SGSAH Year 2 Symposium 2023

Sharing Stories

SGSAH Year 2 Symposium Schedule

The Studio, 67 Hope Street, Glasgow, G2 6AE

Directions: thestudio.co.uk/venues/glasgow

Hope Room “Beyond the Pages: Stories told by materials”

Chair: Shailini Vinod

Presentation

9:30-10:30

Floor 8

Jenny Murray

UHI Orkney College

“One Significant Stone, One Spellbinding Story.”

In one of Shetland’s most northerly rural communities a small carved stone was found lying face down by two hill walkers. The bright red stone stood out, a different colour and shape to the others near to a medieval church. Dating to the 12th century, why was this unique stone secreted away? What stories can it tell in its long life? This presentation will try to shed light on its interesting tale and the story of a Saint associated with red stones.

There have been many stories told of the life and miracles of Saint Magnus. The Orkneyinga saga, written in Iceland during the 12th century, recounts the life and times of Magnus and the growth of his cult instigated by his nephew Earl Rognvald. The saga offers us a fascinating insight into this medieval Earldom and its people. Can we identify surviving cultural remains of his cult, a jigsaw of materiality spread over many islands and communities?

The presentation will discuss the surviving archaeological material relating to the Cult of St Magnus including the Cathedral built and dedicated to him in the mid-twelfth century by his nephew Earl Rognvald. The cult’s popularity spread north to Faroes and Iceland over the following centuries, with Icelandic lawbooks showing that a relic of Magnus was sent to a church there in 1298. In Shetland we will discuss the architecture and founding of three round-towered churches of twelfth century date which may have been related to the building of the cathedral, evidenced by the use of Orcadian red sandstone in their structure.

By reviewing architecture and pieces of church furniture we will explore the veneration of St Magnus in the North Atlantic asking how is he remembered in each community? Can we still appreciate surviving memories of him in our landscape today?

Title of PhD: A Saint in Stone: the significance of the materiality of the Cult of Saints

as evidenced in the Cult of St Magnus the Martyr

Helen Persson Swain

University of Glasgow & University of Edinburgh

“The Many Lives of Chinese Painted Silk”

This paper focuses on Chinese painted silks of the type exported to the West for clothing and furnishing in the eighteenth century, using surviving examples as primary evidence. Silks produced in China have been important currency in commercial and diplomatic exchanges for as long as there has been contact with foreign communities, near and far. Trade was an important stimulus to the creativity in textile technology and designs, as was the cultural exchange made possible by the trade routes. Despite their significance, Chinese painted silks represent a relatively neglected field of research in the Western academy.

Chinese painted silks were largely the private trade of individuals, such as the captains and supercargoes of the East India company ships. These textiles were generally uncut lengths of silk, usually cream-coloured and hand-painted in a lavish hybrid design showing a successful reworking of Chinese traditional imagery to European taste with a hint of Indian chintz. They were popular among the British elite as wall covers or made into various furnishings or garments.

By analysing cut, seams, unpicked seams and shadows of pleats of an extant dress, its original use, as well as its successive lives of Chinese painted silks can be revealed – from the workshop in Guangzhou to the store in a museum. This paper will highlight the role of Chinese material culture within histories of Western fashionable dress, and demonstrate export silk’s continuous value as an indication of wealth, taste and status in Western contexts. Bringing together the usually separate studies of fashion and textile history, and the physical evidence ‘read’ from the actual dresses, I attempt to unpack the object biography to reveal the stories locked therein.

Title of PhD: Chinese Painted Silks: Craftsmanship and Fashion in the Eighteenth Century

Cameron Maclean University of Glasgow

“Using Numismatic Objects in Public Engagement.”

Throughout the course of my PhD, I’ve had the opportunity to utilise numismatic objects, primarily coins and medals, in various forms of public engagement. This has ranged from assisting in the preparation of museum exhibits on Mary Queen of Scots and the Jacobites, public talks delivered on Zoom, blogs and in-person coin handling sessions. The chronological and geographical range of the objects I’ve used have exceeded the comparatively narrow scope of my PhD. This short presentation will cover my experiences in using these versatile sources in public engagement activities, the reactions I’ve received and the benefits of using them.

Title of PhD: The Anglo-Scottish Monetary Union (1604-1707)

Aspire Room Cognition and Narratives

Chair: Anna Kallen Talley

Presentation Session 1

9:30-10:30

Floor 8

Sandra De Rycker

University of Edinburgh & University of St. Andrews

“The Semiotic Situation: Situating Collaboration with Rae-Yen Song at Dundee

Contemporary Art Print Studio.”

The contexts in which meanings are exchanged are not devoid of social value; a context of speech is itself a semiotic construct, having a form (deriving from the culture) that enables the participants to predict… and understand one another as they go along… making possible all the imaginative modes of meaning. (Halliday, 1978, pp. 2-3)

Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA) Print Studio is a site for experimentation and collaboration in fine art print, inviting artists from the curated exhibitions programme (often working in print for the first time) to collaborate with skilled Print Studio staff to explore their artistic concepts through print. At the core of these collaborations is a dialogic negotiation between people, materials and process, between the intangible and the physical, through information transferred, by contact and removal, towards the conceptual goal of a printed artefact.

Using ethnographic and socio-semiotic perspectives, this talk will follow a project begun with exhibiting artist Rae-Yen Song in 2021, focusing in particular on the significance of texture and touch in Song’s work and its collaborative interpretation through print.

During the recent pandemic, as we experienced a profusion of closures and restrictions, print’s characteristic adaptability was used, opening up alternate social situations through which communication of the physical, social and tangible dimensions of printmaking had to adjust and migrate. Records of such circumstances offer alternate perspectives from which to view the layered contributions of multiple voices, processes, places and moments that underpin such collaborations, and trace the dynamic composition and integration of these many parts.

Using examples from Song’s collaboration, this talk investigates the ways in which the indexical qualities of the printed artefact are socially and collaboratively developed through the shared semiotic situation: the multimodal layers, and collaborative material discourse of the Studio, considering tensions of immediacy and separation in relation to the printed artwork.

HALLIDAY, M. A. K. (1978) Language as social semiotic : the social interpretation of language and meaning. London: London : Edward Arnold.

Title of PhD: Recording Print: Collaboration and Social Exchange at Dundee

Contemporary Arts Print Studio

Lachlan Devine University of

Edinburgh

“A Narrative Defence of Linguistic Post-Cognitivism.”

For my contribution, I will present some developments in my research in a narrative manner. This is atypical for a philosophy talk: usually, we employ abstract arguments which do not depend on the researcher’s history or idiosyncrasies. Instead, I aim to articulate and motivate what I am doing, and the positions I am defending, by contextualising them within a history of a progressively developing worldview and research program.

My project involves defending the view, known as post-cognitivism, that the mind is not like a container for thoughts and mental representations; rather, it is something more embodied and interactive, centring perception, action, emotions, and so on. In particular, I aim to account for higher cognitive capacities, especially language, in this post-cognitivist framework. This involves seeing language as an activity, a social practice, which coordinates further linguistic and nonlinguistic activity, rather than as a means for expressing thoughts or representing the world.

How did I end up defending these ideas? In my talk, I will build a case for my current approach by outlining the succession of different views I have held, aiming to bring out consistent concerns and themes which are (hopefully) increasingly better addressed.

The story will start with my masters dissertation, where I defended Donald Davidson’s philosophy of language and mind. Here we can see the roots of my interests in naturalism, demystifying the mind, the embodiment of linguistic practice, objectivity without representation, and so on.

Upon completion of this dissertation, I realised some of my Davidsonian framework’s limitations: its overreliance on folk vocabularies and theories, and underreliance on the sciences of mind and language. For these reasons, I needed to pursue a different, more plausible, and more personally satisfying route for my PhD project, and I will talk about how this new, but related, direction has unfolded.

Title of PhD: An Inferentialist Account of Natural Language and Scientific Models in the Context of Radical Embodied Cognitive Science

Eilidh Bowie

University of Glasgow and University of Stirling “Death, Dying and the Hero’s Journey.”

The 1970s Death Awareness Movement and the contemporary Death Positivity Movement portray themselves as championing death awareness within a deathdenying Western culture, promoting values such as authentic self-expression, death acceptance, personal development and autonomy. One of the narratives found within the discourse of both movements is that of the individual dying process as the hero’s journey. This presentation explores narratives of heroism present within these discourses about mortality, drawing particularly upon Clive Seale’s article ‘Heroic Death’ (1995) and Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death (1973). It also aims to highlight some of the criticisms levelled at this particular approach towards death and dying.

Title of PhD: The Horror of the Good Death: Narratives of Death in Horror Fiction, 1970-present

Room Discovering New Stories Between the Lines

Chair: Cleo O’Callaghan Yeoman

Claire Elder University of Glasgow

“Construction of Voice in the 17th c. Letters of Marie Stewart, Countess of Mar.”

Researchers who seek to investigate historical languages cannot directly access the voices of people from the past. Instead, they must look to printed texts or manuscripts, with many studies based on the uniquely valuable linguistic data contained in letters. Indeed, many have argued that such texts may offer our closest link to voices, describing the colloquial, informal register used within personal letters as ‘speech-like’ (Biber 1988; Culpeper & Kyto 2010: 17). However, such epistolary voices were shaped not only linguistically but socioculturally, visually and materially. Recent large-scale studies of early modern letters have shown them to be a ‘multilayered technology of communication, where the linguistic, material and social intersect’ (Wiggins 2017, 4).

