Chair: Joshua Smith; Room 4 and

Organisers Hilary Clydesdale – University of Edinburgh Lucy Forde – University of Edinburgh Enrico Galvagni – University of St Andrews Joshua Smith – University of Stirling

10:00–12:00 Konstantinos Chatzigeorgiou

University of Glasgow ‘Was Euclid a Pragmatist? A Contextual Analysis of Edward Strong’s Procedures and Metaphysics’

It is a relatively unknown fact that the philosophy department of Columbia University was responsible for producing a number of pioneering works in the history and historiography of the scientific revolution during the first few decades of the 20th century. Two representative examples are Edwin Burtt’s 1924 The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science and Edward Strong’s 1936 Procedures and Metaphysics. The former argues that a kind of Platonism or Pythagoreanism, according to which nature is a geometrical or broadly mathematical structure, was an assumption of major thinkers of the likes of Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes and Newton. In contrast, Strong maintains that the early modern natural sciences (the ‘mixed-mathematical’ sciences, like astronomy, mechanics, optics and harmonics) should be viewed in the context of Euclid’s Elements, not Platonism. Therefore, the key figures of the scientific revolution were tentative applied geometers, not speculative metaphysicians. Having briefly summarised Burtt and Strong’s theses, I will contextualise the philosophical presumptions of Burtt’s narrative. Strong appears to argue that the correct reading of Euclidean geometry is that of its practical or ‘operational’ context, namely a closed deductive system where all possible operations are ultimately based on and restricted by a basic set of postulates, definitions and common notions. In effect, I will argue that the plausibility of Strong’s historical narrative depends on the plausibility of his philosophical assumptions.

Oscar Hyde

University of Aberdeen ‘Towards a theological reckoning with the social construction of consent’

For decades, schools of dominance feminism have developed complex, thoughtful interrogations of common theoretical appeals to consent in questions of sexual ethics. Dominance feminists argue that it is not primarily individual acts of consent that most directly determine the nature of sexual interaction, but rather the series of power relations or power differentials that exist under patriarchy. This framing have received much similarlythoughtful pushback, including vital and transformative work from many sex workers against its most significant legal implementations. Nevertheless, certain core ideas hold lasting power; most notably for this presentation, the difficulty of those who feel their consent, though appearing to be given freely under models prioritising individual choice, has instead arisen from cultural socialisation towards sacrificing one’s own needs. Many popular and indeed hegemonic Christian theologies, both outside and inside the academy, urge their adherents towards giving themselves away for others’ benefit, but tend, with varying levels of consciousness, to urge their most oppressed and marginalised adherents with significantly greater gusto. Unfortunately, despite certain tentative steps, Christian theologies of consent, whether sexual or otherwise, have yet to reckon properly with the social construction of consent, and hence with their own complicity in such construction. Even Christian sexual ethicists who acknowledge the difficulties of defining ethics of situations through appeals to a universalised, flattened concept of consent tend to side-step questions of solutions, or else reveal their much-tootrusting belief that the church may be easily brought to a position inculpable of harmful cultural formation. How can Christians ethically, responsibly work towards righting the consequences of these insufficiently-developed or even actively harmful theologies? What can Christians do, individually or collectively, to develop and practice thicker & more systemic theologies of consent, the better to keep vulnerable people safe?

10:00–12:00

Cian Brennan

University of Glasgow ‘Weak Transhumanism: Moderate Enhancement as a Non-Radical Path to Radical Enhancement’

Transhumanism aims to bring about radical human enhancement. In ‘Truly Human Enhancement’ Agar (2014) provides a strong argument against producing radically enhancing effects in agents. This leaves the transhumanist in a quandary: How to achieve radical enhancement whilst avoiding the problem of radically enhancing effects? This paper aims to show that transhumanism can overcome the worries of radically enhancing effects, by instead pursuing radical human enhancement via incremental moderate human enhancements (Weak Transhumanism). In this sense, weak transhumanism is much like traditional transhumanism in its aims, but starkly different in its execution. This version of transhumanism is weaker given the limitations brought about by having to avoid radically enhancing effects. I consider numerous objections to weak transhumanism and conclude that the account survives each one. This paper’s proposal of ‘weak transhumanism’ has the upshot of providing a way out of the ‘problem of radically enhancing effects’ for the transhumanist, but this comes at a cost: The restricted process involved in applying multiple moderate enhancements in order to achieve radical enhancement will most likely be dissatisfying for the transhumanist, however, it is, I contend, the best option available.

