and 2015 respectively. She has worked in a curatorial capacity in several museums and galleries including National Museums Scotland and National Galleries of Scotland, both Edinburgh, and The University of Aberdeen and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Thomas Elliott | University of Sussex
Digital Isolation and Coping with Zoom; Some Reflective Thoughts
I would like to use this time to reflect on some of the less discussed struggles that we have all experienced in the past year; loneliness, isolation, the pressure to continue as “normal” and anxiety. I hope to share my experiences and some ideas about what worked for me, as well as what did not. My mental health really suffered as a result of the winter/spring lockdown this year and I was thinking of dropping out of my PhD programme. My university offered what support they could, but one of the main things that I was struggling with was remote learning/support/etc. I found that zoom and related apps increased my anxiety and my low mood exponentially, but, unfortunately, that all my “lifelines” and support networks had moved online.
Following some very good discussions with my supervisor, I decided to take a step back from my direct research and to instead dedicate my time to the language acquisition element of my funding (Spanish) and to my CHASE funded internship with “19”. As a researcher this was a struggle, it felt unproductive to put my research on hold and I worried about falling behind, but ultimately, it helped.
I will close by encouraging my fellow researchers to explore some of the less advertised benefits of the internship/placement scheme at CHASE (mainly its benefits to mental health and being a space separate from, but linked to, our research) and reflect on the usefulness of stepping back from our studies when needed and the importance of being flexible in our priorities.
Sarah Sharp | University of East Anglia
Researching popular music and mental-ill health: strands of a critical autopathography and exploration of future support.
This paper draws on my doctoral research on mental ill-health in popular music. The PhD explores representations of mental ill-health in 20th and 21st century verbal, written and performed media texts, created by high-profile musicians with a diagnosis of mental ill-health. I am also assessing whether these themes are incorporated within the support current organisations give musicians with mental ill-health.
This paper consists of a mixture of a work in progress and a reflective discussion around cultural and personal implications of my research area. The theme I shall focus on is Futures, as my research seeks to identify gaps in support which could be developed in the future. I will also be giving advice to PhD students with a diagnosis of mental ill-health which may help them with their own future research.
I will begin with an overview of my research and chosen artists, and a short discussion of my theoretical framework and methodology. I will then reflect on my experience of being a PhD student with a diagnosis of mental ill-health, and share advice based on my own personal experience to other students with mental ill-health and who are researching the subject. For example, I have found some reading of musicians’ autobiographies to be a trigger for my memories of being ill. I would advise others to take a break and talk to someone if this occurs during their own research. The aim is not only to give advice, but also initiate or contribute to a future-oriented networking activity with others who are also researching mental ill-health within the humanities.
I am a part-time PhD student in my third year of study at the University of East Anglia, in the Film, Television and Media Studies department.
Baljit Kaur (University of Sussex) & Kit Ashton (Goldsmiths)
Study Buddies! Care and Community in the Context of the Pandemic
This proposal is for a reflective session (5-10 minutes) presented by Baljit Kaur and Kit Ashton, both CHASE-funded doctoral researchers at the University of Sussex and Goldsmiths University, respectively. Baljit Kaur is a third-year researcher in Cultural Studies and Kit Ashton is a fourth-year researcher in Music.
This session aims to offer researchers, particularly those in the early stages of their research, an insight into the benefits of a study buddy system which we arranged at the onset of the initial lockdown back in March 2020.
To do this, our session will reflect on the benefits of previous Encounters conferences as opportunities to network and connect with researchers whose research interests are similar to yours, and the potential for these encounters to evolve into building communities in the future. In the context of the pandemic, our mutual research interests led us to create a study buddy system in which we used online platforms such as Skype to regularly check-in and virtually work ‘together’, which helped maintain the mutual support and sense of community that the pandemic had/has eradicated for many doctoral researchers. We reflect on some of the strategies we used to forge the online space into one in which we were able to collaborate; discuss, share ideas and solutions to overcoming research and personal challenges, offer collegiality, and importantly, offer encouragement in persevering with our research and writing.
It is through this example of the study buddy system that we hope to convey one way in which researchers, including ourselves, can continue our sense of care for one another, and continue building communities in the often challenging and ever-shifting contemporary world.