This presentation will uncover how early modern letter-writers constructed voice by examining the language, visual layout, handwriting and letterlocking mechanisms exhibited in two sixteenth-century manuscripts sent by Marie Stewart, countess of Mar. A remarkable, yet largely overlooked, elite noblewoman, over the course of her life, Lady Mar transformed herself from a French-born Catholic courtier into a devoted Protestant Scottish Covenanter. The discussion will demonstrate how women adapted their approach to communication to achieve their desired outcome whilst adhering to the attendant conventions for female writing. We will compare the intricate details of an elegant note the countess wrote in her own hand with a business letter penned by her paid secretary via high-resolution photographs of the original documents. The findings will show that studies of early modern letters must give equal prominence to their ‘visual’ and ‘verbal’ features (Evans 2020, 23). In doing so, we can recover previously lost voices and reintroduce them to a modern-day audience.

Evans, Mel. 2020. Royal Voices: Language and Power in Tudor England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wiggins, Alison. 2017. Bess of Hardwick’s Letters: Language, Materiality, and Early Modern Epistolary Culture. Abingdon: Routledge.

Title of PhD: Recovering Early Modern Scottish Voices: A sociocultural analysis of the Language of the Stewart and Erskine Family correspondence, including the letters of Marie Stewart, Countess of Mar

Francesca Pontini

University of Stirling

“When the Readers create their own Para-Texts: extreme of Marginalia in early Modern Book Culture”

During the last decades several studies have focused on manuscript and printed marginalia as a tool for the reader to understand the printed text. Previous studies focused on very well-known readers, such as Gabriel Harvey, and showed how such readers used their to build their work. In other cases, Ann Blair showed that during the Early-modern period it was paramount for scholars, readers and students to mange their own information load. Other studies showed that readers prefer brief marginalia with which to (re)locate specific portions of the text. But what happens when the readers’ texts invade the printed page? Is it still managing information and building their work or is it a different attitude towards the text? In this paper I will analyse three cases from early modern printed books where the readers intervened on the printed page to a point where the marginalia are far larger than the text produced by the printer. The three books are preserved in Edinburgh University Library, and were part Edinburgh University collection from the late sixteenth century. The three books were printed before 1560 and one is an incunable version of “Somnium Scipionis” by Cicero.

This paper will explore the reader/writer reasons to create their own para-texts and how they probably developed the layout and the ideas to integrate the printed page within their own marginalia and commentary. Furthermore, the scripts used by the reader/writer will be analysed and explained from a palaeographical point of view. It will be clear how analysing the scripts can offer an excellent perspective to understand the graphic formation and cultural background of the reader/writer. The paper will also explain how palaeographic and layout aspects are strongly linked to the use and perception of books during the early modern period. The use specific scripts help us in understanding what were the expectations of the readers/writers for their own marginalia and paratexts, if they expected to be read by someone else or not. It will also be discussed if it is possible to say if such marginalia were re-used, re-read, or if they are a highly personal expressions of reading needs.

Emily Hay

University of Glasgow

“Who tells Her Story?”

Mary Queen of Scots is an undoubtedly iconic figure of Scottish history, but what do you really know about her story? More importantly, have you ever questioned where that story comes from? During her lifetime and beyond Mary was the subject of countless pieces of writing attempting to portray her character to a reading audience, but she also presented herself in writing in an attempt to take back control of that narrative. This presentation gives an overview of the way Mary’s story was told and retold by herself and others throughout her lifetime, and the impact that has on the way we think about her in the present day. Moreover, it discusses some of the difficulties presented by a project aiming to ‘reclaim’ a historical woman’s voice – just who is it telling this story?

Title of PhD: The ‘Quenis awne hand’: the literary agency of Mary Queen of Scots in shaping her own public image, 1567-1587

Hope Room Narrating Gender

Chair: Levi Tippett

Grace Borland Sinclair

University of Glasgow

“Stories from the Speculative Scientist”.

The proposed paper will sketch an outline and briefly review the findings of my thesis’ first chapter, titled – “Might not a slightly other kind of excellence be needed now?”[1]: The Figure of the Woman Scientist. In adherence to the symposium theme, the paper will centre around both the difficulties and exciting possibilities that arise when stories of activism, science, fiction, and motherhood (embodied and told by two Scottish women in the mid-20th century) are extrapolated, layered, compared, and most notably, transported to far flung reaches of the universe. This paper will do so by focusing on representations of the woman scientist in the speculative fiction novels of Naomi Mitchison and Margot Bennett (published between the 1950s and 1970s).

Activist and writer Walidah Imarisha writes that:

Whenever we try to envision a world without war, without violence, without prisons, without capitalism, we are engaging in speculative fiction. All organising is science fiction. Organisers and activists dedicate their lives to creating and envisioning another world, or many other worlds – so what better venue for organisers to explore their work than science fiction stories?[2]

But what happens when we bring the histories of scientific theory and method into play, and attempt to combine them with radical or feminist visions of the future? By highlighting the figure of the woman scientist in several novels by Scottish women writers, this paper will build upon Imarisha’s statement. It will investigate the tools and strategies that speculative fiction might offer us, if we attempt to reconfigure and emancipate a science so deeply entangled in colonial, bourgeois and masculine projects.

[1] Naomi Mitchison, Solution Three (Glasgow: Kennedy & Boyd, 2011. Originally published London: Dennis Dobson, 1975), p. 123.

[2] Adrienne Maree Brown and Walidah Imarisha, Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements (California: AK Press, 2015), p. 3.

Title of PhD: Feminist Fabulations: Scottish Women Writing Speculative Fiction

Meemi Matero University

of Strathclyde

“The Special Relationship between a Woman and Her Child’: Judicial Narrative on Parental roles in the European Union.”

When interpreting the European Union’s (EU) maternity leave provisions under the Pregnant Workers Directive against the principle of equal treatment, the European Court of Justice has perpetuated, even relatively recently, a paternalistic gender ideology positing outdated notions of both motherhood and fatherhood (Foubert, 2017)[1]. In this presentation, through a series of preliminary ruling cases concerning the purpose of maternity leave, I examine the Court’s judicial narrative on gendered parental roles and the division of labour between parents, illustrating its implications on sex equality. I trace the evolution of this narrative from Hofmann’s ‘special relationship’ rhetoric favouring maternal care to the recognition of national legislation liable to reinforce traditional gender roles in Roca Álvarez, then back to the ‘special relationship’ in Betriu Montull, and finally through to a conceptual distinction between maternity and parenthood in the recent case of Syndicat. I end by highlighting the need to reform maternity leave provisions at the EU level to make a clear departure from this narrative in order to advance sex equality.

[1] P Foubert, ‘Child Care Leave 2.0 – Suggestions for the Improvement of the EU Maternity and Parental Leave Directives from a Rights Perspective’ (2017) 24(2) Maastricht Journal of European and Comparative Law 245

Title of PhD: Making Latte Dads: The Feminist Case for Sex Equality through Parental Leave Policy Reform in the EU

Rory Wilson University of Edinburgh & University of Glasgow

“The Wrong Body Narrative is Wrong: Transmedicine and Diagnosis as StorySuppressing.”

What if you were told that your life story had a definitive beginning, middle, and end? And if you do not meet those marks then you must be mistaken about your story. This is the reality of transgender people are presented with navigating transition related healthcare in the UK.

The story they are told is called the “wrong body narrative” by philosopher Talia Mae Bettcher. According to this narrative, in order to be trans your body must be wrong – because your body does not match your gender identity. In diagnosis, it is taken that this wrongness is felt in the form of gender dysphoria, or discomfort coming from a mismatch between one’s body and mind. However, there are already quite a few trans people left out of this story. If a trans person does not feel that their body is wrong, their story becomes incomprehensible. Or the thinking may go that they must have their story wrong.

Transmedicine has made great strides in attempting to let go of this narrative, but deeper tensions remain. My research demonstrates that the wrong body narrative has never really left trans healthcare. It has merely gone implicit. As a result, trans people are living with prescribed life stories. It is time that we let them tell their own.

Title of PhD: Decentering Gender Dysphoria: Reconceptualizing and Rephrasing Transgender Experiences

University of St Andrews

“Affect and the Archive.”

In this presentation, I will explore feminist uses of archival documents, as seen in the anti-feminicide movement in contemporary Mexico.

Title of PhD: Exposing Atrocity: Representation and Counter-Representation of Feminicide Violence in Mexico, 1994-2021

Aline Hernandez

Aspire Room Power and Narrative 1

Chair: Hye Lim Nam (Joy)

Presentation Session 2

10:45–12:00

Floor 8

Florian Wieser University of

Edinburgh

“Is There Something You’d Like to Share with the Historian? The Ethics and Methods of Making Colonial Archives Speak.”

The historian studying colonial systems of oppression and exploitation is confronted with a central dilemma: The impulse and demand to tell the stories of the colonised are opposed by a source situation constituted almost entirely by the bureaucratic production and narratives of the colonisers. Generations of scholars have struggled with this problem and developed an extensive methodological toolkit to tease erased voices from colonial sources. In this paper, I discuss these methodologies through a series of examples from my archival research on the role of Black and Indigenous Americans in the conflict between the Spanish and French colonial empires. I highlight the issues created by different types of sources and their different contexts of origin as well as the need to synthesise methodologies. A central question the paper addresses is the ethics of perusing historical sources created in oppressive situations, including under torture, and the question that arises from this: What would historical colonised people have wanted us to know about them today and how may this differ from how they were forced to present themselves and how they were recorded in the colonial archive? The aim in this is not to give an authoritative answer, but to continue in leaving this scholarly dilemma productively open-ended and allow for the research to grow through exchange with other papers at the conference.

Molly Campbell University of Glasgow

“The ‘Acts of Union’ in Wales and William Salesbury’s evidence for a Welsh English Accent.”