Enrico Galvagni

University of St Andrews ‘Hume’s Theory of Virtue’

In this paper, I review the various definitions of virtue and vice that Hume presents in his ethical works. I show that the passages in which he characterizes the virtues can be grouped in three clusters: (1) traits that are agreeable/useful to oneself/others; (2) traits that produce pride or love; and (3) traits that produce pleasure upon survey. I argue that these three characterizations dovetail and provide us with a consistent theory of virtue. In contrast to what scholars have traditionally argued, I show that agreeableness and utility do not enter Hume’s definition of virtue. A close reading of Hume’s text leads us to see his definition of virtue as a character trait that people approve of. Hume recognizes that people tend to approve of agreeableness and utility, and he invests this contingent fact with a great deal of importance in his ethics. However, to maintain a coherent account of his sentimentalism, he had to provide a definition of virtue that works independently of what people approve of.

10:00–12:00 Paddi Alice Benson

University of Edinburgh ‘Ö6-Fieldwork, Somewhere Over Nowhere’

Islands have played complex and distinctive roles in the history of western thought. Defined by their conditions of isolation, they have been repeatedly thought of as places of encounter with otherness. Islands of this sort are not intentionally found, but discovered through misnavigation (Utopia) or shipwreck (Prospero’s island). Historically the island emerges as the site of speculation, invention, and experimentation, and from this arise specific island topoi. This PhD by Design explores these topoi through a sequence of works that critically engage with their cultural and material histories, from Swift’s Laputa to Kafka’s Penal Colony to Bikini Atoll, and beyond. This paper sets out the fieldwork for one component of the PhD, which may be read as 6 ‘chapters’ (or ‘days’) – the unwritten 7th chapter ‘a primer for dissection’. Each of these chapters are holdings for select island topoi (intended for accrual): island-as-cartography; island-as-underland; island-as-place-of-resistance; island-as-extra-terrestrial; island-as-purgatory; island-as-catastrophe. This thematic framework reinterprets 6 ‘paper-islands’ that emerged from the first part of a design work – ‘a device for misnavigation’ – whilst charting the itinerant (and fictional) island of Hellya, within the Orkney archipelago. The subject under examination here, is the island-as-catastrophe [Ö6] – sites of phenomena that enable a destructive reality – somewhere over nowhere… A ‘method of inscription’ was derived from the study of Hellya’s ‘paper islands’, where the text of the catastrophic storm described by George Mackay Brown was subjected to the destructive force of a real storm being laser-etched onto the page. For ‘Ö6-Fieldwork’ therefore, a number of fabrics, fabric aggregates and reversal film were used as the strata subjected to the destructive input of the laser machine. Samples recovered from the wreckage were then examined and filmed with a stereomicroscope and compound microscope respectively – visually and physically investigating the subjects from the macro (meteorological satellites and high-altitude cameras) to the micro (laser machines and optical microscopy, with an image depth of 30mm and 50x magnification). By recording and re(-)presenting the material experiments of ‘Ö6-Fieldwork’, this paper aims to examine ‘what makes the condition for an island’ and the potentiality of the island-as-test-site.

10:00–12:00 Emma McCabe

University of Stirling ‘Negative Theology and the Void in Gender’

This paper will explore the notion of absence in relation to women by analysing 16th/17th-century theories of sexual difference. In doing so, it will endeavour to understand how a developing gynaecological discourse gave shape to gendered understandings of interiority and emptiness, which were seen as inherently female. This rhetoric of gendered absence will be shown to share similar tropes with negative theology which grapples with expressing an unknowable God. Unlike many branches of traditional Christianity, negative theology, in denying humans’ capacity to fully know God, advocates the use of negation when expressing the divine (i.e., God is not…). By reimagining gender through a conceptual framework of negative theology, I argue the female body can be realised as embodied absence. Here, the female body becomes analogous to the God of mysticism as unknowable, gaining the power to identify, and to be identified, outside the bipartisan restrictions of male and female.