4B. Room 2 | Decolonisation | Chair: Tariq Mir (SOAS)
Augusta Ivory-Peters | Goldsmiths, University of London
A classicist reflecting: towards a decolonised classics
Abstract: As a classicist, I am acutely aware that my discipline has reached crisis point. Classics – namely the study of Graeco-Roman antiquity – is not only steeped in a history of privilege and exclusivity but has uncomfortable associations with colonialism and patriarchy. Classical scholarship that continues to engage uncritically (both with the ancient world itself and the methods that we use) reinforces these problematic ideas. To ensure the survival of classics – if the discipline has a future? – there is an urgent need to ‘decolonise’ classics. In this context, I understand decolonisation as the process of decentring the Eurocentric foundations of classical knowledge.
In my presentation, I will reflect on several difficult questions that I have faced in the first year of my PhD surrounding the precarious future of classics. I will also suggest new ways that we can ethically reconstruct antiquity and embed more diversity and inclusivity into the discipline. In doing so, I hope to contribute to ongoing conversations surrounding a future self-reflexive classical scholarship. A case study is made of contemporary classicist Anne Carson.
Shelley Angelie Saggar | University of Kent
Learning to live with ghosts’: Representing the restitution debate in Anna Lee Walters’ Ghost Singer
Abstract: This work-in-progress presents my research into how methods drawn from Indigenous literary studies can contribute to decolonial heritage practices. Drawing on contemporary public discussions surrounding the potential restitution of Indigenous remains and cultural patrimony held in museums, I will analyse how Indigenous writers have represented the repatriation debate through literary texts in order to demonstrate the unique potential of fiction to nuance the parameters of the political discussion. This paper will examine how the trope of spectral Indigeneity is strategically invoked in Pawnee/Otoe novelist Anna Lee Walter’s 1988 novel Ghost Singer to assess the agential potential of Indigenous ghosts in furthering calls for restitution/repatriation/return in the latter part of the twentieth century. I will then turn to consider how the passing of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) has provoked changing representations in Indigenous literary fiction, arguing that a departure from the spectral, and an insistence instead on ‘survivance’ characterises literary engagements with the museum repatriation debate.
4C. Room 3 | Medical humanities & non-thematic| Chair Elizabeth Chappell
Robbie McDermott | University of East Anglia
Musicians with Absent Limbs and Digits Study
This presentation demonstrates my current stage in the PhD process and how my research has been progressing thus far. This will include some introspective insight of certain struggles with aspects such as writing and planning.
The 5-10-minute work-in progress session will emphasise the theme of community, and to some degree, futures as well. My PhD focuses on musicians with absent limbs and digits including popular musicians and their experiences of being a public figure with a disability. This then moves on to lesser-known musicians and their knowledge of music-making such as using and not using prosthetics devices to play, as well as using modified instruments, both including issues of control and haptic feedback. This leads into case studies of organisational and institutional support that help these musicians to achieve their musical aims. To conclude, the thesis explains how advocacy is at the heart of being a musician with absent limb(s) and/or digit(s) and my desire for a knowledge base for provisions for disabled musicians.
My name is Robbie McDermott and I am in my 5th year of part-time study at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in the department of Film, Television, and Media Studies.
Caroline Hawthorne | University of Essex
Identity and agency: Exploring the relationship between theory and professional practice in Healthcare students’ academic writing
This session considers progress to date in exploring the key research concepts of identity and agency amongst Healthcare student writers, and in the development of qualitative research tools. Specifically, it will report on the process of creating a pre-interview online questionnaire, and on initial thoughts surrounding the development of a writing analysis framework that seeks to identify different facets of identity and agency in student writing. The session will also include a brief reflection on experiences of working and studying part-time for a PhD, and will consider how a reframing of a stop-start study pattern can help to reduce stress.
Ricarda Brosch | The Courtauld Institute of Art
I will give a brief summary of my PhD progress and how I have tried to adjust my research to the current times.
4D. Room 4 | Film and Art | Chair Jacob Rollinson
Raquel Morais | Birkbeck, University of London
Imagined films
I am currently in the early stages of my project “Exhibiting an Interdisciplinary Archive: Curatorial practice as reactivating the film archive”. Over the past few months, I have completed a review of the existing literature on my case-study, the films of Portuguese directors Margarida Cordeiro and António Reis.
Among other important aspects, the concept of imagined film came up as relevant. The six films directed by the duo between 1963 and 1989 remained pretty much impossible to watch for about three decades, because of material aspects related to their distribution and exhibition history.