The ‘Acts of Union’ passed by the English in the 1530s and 1540s ensured that all who held office in Wales must speak English. In 1547 William Salesbury, a Welshman, published a Welsh-English dictionary (A dictionary in Englyshe and Welshe) to help his countrymen learn the language of the administration. In 1550, he published another text, A briefe and a playne introduction, to help Englishmen learn to speak Welsh. In these texts, Salesbury equates Welsh and English sounds with each other to help his readers learn to pronounce the language that they were trying to learn. In doing this, Salesbury provides us with a way to examine how a native Welsh speaker may have pronounced English in the sixteenth century. In this paper I will discuss some of the sounds that Salesbury handles, and explore the ramifications that his discussion could have for an Early Modern Welsh English pronunciation and, in theory, an emerging accent of power.

Salesbury, William. 1969a [1547]. A dictionary in English and Welsh. Menston: The Scolar Press Limited. Salesbury, William. 1969b [1550]. A brief and plain introduction. Menston: The Scolar Press Limited.

Title of PhD: Pronouncing Early Modern English and Scots: Reassessing the evidence for ‘non-standard’ speech in Early Modern Britain

Ash Charlton

University of Edinburgh

“Contention, Contradiction and Competing Narratives: George Gleig’s ‘Slavery’ Article in the encyclopaedia Britannica”

How was race and slavery discussed in the third edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (EB)? Published between 1788 and 1797, the EB third edition was a huge expansion on the previous editions, with extensive information added by a range of authors. The article for ‘Slavery’ was no exception, increasing from mere paragraphs in the first and second editions to span twelve pages in the third edition. My presentation will explore the additions and amendments to the article that reflect the increasing contemporary discussions on slavery and abolition in Britain and beyond. Written by George Gleig, a Scottish Minister and frequent contributor to British periodicals, this ‘Slavery’ article subsumes and extends the information from previous editions, reframing the late eighteenth century understanding of race and slavery.

Through close reading and digital text analysis methods, my research addresses Gleig’s conflicting accounts of the origins of slavery and his contradictions of the contributions of other writers elsewhere in the volume. Gleig’s own opinions and religious influences appear throughout the article, and his grappling with the portrayal of the institution of slavery over time and in a contemporary context is clear throughout his writing. What Gleig chooses to include in the article is equally as significant as the omissions he makes, as do the other articles Gleig references through his entry on ‘Slavery’.

The ‘Slavery’ entry of the third edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica tells a story of a turbulent and transformative time in the public expressions of and understandings of society, slavery and moral consciousness, which I explore through the contentious writing, contradictions and competing ideas that appear in Gleig’s narrative. This sits within a wider study into intellectual interconnectivity between Encyclopaedia Britannica entries and reveals the legacy of race and slavery in our Scottish print culture.

Title of PhD: Slavery and Race in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1768-1860): A Text Mining Approach

Hannah McLean University of Glasgow

“Ithaki na wiathi: Memorialising Mau Mau in Kenya”

Following the end of the Mau Mau Uprising (1952-1960), the responsibility for management of sites associated with the conflict fell under Kenya’s state heritage body, National Museums of Kenya (NMK). NMK has overseen the memorialisation of sites such as cave systems used as hideouts by Mau Mau fighters and several mass graves for those executed by the colonial government. Only a handful of the over fifty detention camps (known as the ‘Pipeline’) used to detain Mau Mau suspects are left standing, some repurposed as schools. In this process of transformation, confinement cells have been repurposed as dormitories and storage rooms, and barbed wire and brick kilns have been left abandoned as waste. These sites remain largely unrecognised by NMK, at least officially.

In 2018, the Museum of British Colonialism (MBC) was established by a group of four women, three Kenyan and one British, to share resources that highlight lived experiences of British colonialism, with a particular focus on the Pipeline. Without a bricks and mortar building or a physical collection, MBC disseminates its open access research through oral history interviews, interactive digital maps, 3D digital models of detention camps, and temporary exhibitions and events.

This paper will consider the roles of state heritage bodies and grassroots community organisations in the memorialisation, commemoration, and interpretation of Mau Mau sites. It will explore the production of heritage within a complex and contentious contemporary context, and ask: How, if at all, should the memorialisation of these camps be approached?

Title of PhD: ‘The rot remains’: Memory and materiality at British-colonial detention camps in central Kenya

Twist Room Power and Narrative 2

Chair: Catriona Schofield

Shailini Vinod

University of Aberdeen

“The Power of Voice, Societal Hierarchies, and the Performance of Identities in the Context of a British South Asian Migrant Community.”

My interdisciplinary creative writing and sociology project uses the devices of short fiction and sociological research in conjunction to address the issue of unequal literary representation and facilitate an understanding of the migrant British South-Asian community from Kerala, India. The study is guided by following questions:

1. How has negligible representation in English and Scottish literature impacted the performance of identities within the British South-Asian community from Kerala, India, a significant proportion of which is employed within NHS healthcare?

2. How do members of this community perceive ‘Britishness’?

3. Can positive and reliable representations of ‘difference’ in literature facilitate a clearer perception of the concept of evolving ‘Britishness’?

4. Can these facilitate the creation of more equal and inclusive literary spaces for those marginalized?

5. How can these simultaneously inform ongoing sociological research and vice versa?

The piece presented will employ a story like format, commencing with my personal journey and motivation that underpin my research, to then relay some of the core considerations which form the focus of one of the chapters of the thesis. This piece analysis the correlation between power, cultures of domination and hierarchies in society, tracing the concepts of domination and oppression evolving historically from a colonial context, and investigates the role of stereotypical representations and other tools of subjugation in deeply embedding damaging racial, gender and class-based norms and codes in society. By highlighting the significance of the ‘power of voice and narration’ in the formulation and performance of identities, this piece will be drawing on my study and will base it within a sociological theoretical analysis of the societal mechanisms that cause marginalisation of groups and thereby guides and substantiates my argument in favour of egalitarian cosmopolitan societies and the significance of reliable literary and media representations in making ‘difference’ understood and accepted.

Title of PhD: ‘That Shade of Brown’: A creative socio-literary exploration of the evolving concept of ‘Britishness’ and the mutual impact of migrant representations in literature and sociological research.

Bethan Holt University of Glasgow

“Families and Infant Mortality on Board 19th c. Indian Emigrant Ships- the Story of the Salsette.”

This paper examines the story of the journey of the Salsette, a ship carrying 324 Indian indentured labourers from India to Trinidad in 1858. It explores what the story of the Salsette and the high mortality rates on its journey can tell us about experiences of and colonial attitudes to families and infant mortality on emigrant ships. The paper also reflects on the sources which tell us the story of Salsette’s journey, and how we can uncover the voices and stories of Indian indentured labourers in the colonial archive.

Title of PhD: Maternal welfare and reproductive politics on the plantation in the age of indenture, 1834-c.1920.

Perpetual Brade

University of the West of Scotland & University of Glasgow

In partnership with BBC Scotland

“The Role of Education and Perception in Developing ethnic Diversity Behind-theCamera in Scotland: A BBC Scotland Case Studies.”

Ethnic diversity in the UK Cultural & Creative Industries (CCIs) has long been considered an issue and whilst there have been moves to improve diversity in the industries, in the Film & Television sector progress is moving at a much slower rate. Within production - in behind-the–camera roles – a 2017 report by the Work Foundation found that 3% of employees in production are from a minority ethnic background (BFI, 2019). In recent years there has been a concerted effort within the industry to improve diversity and monitoring data, as signalled by the BFI Diversity Standards, which requires production companies applying for funding to meet the criteria for a variety of underserved groups. Most importantly it differentiates between on and off-screen[1].

The BBC has also improved its reporting and monitoring progress workforce targets and it became the first broadcaster to report on the diversity of its workforce in each of the nations (Ofcom, 2022). However, despite the visible work in recent years ethnic minorities are still leaving the production sector. This research pulls together strands from the existing literature on the Creative and Cultural Industries (which lays out the challenges of creative work) and puts them into dialogue with the subjects of ethnicity, education and diversity management to understand the roles they play in career aspirations and their experiences of work within media organisations which might affect their decision to stay or leave the industry. To achieve its aim this research employs mixed methods of focus groups (with students and educators) interviews and a case study of BBC Scotland.

[1] Analysing the standards, Nwonka noted that Scotland is the lowest region for race representation on screen (27% of films) compared to Yorkshire (60%) (Nwonka, 2020).

Title of PhD: Understanding Diversity in the Scottish Screen Sector: The Role of Perception and Education in Unblocking Talent Pipelines

Niall Ingham

University of Glasgow and University of Strathclyde

“Our cow has to go three miles before she can bend her head to grass’: Stories of land injustice in the c19th Scottish Gàidhealtachd as seen through human-cattle interactions.” (Pre-recorded)

Historical narratives around agricultural ‘Improvement’ and the Clearances in the Scottish Highlands and Islands foreground the shift from a predominantly cattlebased husbandry to industrial sheep farming. This narrative has perpetuated a reliance on ‘political, demographic, economic and elite perspectives’ and the persistent marginalisation of Gaelic oral culture by historians (Tindley, 2021). The importance of cattle to Gaelic-speaking communities in this region beyond the end of the Clearances (c.1860) has been largely overlooked.

Taking cattle’s ubiquity in Gaelic cultural expression from this era as a starting point, the paper will explore the way people in the Scottish Highlands and Islands explained social, cultural and ecological changes during this period with reference to their relationships with cattle, such as milking, herding, and seasonal transhumance. In addition, it will present findings from oral testimonies given to the Napier Commission by crofters and cottars in the Isles of Skye and Lewis in 1883. This paper will also highlight how the employment of multi-disciplinary animal studies approaches allows for fresh insights into human and nonhuman experiences in this critical period. The paper will contend that applying this novel approach to these sources and this period allows us to subvert dominant historical narratives, taking into account the values, attitudes and beliefs underpinning lived experience.