Lucy Forde

University of Edinburgh ‘Participatory Music Making with People Living with Dementia’

People living with dementia can experience behavioural and psychological symptoms, often resulting in a lower quality of life for themselves and their caregivers (Cerejeira et al., 2012). In recent years there has been increased interest in music-based interventions that could alleviate some of these symptoms and improve quality of life. Music has been shown to have a range of benefits for people living with dementia with evidence indicating that music can reduce symptoms such as agitation (Elliott & Gardner, 2016), depression and anxiety. Reported benefits also include improving quality of life and cognitive skills as well as promoting personhood and strengthening social connections. There is also evidence that memories of musical experiences are well preserved in comparison to other types of memories in people living with dementia (Jacobsen et al., 2015) raising the possibility that music can be used to trigger and reinforce memories in people who may be too severely affected by dementia to respond to other treatments. The use of music in dementia care is well established in the field of music therapy, and over the past ten to fifteen years there has also been an increase in the number of community musicians working with people living with dementia. The main aim of my talk is to give an introduction to my research, which explores the experiences and perspectives of experienced music therapists and community musicians who engage in participatory music practices with people living with dementia. Through my research I aim to bring about a deeper understanding of the benefits of active participation in music for people living with dementia, and also shed light on the challenges and rewards it can bring for community musicians and music therapists who work with them.

10:00–12:00 Agana-Nsiire Agana

University of Edinburgh ‘Authority and Authenticity in Ghana’s Online Christianity’

While personhood is an enduring theme in Christian theology, the consequences of digital culture for this concept have received scant theological attention. This is especially true in in Majority World contexts, where digitality raises different issues from those in Western societies. A contribution to the emerging field of digital theology, my research addresses this lacuna by investigating how Ghanaian youth negotiate their construction and portrayal of personal identity and Christian faith within digital culture. I interrogate this in terms of youths’ relationship with ecclesial authority, and their conceptions of and quest for authentic Christian personhood in the age of social media. I rely on a blend of online content analysis, semi-structured interviews, focus group discussions with 18-35-year-old Christians in Accra, and on prescriptive notions of personhood from three highly influential Christian figures. My presentation will outline preliminary findings from fieldwork done in Ghana that highlights the continuities and divergences between established conceptions of personhood in academic and preached theology with young people’s own conceptions of self as influenced by their digital experiences and interactions. It will focus on mainly on the reconfiguration of theological authority in online spaces and secondarily on a widely decried social-media-instigated crisis of authenticity. I will submit that with respect to faith identity, although there is a generalised sense of the benefits and threats posed by of social media, personal reflexivity on its effects is low. This means, for one thing, the uncritical consolidation and diffusion of established authority structures and, for another, the renewed urgency of a theological anthropology suited to the new digital reality.

10:00–12:00 Samuel Cheney

University of Edinburgh ‘“The Discordant Roar of the Multitude”: Sonic Encounters with China in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century British Travel Writing’

China’s diverse soundscape elicited a variety of reactions from British travellers in the late nineteenth century. However, such sonic encounters have not been fully appreciated as the crucial sensory experiences conditioning British perceptions of China that they were. By listening to Victorian travel literature about China, this talk will build upon existing scholarship about travel writing and imperialism, showing how the sounds travellers heard in China fundamentally challenged their expectations and desires from their journeys.