We could say that Cordeiro-Reis’s films are “imagined films” in two specific senses. Firstly, they are imagined before being watched – many cinephiles would spend years hearing about the films without being able to watch them in proper conditions or to even watch them at all. The mystique surrounding these works became part of the narrative created around the films, which somehow infused them with a new life. Secondly, there is a sense in which the films are imagined during and after being watched, as they demand/require an active spectator, who can trace and unveil certain elements, while at the same time envisioning new ones, which means an availability to “complete” the films.
I would like to incorporate these aspects as part of my methodology and the practice element of my project. How can I conceive of myself as an “intermediary” spectator, who can re-imagine these films in the process of programming them? Is it possible to revive the films by infusing them with other texts, films, paintings, stories, objects which are not in the films explicitly, but also, and precisely because of that, can be there at the same time? How can I build a project that relies in a non-linear and associative way of describing a film’s history, context of production, afterlife?
Allan Norris | Open University
Figuration in the work of post-conceptual british women painters
It is widely accepted that the most significant development in painting since the 1990s has been the return to figuration. And, as Linda Nochlin has observed, many women artists with feminist affiliations have turned to painting as a means to reject the masculine displays of phallocentric dominance characteristic of modernism. In Britain an entire generation of female figurative painters has emerged. Artists such as Jenny Saville, Cecily Brown, Chantal Joffe and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye have all become internationally acclaimed.
The choice of these artists is important in art historical terms because their emergence and ongoing influence within the institutional structures of the international art market signals a particular transitional shift in contemporary British art. From the relative antipathy to representational painting during the dominance of conceptualism in the 1990s to the growing critical attention afforded it today, we have seen a marked change in attitude which continues to confound notions of the death of painting.
My research explores the extent to which contemporary figurative painting, engaged in by women, can operate as institutional critique or challenge the objectification of the female body. It analyses the extent to which the relationship between painting and representation serves to construct, support or subvert prevailing hegemonic structures and how the feminist critique of modernism has enabled certain interventions to flourish, through the perceived interrogation of a hitherto male dominated canon.
Alice David | The Courtauld Institute of Art
Man in the Machine: Xerox Performance Art in Brazil, 1981 – 1982
Over the course of my research into alternative printmaking practices in Latin America during the 1970s and 80s, my focus has gradually shifted from printing technologies’ simple function for replication in favour of other essential operations such as contact, transfer, absorption and resistance. This line of inquiry has most recently taken me full circle to the lesser known, second version of Walter Benjamin’s seminal text The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility (1936), in which the author identifies the potential for productive interplay (Zusammenspiel) between humans and technology. I would like to take this opportunity for interdisciplinary discussion to consider printmaking as a technology through the lens of media studies and related fields outside the narrow confines of art history. To do so, I propose to use Brazilian artist Hudinilson Júnior’s Xerox series ‘Narcisse’ Exercício de Me Ver II (Exercise of seeing myself II, 1982) to explore the possibility for play contained within these office machines, and to interrogate the multiple ways in which the notion of play offered countercultural artists an alternative mode of making art outside the commercial demands of the art market.
Bruno Verner | Goldsmiths, University of London
Title: Man Ray on the Radio: Underground Post-Punk, Death Sambas and Other Tropical Sonic Transitions in Brazil.
Less a genre of music than a new assemblage of practices, post punk culture has produced a new type of futurism and utopianism. How did it develop into a dissent post-tropicalist sensibility in Brazil?
My research is concerned with the investigation of sonic-politico and aesthetic overlooked manifestations of singularity in Brazilian underground artists from the 1980s and beyond. It explores how their practices and ethics were instrumental in forging an experimentalist and yet popular independent DIY culture by examining a constellation of unheard voices, inflections, and forms of musicality as it investigates distinct processes of subjectivation in the construction of a poetic and political black-latino-caboclo-pardo semiotics. In particular, the work of non-musicians and/or experimental artists/bands who have radically invented their own praxis, spaces of occupation and poetics in the public sphere, breaking off from institutionalised modes of production, including traditional forms of MPB (Brazilian Popular Music) structure and dissemination.
Developed around explosive countercultural scenarios in cities such as São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Belo Horizonte, these scenes created specific and autonomous territories of experimentation, and were fostered by a singular collision of sources and ideas from poetry, pop, visual arts, politics, performance-art, electronic music, feminism, and the avant-garde.
Bruno Verner is a PhD researcher in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths University, and a composer/artist in the Brazilian duo Tetine (www.tetine.net). His thesis examines the overlooked histories of experimental post punk and post-tropicalism in Brazil.