Title of PhD: ‘M’ aghan cri, coir, gradhach’ – ‘My heifer beloved, kind and loving’: Humancattle interactions in the Scottish Gàidhealtachd c.1750-1960.

Shout Room External Influences – Help and Hindrance

Chair: Kate Ferrier

Presentation Session 2

10:45–12:00

Floor 8

Dominic Allen

University of Strathclyde, University of Glasgow & University of Edinburgh

“An Act of Betrayal: the Magnuson Act of 1950, Maritime Labour and Cold War Blacklisting.”

This paper examines the impact of the 1950 Magnuson Act and Executive Order 10173 upon left-wing maritime trade unionism in the USA. It has been developed from the AHRC-funded doctoral research I am undertaking on American maritime trade unionism after World War 2, drawing partly on material accumulated during a research visit to two Presidential libraries in 2022.

The commencement of the Korean War in 1950 heightened existing domestic political tensions within the USA amidst a conservative backlash against the New Deal reinforced by anti-communism. As left-wing unions were targeted by government agencies, business leaders, and other unions, the Magnuson Act specifically extended this Red Scare to maritime unions. In the name of national security, it instigated the largest blacklisting of workers in American history. Four thousand maritime workers were denied employment after being deemed security risks. Despite this, there has been no authoritative study of the underlying motivations behind the legislation or its effects on maritime unions.

This paper therefore addresses gap and will appeal to researchers, teachers, and students with interests in the post-1945 Red Scare, labour history, civil rights, and cycles of political repression within the USA.

Title of PhD: An Act of Betrayal: The Magnuson Act of 1950, Maritime Labour and Cold War Blacklisting

Danielle Farrier

University of St Andrews & the Royal Society of London

“Funding Progress: the Role of Grant-Making in the story of Advancement in Victorian Scientific Knowledge.”

The Government Grant, administered by the Royal Society and first distributed in 1850, was the first time the British Government would play a role in the funding of scientific research which was not directly linked to any one specific project. Since this time, grant funding has evolved and expanded to encompass a wide range of disciplines. The beginnings of many of the funding mechanisms we take for granted today have their origins in the nineteenth century, and through exploring their inception more deeply we can learn much about the way we fund research today.

This presentation will begin to tell the story of ‘grant-making’ or ‘research funding’ from the nineteenth century onwards, focusing on the development of science funding in the mid-nineteenth century. It will explore some of the shared themes and factors that are present in the funding of research in both a historical and modern context. In doing so, it will highlight a selection of ‘funding stories’ in the history of nineteenth-century science, which I have uncovered through the course of my research, in the hopes of demonstrating how research funding has worked practically to promote advancement and discovery, and how this has been valued. The aim of this presentation is to emphasise the way that increased opportunities for research funding fostered a sense of ‘advancement’ and influenced some of our modern-day beliefs about grant-making.

Title of PhD: ‘Scientific Grant-making in Britain, 1849-1914.’

Jonas Theoreson

University of Glasgow

“Red Clydeside, Periodical Print Culture and the Public Sphere”

This presentation uses an early twentieth-century debate on working-class adult education as a springboard for examining two periodicals printed in Glasgow, The Socialist (1902-19024) and Forward (1906-1959), and their cultural role in the Scottish proletarian public sphere. Construed as an ideological rivalry between the state-funded Workers’ Educational Association and the trade union-supported movement for independent working-class education, the debate concerned the proper aims and ends of working-class education: ‘one group saw education as a means towards transforming society, the other wished to direct it towards transforming the individual’ (Simon, 1974, p. 305). While previous research has investigated the institutional rivalry using autobiographical recollections and institutional archives (Williams, 1961; Simon, 1974; Macintyre, 1980; Rose, 2001; Sutherland, 2015), I focus on the cultural role of contemporary periodicals in mediating this debate by drawing on archival research of physical holdings at the National Library of Scotland and digital holdings at the British Newspaper Archive. The debate on educational aims signals the historical reappearance of an enthusiastic movement for popular education (c.1880s-1920s) displaying both educational continuities and differences compared to the earlier radical plebeian formation (c1790s-1830s) as examined by Richard Johnson (Johnson, 1979). Following Johnson, I analyse these periodicals as being caught up in a dilemma between limiting conditions (political and commercial) and normative aspirations for ‘really useful knowledge’ – that is, knowledge that would not merely make the knower useful in utilitarian terms, but be useful to the knower. Viewed not just as media for public debate on education but as inherently educational media, I ask how the periodicals constituted, or ‘educated,’ its working-class publics by analysing their style, rhetoric, formal layout, and contents. The long-term comparison between the proletarian and the radical plebeian public spheres enables a story of what Jürgen Habermas terms lifeworld colonisation to be told historically (Habermas, 1981).

Title of PhD: The Clash of Publics on Red Clydeside: Periodical Print Cultures, Education and Pedagogy, and Public Opinion Formation in the Scottish Public Sphere, c. 1872-1945

Chen Antler University of Glasgow

“This Land is my Land?: Building Reality, Narrating Landscapes in Iron Age Rome.”

Stories are how we make sense of the world around us. Nowhere is this more evident than in the stories we tell about our surroundings: how they came to be the way they are, what happened in them, and what are the special and important places within them. Through the process of creating and delivering stories, we transform the natural environment into something that can be explained, controlled, and maintained – we turn ‘Nature’ into ‘Landscape’. In that sense, ‘Place’ is merely a concept, existing only as a mental construct. It is the result of human interaction and negotiation with the environment, an attempt to organize and understand an otherwise chaotic world. Starting from the 9th c. BCE, the evidence is emerging for human activity to establish the earliest ‘places’ in Rome. It is the aim of my research to investigate the motivation for their creation and meaning in the collective Roman identity as it developed.

This presentation explores the intersection of two key methods by which people in Iron-Age Rome made sense of the world and their place within it: In the first, they created a new anthropogenic landscape. In the Second, they created stories about that process. In fact, the interest of the Romans in their archaic heritage echoed for centuries. This is evident not only in the archaeological remains of reconstruction and maintenance of ‘cultural heritage’ sites, but also in the recounting of stories of founders and foundations, of laborious works to drain the valley and to terrace the hills. It is the Romans’ obsession with their city’s foundation and its primordial places, which make Rome into such a compelling test-case to investigate the connection between men and space, created and maintained by stories.

Title of PhD: “Meaningful Places: Intertwined Identity and Environment in Archaic Rome”

Siân MacGregor University of Aberdeen

In partnership with Imaginate

“Researching young audiences: child at the centre, stories at the heart.”

Stories and children are often found together, frequently inseparable, so it was somewhat inevitable that when approaching children to contribute to research, stories and storytelling would feature highly. They provide a common ground, a neutral space for sharing, and unknown potential. All at a safe distance to enable just as much participation as feels comfortable – yet still carrying along and engaging imaginations and means to interpret or experience different worlds, and therefore understand their own.

My project centres and prioritises the child, and stories are located throughout my research, from the preparation and – I anticipate – until the final analyses. Even the methodology design required an element of storytelling and imagination: without access to the young participants to initially advise me, I leant on my own and other adults’ previous experiences to plan the fieldwork, using memories and observations from our own childhoods, and recollections of children interacting with books, performances, drawings and imaginative play. Incredibly, even the ethics process necessitated a process and series of descriptive communications not unlike the unfolding of a story.

Fortunately, as the main focus of my project is towards young audiences watching live performances, I can also incorporate and discuss tales beautifully told both on stages and afterwards, offering a span of sources and styles. This shows the effects and presence of stories both within young minds and those of the professional artists creating works for them. But it is perhaps the use of storytelling by the young participants in the workshop-research sessions that is the most striking of all: at once surprising and revealing, even without literal or realistic descriptions – truly and instinctively taking stories as means of expression and communication, frequently abstract and sophisticated.

So I would like to offer some tales of research and findings: where stories are found, and how effective and affecting they have been throughout my research process.

Title of PhD: Valuing Young Audiences: How children experience and value live theatre and dance and why it matters.

Kathryn Raeburn McClure University

of Glasgow

“Caledon dyes: chemistry and cultural consequences.”

The historic Caledon dyes have unusual chemical structures and properties. They belong to the ‘anthraquinoid vat’ dye class, meaning that they are bulky, inflexible, non-polar molecules with poor solubility in most common solvents. These qualities make them chemically different from most other dyes, but why should this matter to the field of history of art?

This contribution will draw attention to the cultural consequences of the development of these unique dyes, highlighting links between their molecular structures: their historic use, their role in culture, and their heritage preservation. The poster will harness the underused storytelling power of chemistry (a discipline often wrongly considered dry, inaccessible, and uncreative) in uncovering narratives about the use of materials in art, design and culture.

Title of PhD: Synthetic Caledon textile dyes: development of analytical protocols for identification and colour preservation in heritage collections

Kate Ferrier

University of Aberdeen & University of Edinburgh

“When will you be ready to join hands with me?’: Connection and Creativity in the Literary Circles of Susan Ferrier”

Despite the rich social circles of the Scottish novelist, Susan Ferrier (17821854), the image of her planning and composing her work in quiet seclusion nonetheless prevails. My examination of her surviving letters has challenged this view, revealing an evolving creative community with whom she shared stories, exchanged writings, discussed books, and traded support and inspiration. Above all, such findings show that Ferrier relied on connection with others to fuel her own creativity.