Marc Czarnuszewicz

University of St Andrews ‘Dreams of a Saffarid King: Exploring Sufi Connections’

The Edward Browne collection at the University of Cambridge contains a previously unstudied manuscript of the Tuhfat al-Mulūk f Ta b r al-Ru y , older than any other known copies of this text and in excellent condition. Previous studies of this Arabic work have attributed its authorship to Abū A mad Khal f b. Ahm d al-Sijist n (d. 1009 CE), the last ruler of the ‘Second Line’ of the Saffarids of Sistan, a dynasty with close associations with popular ayy r movements. In light of the Browne manuscript, this paper will reassess this attribution and explore the text’s relationship with dream interpretation practices among popular religious and Sufi movements in Eastern Iran in the 11th and 12th centuries.

10:00–12:00 Geraldine Timmerberg

University of Aberdeen The Turn to Narrative and the Recognition of its Limits: Biblical Studies in Process’

Precisely four decades ago, the term narrative criticism was coined in the studies of the New Testament. Recognising the literary quality of the Gospels and the Book of Acts has been a welcome corrective to the prevalence of historical criticism and its way of fragmenting the text. Adopting a literary lens in the approach to these ancient and sacred texts brings into view different aspects of them that the limited methods of historical criticism do not engage. It is recognised that the reader experiences a storyworld and that they are impacted not only by that narrative world but also by the rhetorical strategies built into the text. Their experience and process of sense making becomes the place where meaning is generated. Scholarly contextual pressure led the pioneers of this new reading to defend their approach by pointing to the text’s unity, coherence, and above all, to the obviousness of its plot. The seemingly plain storyline of the texts finally served to seal their case. Despite the initial insight of the reader’s central position and their reading experience, the aspects that have shaped narrative criticism are an understanding of a unified and coherent plotline and a pre-supposed meaning held objectively by the narrative text. A perpetual plot fixation and an apparent consensus on the narrative events have eclipsed not only the non-narratival elements of the poetics of the texts but also marginalised the encounter taking place between the text and the reader. This paper argues that a clear distinction of terms like narrative, poetic, and literary is needed to widen and deepen narrative criticism. Furthermore, the centrality of the reader with respect to their experience and their process of sense making need to remain focus in a literary reading of these New Testament texts.

Catherine Mackenzie

University of St Andrews ‘The adolescent protagonist in Central African fiction and international children’s rights law’

In both its material and social reality adolescence is understood as a time of liminality and formation, on the cusp between childhood and adulthood, the present and the future. In this paper I discuss the depiction of adolescent protagonists in three novels by African authors, set in situations of conflict in postcolonial environments. Alongside such depictions, I consider the conception of adolescence in international children’s rights law. I explore how fiction and law envisage the (un)naturalcultural formation of the adolescent, both through the socially approved structures - the school, the orphanage - and the disapproved - the street, the gun, the gang. Where international children’s rights law depicts threats to the child as external, fictional texts show the adolescent child as both active and passive participant in society, in an interactive flux of material-social encounters. Through the gun and the gang, Johnny in Johnny Mad Dog (Emmanuel Dongala) takes the form of soldier and predator. Separated from both, he is transformed into child and victim. In the isolated boarding school of Our Lady of the Nile (Scholastique Mukasonga), the girls are being formed to reproduce the society that has produced them, in an intensifying cycle. Whereas the genocide survivor, Faustin, in The Oldest Orphan (Tierno Monénembo) resists being shaped back into acceptable child form by kindness, by the orphanage, or by the law. I suggest that the conception of the child as in need of adult protection and guidance is rooted in material reality, but is at the same time an essentially ‘adultist’ construction – into which the adolescent does not neatly fit. In particular, the growing agency of the adolescent in direct interaction with their environment challenges the notion of a managed ‘zone of childhood’. Thus, the adolescent embodies the potential for social reproduction or disruption, and exposes the illusion of adult control of the future.