Building on this research, I propose that a poster is the best way to map out a section of Ferrier’s creative community. This will provide a simple yet distinctive representation of the many connections she made during her career and visually highlight the ways in which such encounters shaped and inspired her literary output. As part of my project involves a digital output it also seems appropriate that through interactive technologies, the poster will also share what I have learnt whilst exploring the sociable aspects of Ferrier’s creative process, particularly in relation to my own experiences as a postgraduate student. For example, Ferrier often turns to her creative companions during lonely and difficult times in her life and the subsequent interactions not only lift her spirits and boost her confidence but produce some of her most exciting work. While life as a PhD candidate can be an isolated experience, Ferrier should encourage us to surround ourselves with people who support, inspire and develop our work. Significantly then, this poster will not only display Ferrier’s many interesting creative connections but share the enduring lesson that mapping such a community has taught me and touch on some of the stories, conversations and connections which have enriched and inspired my own research journey.

Title of PhD: ‘An Archival Recovery and Examination of the Private Writings of Susan Ferrier’

Nicola Torch University of Stirling

“Social Media Stories”

While social media is now deeply enmeshed within the very fabric of twenty-first century society, there was an introductory period in which social media platforms operated, at their very core, largely with the objective to simply facilitate uploading, sharing and updating; while YouTube encouraged users to ‘Broadcast Yourself’, Twitter invocated participation by asking the simple question ‘What are you doing?’ (Burgess 2015). Nearly two decades on, sharing one’s story on and through social media platforms has transcended these somewhat humble beginnings with limited functionality and has in in turn enabled careers, brands, and businesses to be built around an effective online presence and a penchant for public posting.

This poster presentation builds on my thesis topic by mapping out and exploring how online content creators utilise social media affordances to share their stories online and build successful online capital which is then utilised and deployed into other creative fields, such as book publishing. Since the mid 2010s, publishers and online content creators have collaborated on myriad titles, many of which have broken publishing sales records and sat firmly within bestseller lists, for example YouTube sensation Zoe Sugg’s 2014 debut novel Girl Online which broke the record for highest first-week sales for a debut author in the UK (Farrington 2014). With an ever-increasing mutual interpenetration (Murray 2018), it seems that the interplay between the literary and the digital has created a vast array of titles and a specific genre of publishing.

The poster is divided between four social media platforms under study –YouTube, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok – and space is dedicated to exploring the specific platform affordances, contexts and online conditions and illustrating how content creators are able to successfully navigate the online space in order to write, publish and share their stories in a more traditional and physical sense.

Title of PhD: Field Migration and the Publishing Ecosystem in the Digital Age

Levi Tippett

University of Stirling

“Sound Archives for Football Memories”

This poster will detail my research journey through this PhD project. The categories will be as follows:

1. Why sports-based reminiscence?

This section will involve consideration of why sports-based reminiscence exists as an intervention, the potential benefits and the gaps in research.

2. Sound archives

This section will include justification for using sound archives for sports reminiscence with older people, and detail on the process of conducting archival research with football-related audio materials. Examples of football-related sound archival materials will also be available via a QR code and/or headphones and mp4 player/laptop/ipad.

3. Podcast development

This section will consist of an outline and justification of developing football memories podcast for sports reminiscence with older people. That is, why podcasts were chosen as a delivery method, the development of a podcast tailored for this context (processes), and the next steps beyond the PhD.

4. Methodology

This section will detail the methodology for this research (i.e., methodological position, methods employed and other methodological considerations)

Title of PhD: Sound Archives for Football Memories: Exploring Innovations in the Use of the Scottish Football Museum Archive for Older People

Gerardo Sanches Arguelles University of Edinburgh

“The journey of a historical linguist”

My journey started at the University of Oviedo in Asturias, Spain, where I first had contact with English Historical Linguistics studying the history of English in detail. This continued at Aberystwyth University, where I spent one semester abroad focusing on Old, Middle, and Modern English studies. Having already set my mind on pursuing a career in this field, the last step of my undergraduate education was my thesis The potential influence of Old Norse on the syntax of early English: the gloss to the Durham Ritual.

I embarked on a postgraduate career in Scotland in 2019. My first master’s degree in Edinburgh allowed me to continue my specialisation. At the hight of the Coronavirus Pandemic, I published my study The status of compound relatives in the Northumbrian Old English gloss to the Rushworth Gospels in 2021. Immediately afterwards I started my second master’s degree in Aberdeen, focusing this time on Scandinavian Historical Linguistics, and this led me to publishing my study Incipient articles in Old East Scandinavian varieties in 2022.

I then decided to start my PhD in English Historical Syntax at the University of Edinburgh in September 2021. At this stage, I received the support from SGSAH: as a linguist, I am conscious that funding opportunities in my field are scarce, hence why I value SGSAH’s support for my discipline so much, as that gives researchers in the humanities like me the peace of mind and all the tools required to work at our best. Thanks to my previous work, to the support of my HEI, and to SGSAH, I am now able to work full-time on my project and to combine it with second language learning, with organising a Visiting Doctoral Researcher position, and with presenting my work at the most prestigious conferences in my field.

Title of PhD: The loss of grammatical gender and its impact on syntax and discourse

Julia Vallius University

of Glasgow

“In Search of Charter Culture”

Studying twelfth and thirteenth century documents is rarely, if ever, a straightforward process. With so little information about almost every aspect of the document, the researcher has to cover so much ground. Manuscripts such as charters (or legal documents that often record land transactions) can leave a lot to be desired. All a charter offers up to the researcher is usually a single sheet of parchment, sometimes divorced from its original context, other times giving us little information about the people in the document. Who were these people giving lands and found as witnesses in these documents? What was their relationship to these documents? Unless they are important royal or ecclesiastical figures, it can be so hard to find out more about the people behind the charter document. It can be harder to find out about the culture of the document itself. The journey of understanding the charter document and understanding the people in the document is a continuous one. My research has come to focus on the people who are scattered throughout surviving collections, people who only appear once in the entire surviving Scottish archives, and how we can use these scattered voices to dig deep into the culture of charter production and the communities and networks that are often left untouched by charter historians.

Title of PhD: Conceptualising and Contextualising Twelfth and Thirteenth Century Scottish Charters

Ronan McGreechin University of Strathclyde

“Scrapbooking in the late-nineteenth/early-twentieth century workplace: The Denny Brother’s Drawing Office Arkiviz”

An examination and analysis of scrapbooking culture in the workplace using the Denny Brother’s Arkivz scrapbook as a case study. Aims to identify and answer questions regarding how these scrapbooks were assembled, what kind of content the scrapbook contains, rituals or traditions associated with these books. Due to the relative scarcity of workplace scrapbooks, a case study on the Arkivz holds historical value in itself.

The Arkivz offers a rather rare insight into the Victorian workplace, in this case a shipyard drawing office. The scrapbook presents to a rather personal view of the workplace. Through the contributions and creative outputs of the drawing room staff we learn more about them, how they interacted with one another as well as how they interacted within the workplace. The presence and power of humour in the lives of the staff and their creations and contributions is one of the major takeaways from the Arkivz. I would explore in this paper how this humour is created, fostered, and presented. How the realms of the humorous and professional overlap, and what limits (if any) are placed on comedy.

The content, cuttings and contributions included within the scrapbook offers insight into the cultural and creative world of the contributors and drawing office staff. The paper would explore this, looking at the usage of the Scots language throughout the book. It will also consider how pop culture references and more classical references find their way into the creative outputs of the Denny Drawing Office workers. Conclusions may be drawn here about the level of education of Drawing Office staff compared with other workers within the shipyard.

This paper allows for a greater understanding of how the drawing office staff shared their stories. Furthermore, through the stories the workers shared in this book we have a unique and valuable insight into their life and the cultural interests of this class of worker at this time.

Marissa Clarke University

of Edinburgh

“Knowing-With and Knowing-Through the Breath”

In this poster contribution, I will provide an overview of my PhD research ‘Sensing Yoga Bodies’ and introduce the audience to the key research questions, ideas, and context. I will talk about my journey as a doctoral researcher over the past two years, making note of the events, highlights, and milestones that have helped shaped my progress. This will include summarising additional activity I have undertaken such as conference papers I have presented as well as journal articles and book chapters I have written for edited volumes. I will share insights and learnings from these experiences, to help offer encouragement to other doctoral researchers attending the symposium. To showcase the practice-based elements of my research, I will include a ‘sonic’ self-portrait that the audience can listen to by scanning a QR code. There will also be a short performance score, which is a somatic invitation for the audience to tune into their senses using their breath. Overall, the poster will share the story of my research using the mediums of narrative, sound, and somatic practice.

Title of PhD: Sensing Yoga Bodies: A Phenomenological-Ethnographic Inquiry

Gonca Yalcin

University of Glasgow

“Contemporary puppetry and object theatre scene in Turkey”

In this presentation I want to briefly share one of the stories that my findings tell. The first section of my PhD focuses on a newly emerging theatre scene in Turkey (with a particular focus on Istanbul): a puppetry and object theatre scene, which encapsulates what can be identified as an increasing demand by directors of alternative theatres to include puppetry in their works and puppet makers and set designers designing and directing their own performances. What distinguishes these new practices from the more ‘mainstream’ alternative theatres is their prominent use of visual dramaturgies, their focus on materiality, and the different story-telling techniques they employ which do not rely on the written text. Another aspect that is important to highlight is that this scene is currently led by women whose approach to performance making is rooted in their material, object-based practices. Some of my findings related to this new scene highlights a narrative which suggests why it might be emerging now in Turkey. This narrative includes

1. The particular ways in which these object-based practices are able to respond to a climate of censorship;

2. Partake in a different understanding of ‘reality’ provided by the object;

3. And thus, allow artists to generate ‘creative ecologies’ where different realities and discrete realms of experience and knowledge often intersect.

Title of PhD: Practicing Alternative Historiographies: Contemporary Material Performance Practice in Turkey, Iran and Lebanon.

Holly Young

University of the Highlands and Islands

“‘Feast, Famine or Fancy: Iron Age relationships to marine molluscs”

There is an assumption in Iron Age archaeology that shellfish consumption automatically indicates a societal state of famine and poverty, however this is far from the reality. This is not to say that shellfish were not relied upon in times of hardship, but that the role they played in society as a whole is far more convoluted. Shell assemblages are often disregarded after an initial conclusion of ‘famine food’, but there is much more that these shells can tell us.

To illustrate this, the marine shellfish assemblages from two Orcadian Iron Age sites have been examined. The Cairns, South Ronaldsay, is a substantial broch settlement with evidence of specialised craftworking and extensive feasting deposits. There is no evidence of a sustained period of famine or any sign of poverty throughout the long life of the site.

In contrast, Berst Ness, Westray, is characterised by marginal struggles. Skeletal analysis from associated burials shows evidence of seasonal deprivation, and high levels of infant mortality indicates a much harsher lifestyle than that experienced at The Cairns.

Both sites are coastal, both have the same range of taxa present, and both have substantial assemblages of marine shell which are being examined using traditional archaeozoological techniques. This presentation will demonstrate that ‘traditional’ analytical methods can reveal a complex and rich relationship between Iron Age communities and shellfish, going far beyond poverty resources and even beyond a food source, regardless of the economic quality of life at these sites.

Title of PhD: Shore life: The contribution of shellfish to prehistoric subsistence and social life

Louis Coyeman University of

“The story of my PhD research journey looking at the Scots language revitalisation”

Doing a PhD is a journey, and like any journey it can be deconstructed into a series of steps. In this poster presentation, I share the story of my research journey and of the steps that were needed to arrive at the stage I am currently in with my research on the Scots language revitalisation. What are the stages PhD students go through to write their thesis? How does a PhD journey help you improve as a researcher? How does being an international student influence my research on Scots? These questions will guide the narrative that is presented in this poster.

Glasgow

Title of PhD: Scots language revitalisation

Charlene Michelle Jordan University of Glasgow

The natural palette of the Guiana Shield: Indigenous South American dyeing traditions and the significance of colour in the Amazonian rainforest

Textile traditions form a strong part of the cultural practices of the African diaspora in Suriname, South America. Enslaved Africans brought various aspects of their culture such as religion, plant knowledge and dyeing traditions to the Americas where some customs were retained in their original form (Africanisms) and others were modified (creolisation). One outcome of the exposure to other African, Indigenous and European (colonizing) cultures was the formation of the Winti religion in which practitioners use coloured pangis (textiles) to honour and express their African cultural and spiritual heritage.

Red, white, blue, yellow, and black play an important role in Winti; these colours reoccur in textiles given to enslaved Africans on Surinamese plantations. In addition, colonizing missionary accounts have shown that Carib Indians and other indigenous communities were also familiar with red, blue, yellow, white, and black fabric dyes prior to the arrival of Europeans.

In this poster, the cultural significance of natural dye sources and their resulting colours in addition to dyeing traditions of the original inhabitants of the Guiana Shield (pre-Columbus) will be presented.

Ross Patrizio University of

Glasgow

The Epistemology of Testimony

One key question in the epistemology of testimony concerns what is known as the normativity of testimonial entitlement. Put simply, epistemologists of testimony debate over the conditions under which it is acceptable, justified, or reasonable to form a belief on the basis of someone’s say-so. There are two broad views: liberalism and conservatism. Liberals argue that a hearer is perfectly entitled to believe on the basis of a speaker’s say-so just so long as they have no particular reason not to believe what’s been said. Conservatives, on the other hand, adopt more stringent standards. They argue that, over-and-above a mere absence of reasons not to believe, a hearer must also have some positive, non-testimonial basis for thinking that what’s been said is actually true, or at least that the speaker is particularly likely to know what they’re talking about.

There are a number of challenges and hurdles one faces in adopting one or the other of these competing views. Here I discuss just one such problem, known as the ‘vulnerability problem’ (VP). The VP, put simply, targets the liberal view of testimony, and asks how it can be rational to believe solely on the basis of testimony (i.e. when there is no positive, non-testimonial basis supporting said testimony) given that speakers often lie and get things wrong. My proposed solution makes use of the under-discussed notion of productivity. I argue that there are perfectly good (and rational) reasons for going ahead and believing on the basis of testimony, even if this policy may lead one astray from time to time. In order to do so, I make use of the thought that, at least sometimes, one can be too epistemically cautious, so much so that one’s caution becomes counterproductive.

Title of PhD: The Epistemology of Testimony

Hope Room Archiving Stories

Chair: Helen Persson Swain

Nelson Correia

Edinburgh Napier University and University of Edinburgh

“Stories from the Archive: A Journey through the world of Film and Archival research”.

My symposium presentation will reflect on my journey through the world of archives and the history of the Scottish film and television sector during the first two years of my PhD project. My research uses video-based oral history interviews and archival materials to investigate the development of the freelance screen workforce in Scotland over the last half-century and is being collaboratively supervised by Edinburgh Napier University and the University of Edinburgh, with the National Library of Scotland (NLS) as partner organisation. Under SGSAH’s ARCS scheme (Applied Research Collaborative Studentships), the project comprises a long-term work placement at the NLS Moving Image Archive, which has proven a positive experience in several ways for both myself, as a researcher and the organisation. The NLS has been benefiting from my input in activities such as the cataloguing of records, curation of materials for a public exhibition, and production of new digital resources to enhance their collections on the history of the Scottish screen sector in alignment with their policies, while I have benefited from the development of my curatorial skills and access to the early stages of archival processes usually unavailable to academics, including the opportunity to witness a rescue operation for new paper-based materials, the appraisal of items for collection acquisition, and the negotiation of daily challenges with resources, storage space and permissions. My presentation will discuss different aspects of this partnership and explore the potential of such academic-industry collaborations with archival institutions and their benefits for both academics and archivists.

Title of PhD: Film Bang: Communities of Practice, Cross-Media Interconnections, and Sectoral Growth within Scotland’s Film and Television Industries

Ahmed Mostafa Abertay University

“Investigating the Potential of Extended Reality for Alternative Understanding of Forced Migration and Devastated Middle eastern Cultural Heritage Sites.”

The rich heritage of Middle Eastern culture and architecture (founded in art and design) is inextricably linked to the rise and fall of empires and kingdoms throughout the region. This research project proposes the remediation of the Nubia heritage site using interactive technologies of new media and game design as a paradigm for other Middle Eastern heritage sites. I will document and critique the digital narration of the history of ancient civilizations and mediaeval culture by analysing discrepancies between archetypes found in contemporary video games and the history of Islamic, Coptic, and ancient Egyptian architecture. Contrast these virtual representations with conflicting representations of historic sites from first-hand accounts by displaced communities and narratives from historical publications.

I propose to reconstruct what our cities in the Middle East have lost by creating an interactive archive that allows the public and academics to investigate the evolution of these ancient sites.

I will investigate the concept of remediation described by Richard Grusin and Jay David Bolden in Remediation: Understanding New Media (1999) by employing a methodology based on John Sharp’s understanding of the “artgames” system. Combining these concepts to develop a new language for the digital archive, I will establish a rigorous creative context for the development of new applications for XR (virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality) technologies. The reconstruction of refugee experiences and devastated monuments using 3D simulation technologies will be combined with sensory ethnographic techniques to assess the impact of loss. There will be a combination of spatialtemporal narratives and visual material to represent what has been destroyed or lost. This project provides the opportunity to combine the present and the future in a contemporary visual language that can engage new audiences in the representation and interpretation of primordial worlds and their existence in our contemporary culture.

Title of PhD: Investigating the potential of Extended Reality for alternative understandings of forced migration and devastated Middle Eastern Cultural Heritage Sites

Catriona Schofield

Edinburgh Napier University and University of Edinburgh

“Defining ‘Literary Heritage Site’: Which Came First, the Literature of the Heritage.”

Whenever people ask me what my PhD is about, my automatic answer is ‘literary heritage sites’. This is a key phrase for me, the way I describe the entire focus of my project. It is also not consistently understood. Sometimes, the phrase clarifies things for people, and they’re able to fit it to museums or monuments they’ve been to; in those cases, it’s intuitive, and doesn’t need further exploration. But literary heritage sites are niche, and not on everybody’s radar, which makes them hard to picture. What makes it even harder is the long history of debate and subjectivity around how to define literature, heritage and heritage sites. And it turns out that summarising a concept with a roll call of contested terms doesn’t exactly clear things up.

In this talk, I will consider some of the ways of defining the various terms which make up and complicate my concept of ‘literary heritage site’. Literary heritage sites are a key mode of sharing stories, in a literal sense, but still what those stories are might be changed by how that term is understood. Therefore, I will consider how the ambiguity of terms like literature and heritage might open up new avenues for exploration, and how definitions can be both used and resisted.

Title of PhD: The Literature House in the Digital Age: New Directions in Literary Heritage

Aspire Room The Researcher’s Story Chair: Perpetual Brade

Presentations Session 3

14:00–15:00

Floor 8

Adam Benmakhlouf

University of Dundee

“EXPERIMENTING WITH FORMAT or How to do A QUEER TAROT READING FOR MY/YOUR RESEARCH.”

TAROT HAS BEEN A PART OF MY LIFE SINCE I WAS A CHILD + HAS FORMED AN EXPERIMENTAL MEANS OF CHECKING IN MY INTENTIONS AND MY PROGRESS DURING MY PHD + . HAS BEEN A TOOL FOR THE PROVISIONAL NARRATIVISATION OF EMERGENT RESEARCH.

THIS PRESENTATION USES TAROT TO HOLD AN EXPERIMENTATION WITH FORMAT FOR ACADEMIC PRESENTATION, ALLOWING FOR AN INFORMALISING OF RESEARCH OUTCOMES.

THIS CLOSELY ALIGNS WITH THE EXTENSIVE PRACTICE-LED RESEARCH I HAVE CONDUCTED INTO COLLABORATIVE METHODOLOGIES THAT EXPAND THE POSSIBILTIES FOR CARE WITH ARTISTIC PRODUCTION, AND HOW TO SITE THESE WITHIN THE ART INSTITUTION.

THIS FORM OF RESEARCH ACTS AS A MEANS OF WORKING OUTSIDE THE USUAL PARAMETERS OF ARTISTIC AND ACADEMIC FORMATS, ENCOURAGING A MELDING OF CREATIVE AND CRITICAL METHODOLOGIES.

THIS IS ALSO A SKILLSHARING.

BY THE END OF THE SESSSION, ALL MEMBERS OF THE AUDIENCE WILL BE ABLE TO READ TAROT WITH CONFIDENCE AND CONDUCT THE SAME READING FOR THEMSELVES INDEPENDENTLY

Title of PhD: COMMUNAL WORDS: HOW CAN THE ART INSTITUTION SUPPORT NONNORMATIVE ART WRITING?

Hye Lim Nam (Joy) University of Glasgow

“Mental Models of the Organization of Scholarly Information Across the Academy: Disciplinary Similarities and Differences”

The aim of my doctoral project is to explore researchers’ perceptions of knowledge organisation in four different disciplines: Chemistry, History, Law, and Medicine. It draws upon library user experience (UX) techniques and ethnographic approaches to understanding human information behaviour and mental models. Historically, human information behaviour and library user studies have been skewed towards quantitative and system-oriented methods and outputs; my study seeks to draw upon entirely qualitative methods of data collection and analysis to tell a different kind of story. The UX- and ethnography-inspired methods I use emphasise participants’ voices, their contexts, as well as the complexity and connectedness of their disciplinary environments. Ultimately, it is hoped that the data collected via interviews and creative drawing techniques will tell the collective stories of researchers’ experiences of learning, teaching, and working in their own disciplines and convey their situated, embodied, and embedded perceptions of information through their own voices and visual representations. The process of getting the protocol right has not been straightforward or easy; I have been refining and revising the scope and content of my questions and prompts through preliminary testing on peers, and through pilot studies. I am learning to be flexible and responsive during interview sessions to allow space for participants to voice their thoughts and reflections. Thus, I have been on a journey of learning to become a better researcher who is able to embrace the unknowns and navigate the ongoing challenges of conducting research that is iterative, less structured, and tailored to each participant. Data collection is still in its early stages and only two pilot studies have been conducted so far, but it will be an interesting, hopefully rewarding experience to make sense of the data I will collect this spring and summer.

Title of PhD: Mental models of the organisation of scholarly information across the Academy: disciplinary similarities and differences

Kiah Endelman Music

University of Glasgow and University of Edinburgh

“A Woman Walks in What She Thinks in Circles.”

My presentation will involve a performative reading of a narrative centred around the idea of ‘walking in circles’ — both a feeling of frustration with and a methodology for my PhD project.

Writing through a complex and ambivalent relationship to inherited Jewish culture and religion, I have found myself retracing steps, writing around the same subjects again and again, rarely (if ever) able to locate or ground or centre myself comfortably.

My presentation will explore this action of recurrent return by addressing a relationship to, and narrative of, Judaism known within the regulatory space of a fence, felt as a sense of coming up against. Drawing on and grappling with the significant ethical imperative in rabbinic Judaism to ‘build a fence around the Torah’ (Pirke Avot 1:1), I will read the fence as tradition, the space from which to move, and ask if there are ways to be and mean beyond its bounds, ways to walk outside/beside the circles it inscribes.

Grappling with the realities that a cyclical structure of religious life has pro- and prescribed (especially for women), I will ask what happens when this structure is broken, what it means and how it feels when what once was understood and received as whole, as sacred, now comes to us in pieces or in parts. When the steps that we retrace no longer cohere or hold us as we want. Within this narrative, the act of walking in circles becomes both a marker of and a way to engage with this fracture, a way to live with the traces of a Jewish past that both remains and demands reinterpretation. Walking in these circles, I will trace the paths left by those before and ask how else it could have been, will wrestle with a past written in as truth.

Title of PhD: Living still with injury: writing reparative Midrash as an act of feminist resistant memory making.

Twist Room Truth or False: Subjective Narratives and Histories

Chair: Jonas Theoreson

Presentations Session 3

14:00–15:00

Floor 8

Rory Aird University of Glasgow

“The Legitimacy Dilemma.”

Have you ever wondered what to do if someone around you asserts a controversial false statement like “climate change is a hoax”? Recent work in philosophy has suggested that you have a duty to voice your objection. But what if objecting only makes things worse? Perhaps it legitimises the false claim or lends it undeserving warrant that you even granted it engagement. That seems to suggest that perhaps you should not object – just stay silent. But that (rather uncontroversially) seems like it is an equally bad thing to do; after all, if everyone was silent in the face of false assertions, it looks fairly obvious that this would have widespread pernicious effects on society as a whole. So, it appears that, in situations in which we are face with controversial false assertions, both our putative options are bad. I call this the legitimacy dilemma. In this presentation, I put forward a variety of cases to display and discuss this phenomenon. Unfortunately, I might not have a satisfying answer to the question I posed right at the start but there are some possible (institutional) solutions to that are worth considering.

Title of PhD: Combatting Conspiratorial Thinking through Ameliorative Epistemology

Anna Talley

University of Edinburgh and University of Glasgow

“From ‘London is Panicky’ to ‘Trending in the United Kingdom: Major Catastrophe’, Tales from Comparative and Contemporary Design History.”

Comparative historical research is a tricky practice. One wants to draw reasonable and logical parallels between periods to explain change over time without being ahistorical or generalising. Equally, contemporary historical research is challenging due to its various criticisms: of being a form of journalism, that researchers do not have enough distance from the events to make objective judgements and that such research has the potential to be coerced by forces outside of the researcher’s control, causing unintended change in the present.

Of course, in my doctoral research, I have decided to take on both methods as central to my research design.

Join me in this presentation, a romp through humorous narratives from my investigations of nineteenth-century sensationalist newspapers and twenty-first century fake news websites, while I offer several critical insights that I have learnt on doing comparative and contemporary history. Instead of seeing contemporary history as a challenge, I invite you to think of the potential for contemporary history to take an activist role in political and social issues. Instead of limiting yourself to a single historical period, I hope to offer insights on how comparative historical research can benefit more recent histories by offering a longue-durée perspective. Whether you are a historian, a social scientist, a philosopher or a designer, this presentation will provide a deeper insight into the ways in which the stories of the past and present are investigated and retold.

Loretta Mulholand University of Dundee

“East, West and Back Again: the Challenges of Writing ‘Artful’ History through the Life/Work of Isabella Bird.”

“My Pet, Probably no-one in England has ever received a letter from Sempang but you!”

These are the first words from the first letter that I read by Isabella Bird while sitting in the Special Collections Room at the National Library of Scotland. I have been fascinated by her work ever since. Isabella was born in Yorkshire in 1831 and lived until she was 72 years old. After her father’s death, she stayed in Scotland, between the capital city and the Isle of Mull. She died in Edinburgh in 1904 and is buried with her family in Dean’s Cemetery.

Isabella lived a remarkable life, travelling throughout the world unaccompanied by a husband, father or close companion, while suffering from both physical and mental health issues. She was introduced to the Scottish publisher, John Murray III, after her first trip to America and Canada in 1856 and thereafter the company published accounts of her journeys throughout her life. Her earlier books were based on letters sent to her sister while later volumes were more geographical and eventually illustrated by her own photographs.

I have been researching Isabella’s life and writing, using archival evidence, biographies and photographs whilst studying theories of historiography, literature and examples of what American historians Sachs and Demos call ‘artful history’, in an attempt to write about her life in a creative manner, while taking account of the ‘truths’ held in archival records and other sources of historical evidence.

My presentation will focus on the discussions that have arisen in the conflicting aspects of inter-disciplinary writing and reflecting on the challenges that this has brought concerning subjectivity in historical writing, using archives when weaving in a narrative which deals with the past and the present, and looking for examples of ‘artful history’ on both sides of the Atlantic.

Title of PhD: Travels East, West and Back Again: Researching and Writing

Isabella Bird Artfully

Shout Room Interacting Through Stories

Chair: Ash Charlton

Presentations Session 3

14:00–15:00

Floor 8

Grace Docherty

University of St Andrews

“Exploring Human remains in Late Imperial Russian Detective Fiction.”

This paper will analyse the depiction of human and nonhuman interactions in early Russian detective fiction using a new materialist and posthumanist approach. Scholarship has previously discussed the significance of materiality in detective fiction primarily in terms of how instruments aid detectives in solving crime. However, in merely highlighting the use of objects, such criticism operates under the assumption that the human detective sits atop a hierarchy. This paper challenges anthropocentric conceptions of authority actors in Russian detective narratives, thereby reshaping contemporary approaches to the genre and literary studies. Storytelling is a central theme of this paper as it explores material forms of storytelling where human remains and other nonhuman things are significant narrating agents. This paper will first explore theoretical approaches that assert mutually constitutive agency between human and nonhuman actors. Then, it will explore human-nonhuman agency and entanglement in the genre by focusing on human remains, where decomposing bodies offer a unique opportunity to interrogate binary boundaries. Acknowledging post-mortem bodies as agential entities significantly challenges conceptualisations of victims as passive and subverts human-nonhuman as well as perpetrator-victim hierarchies. The paper will make reference to works including N.P. Timofeev’s ‘Проститутка’ and ‘Преступление суеверия’ (1872); R.L. Antropov’s ‘Ритуальное убийство девочки’ (1908); and A.E. Zarin’s В поисках убийцы (1915).

Cleo O’Callaghan Yeoman

Universities of Stirling, Glasgow and Edinburgh

“Sharing Stories

About reading: A Metadiscourse of Improvement”

In 1800, The Anti-Jacobin Review published a review of Scottish novelist Elizabeth Hamilton’s second novel, Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800). The review describes Hamilton’s novel approvingly as ‘the first novel of the day’, but it also identifies the way in which novels, perceived at the time as dangerous and corruptive, can provide their own corrective. As the reviewer observes, ‘the same means by which the poison is offered, are, perhaps, the best by which their antidote may be rendered efficacious’.

This notion of novels providing their own antidote is central to my doctoral research, which analyses the early-nineteenth-century novels of six Scottish authors (Mary Brunton, Susan Ferrier, John Galt, Hamilton, James Hogg, and Walter Scott) and their relationship to ‘improvement’. Within the literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, examples abound of anti-novel stereotypes that detail the perceived perils of novel reading. In my thesis, I argue that these Scottish novelists advocate within their novels a conversely improving model of reading, which operates to ameliorate and steer readers away from these perils.

A primary way through which these novelists achieve this is by depicting scenes of reading within their own novels - essentially, sharing stories within stories. Whilst some of these scenes of reading confirm the stereotypical dangers of novel reading, others deny these dangers, instead promoting an approach to reading that teaches readers to think and act for themselves, thus becoming improved. Taken together, these discussions of novel reading within novels comprise what I term in my thesis as a novelistic metadiscourse of improvement. In this paper, I will analyse examples of this metadiscourse in action, arguing that the act of sharing stories about novel reading within novels is, to a large extent, what enables these Scottish novels to function as improving forms of literature.

Title of PhD: ‘Reality and Representation: A Study of Novel Reading and Improvement in Post-Enlightenment Scotland, 1800-37.’

Rachel Millar University of Glasgow

“Mary Porter: From Glasgow to Air Force.”

Mary Porter begins the war at home in Scotland where she writes to her brother from a flat in 31 Bank Street Hillhead, in the west-end of Glasgow. Often referred to as ‘fluffy’ due to her hair, or ‘little Porter’, Mary had many friends and a happy and comfortable home life before the war. After the death of her brother, Andrew Hay Porter, killed in action in 1917, Porter joined the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC) and later the Women’s Royal Air Force (WRAF). Technical roles included acetylene welding to mending balloon silk. Porter worked on various aeroplanes and was made a mobile member; she then was sent to France and Germany in the immediate aftermath of the war.

During her time before and during the war, Porter kept a snapshot camera with which she documented her experiences. She then used those photographs to create an album. I found this album during my research and was struck by the hundred-year-old images of young friends finding fun during a global tragedy, some of which were taken in my own hometown. This album now tells the story of a young woman’s life turned upside down by war and grief. However, it also shows photographs of a fun-loving woman experiencing new countries, new friends, and interesting work for the first time. Some of these photographs contradict the serious and sober pictures considered to be the canon of First World War Art. And so, Porter’s story is a very interesting one to tell.

This story is seen through photographs, and so a visual presentation is the perfect way to showcase it to a new audience a century after it was first curated by porter.

Title of PhD: A study of the representation of women’s war work during the First World War and its aftermath in visual culture.

15:15–16:15

Floor 8

Workshops and Film

Hope Room

Workshop 1: Kyle Gunn, “Smelling Stories: Perfume and Storytelling”

Odours are difficult to express in language— in English at least, we have a very limited vocabulary to describe what we experience with our sense of smell. If our choice of scent-specific words is so limited, can we use stories to communicate our olfactive experiences instead? In this workshop we will sample various artisan perfumes and think about the stories that the sensory experience of each conjures in our minds. We will think about the possible characters, places and situations that could be used to “describe” each fragrance, and then compare our stories with those told by each other, by each fragrance’s marketing, and by the linguistic data.

Aspire Room

Workshop 2: Roslyn Potter, “Ane Excellent Secret: Early Modern Beauty Hacks (and other lifestyle tips) Found in 17th Century Scottish Recipe Books”

In seventeenth century Scotland, beauty was a concern for many. Household recipe books from the period show a range of preparations such as ‘to mak ones face fair’ and ‘to make hayre black’. Herbs were chopped, spices were ground, rainwater was boiled, and some other less savoury ingredients were added to make perfumes, soaps, creams and salves to give the individual the look they wanted for the next stately houseparty. Examining these recipes also provides a deeper insight into early modern understandings of medicine, the body, and fertility. Investigating the ingredients also shows the extent of Scotland’s participation in international trade. This presentation will show the variety of ingredients, processes, and applications of beauty and household remedies – with a live demonstration!

Please attend the workshop you were allocated via the registration process. 55

Twist Room

Workshop 3: Tullia Fraser and Guilia Marinos, “Collecting, Displaying and Uncovering Biases in the Museum”

The stories that museums tell are not neutral, nor have they ever been. Requiring no prior knowledge in museums, Egypt or China, this interactive workshop invites attendees to uncover some of the biases involved in the acquisition and display of objects in National Museums Scotland (NMS) in the early 20th century. Based on current research in two ongoing collaborative PhD projects, the biographies of specific Chinese and Egyptian objects—and the people involved— will be examined, demonstrating how the 20th century practices of acquisition, documentation and display are key legacies that continue to inform and shape the understanding of cultures in museums today. This will be an engaging workshop encouraging participants to challenge the authority of the Museum, and to reflect on the subjective nature its collecting and displays. Acknowledging the myriad experiences and relationships that participants may have with the cultural sector, this workshop will be a space for fruitful discussions to raise concerns about, and share visions for best practices in museums and the wider cultural heritage sector today.

Shout Room

Workshop 4: Anna Rezk, “User Agency and Identity in Personalised News”

Emergent forms of media allow for increased personalisation and audience agency. This development has also made its way into the realm of Public Service Media (PSM), with the BBC’s projects around recommendation systems. This step into the direction of personalised content curation raises considerable risks as offering audiences too much agency over content consumption could potentially thwart the editorial intent over content presentation but also on a more granular level distort individual stories. Furthermore, current trends are blurring the lines between user customisation and behavioural personalisation models. This development also raises the question, at which point it would lead to an increasingly fragmented media landscape, raising the question of how PSM can reconcile their core values such as universality with personalisation.

The planned workshop for the SGSAH symposium will feature an interactive system which tackles the issues of user agency and profiling as well as algorithmic and editorial intervention in personalised news head-on through provocative design. This “provotype” (provocative design artefact) is designed to elicit feelings surrounding personalisation among its users. After interacting with the system, we will move to a co-creation workshop setting in which the experience will be reflected upon and user-centric design approaches for personalised news will be explored and critically assessed.

Workshops and Film

Proclaim Room

Film and Discussion: Deviant, Emily Beany (Running time: 5 minutes, with short introduction and post-screening Q&A)

Deviant is a 16mm experimental film exploring themes of collective care and mis/communication in the face of chronic pain and societal stigma. The film was developed through collaborative, practice-based research with The EndoWarriors community group in West Lothian. Addressing health inequalities and ‘diagnostic imperialism’, which exerts power over who has access to support and who does not, the project examines the label of ‘deviance’ when applied to women’s bodies, using endometriosis as a potent example of pain being side-lined as deviance. The collaborative project shares stories of endometriosis experience through workshops with The EndoWarriors exploring sound, movement and form. Visual embodiments, soundscape and voiceover inform, mark and interrupt the filmic body, seeking to communicate the unpredictable rhythms of this chronic illness. As Deviant reveals the internal sensations, thoughts and emotions of endometriosis experience that remain hidden / unheard, affective experience is highlighted and the extent to which written / verbal language can share embodied stories is brought into question.

Please attend the workshop you were allocated via the registration process.

Keynote Speaker Caroline Brown

‘Tales of the Unexpected’

In this talk Caroline will discuss how archives, far from being dusty old documents, can bring together people from different disciplines and backgrounds, enable them to see the past in a new light and weave new stories which will become part of our future.

Caroline Brown is the University Archivist and an Assistant Director in the Library, Learning, Culture & Information Directorate at the University of Dundee. She has responsibility for Archives, Museums and Information Governance and was for many years Programme Leader on the University’s Archive and Family History degrees. She is a member of the AHRC Peer Review College, a Trustee of the Scottish Council on Archives and a member of the Executive Board of the International Council on Archives. She has written and published on the theory and practice of archives, including having two books published by Facet.

Thanks for participating in the SGSAH Year 2 Symposium 2023!

Organising Committee:

Chen Antler Finkelstein, University of Glasgow

Siân Mitchell MacGregor, University of Aberdeen

Katie McClure, University of Glasgow

Loretta Mulholland, University of Dundee

Julia Vallius, University of Glasgow

With special thanks to Caroline Brown, University of Glasgow Print Services and all the staff at SGSAH