Panel 04: Alternative Methodologies & Alternative Sites of Knowledge

14:00–15:30 Matthew Floyd

University of Glasgow ‘Constructing a history of television from precarious archives with the Edinburgh International TV Festival’

In this paper I will address using primary sources to understand the ‘big stories’ of television histories, in relation to my doctoral research on the history of the Edinburgh International TV Festival (EITVF) as it approaches its 50th Anniversary in 2026. This paper considers the value and challenges of using a specific, unstudied archive of festival materials that the organisation has made available to use in order to construct both a history of the festival and to position the EITVF within a broader history of television. At the core of this archive are the annual James MacTaggart Memorial Lectures, a keynote address by a leading industry figure that forms the centrepiece of the Festival each year (1976-present). Named after the Glasgow born TV producer, the MacTaggart offers a platform for important policy announcements and agenda-setting speeches, with notable past speakers including Jeremy Isaacs, The Murdochs, and David Olusoga. However, the process of building the archive has been challenged by the precarious nature of festival management and the vast changes in technology that the festival’s history has overseen. This paper will demonstrate how these issues are exacerbated when the researcher looks to analyse less central primary sources to construct a more comprehensive television and festival history, such as the wider programmes, records of participation and marketing materials. Nonetheless, the EITVF archive is a revealing and significant resource towards exploring the festival’s history and roles in shaping discourses surrounding television as a medium, technology and industry. This paper reflects on the project’s archival research to address the broader questions of what sources allow us to understand television histories and what sources are missing. Additionally, considering whose voices have been persevered and whose have been silenced in constructing the history of a leading media event in the broader history of television.

Amber Ward

University of St Andrews ‘History, Memory and Decolonising Methodologies: alternative sites of knowledge production in the deindustrialising Scottish coalfields’

=Once celebrated amongst Britain’s great industrial heartlands, the Scottish coalfields have comprised the focus of many recent studies of ‘deindustrialisation’ - a long, international process involving the closure of mines and factories across the industrialised world across the second half of the twentieth century. By considering the experiences of coal miners, trade unionists and factory workers, these studies have explored the Scottish coalfields’ long-historical deindustrialisation from 1945 to the present through both moral economy and cultural lenses. However these works, and deindustrialisation studies more broadly, primarily focus upon white proletarian experience. Cultural considerations of deindustrialisation beyond the contexts of production and politics are therefore similarly scarce. There is therefore a need to understand how deindustrialisation has affected those who do not belong to the somewhat niche category of the white, largely male, working class. This paper will attempt to fill this gap by outlining how decolonial methodologies can broaden the scope of deindustrialisation studies. Firstly, I will explore the decolonial concept of platforming alternative sites of knowledge production. The paper will then explain how my PhD project applies this concept: by consulting a broad range of community organizations who may hold different, perhaps contrasting memories of local deindustrialisation. My project pivots around the collection of oral history testimonies in the ex-mining communities of Central Fife, and explores how changes in community, identity and social life in the years after the defeated miners’ strike of 1985 are remembered by individuals belonging to a broad range of community organisations, including ethnolinguistic community organisations, organizations providing education and safe spaces for young people, women’s groups, and others. In the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, and the broader emergence of decolonial ideas into public discourse, this paper makes a timely contribution to the study of deindustrialisation and its aftermath. Further, in its consideration of plural deindustrialising ontologies, drawn from demographic perspectives which have hitherto been overlooked, this paper departs from the hollow, simplistic branding of ex-coalfields as ‘left behind’ localities. Finally, the inherent focus on community as an analytical lens ties with the symposium’s theme of ‘coming together’.

Panel 04: Alternative Methodologies & Alternative Sites of Knowledge

14:00–15:30 Helena (Henna) Cundill

University of Aberdeen ‘“Hold the Fish Loosely”: Reflections on Method in Qualitative Research’

There is, arguably, a temptation in qualitative research to lead heavily on “method” as a means to legitimise qualitative work and to create an illusion of researcher-objectivity. Whilst this may seek to satisfy a research climate that still leans towards quantifiable, generalisable and replicable research findings, it is not true to the stated intention of most qualitative work, nor to the philosophical movements in which qualitative research finds its origins. In this presentation I will share experience of my own Participatory Action Research project as it has moved through the stages of methodology writing, data collection and into early data analysis. I will illustrate how I have had to learn to “hold the fish loosely” when it comes to “method” at every stage, in order to stay true to my project’s stated goals and the philosophical and theological belief systems with which my research seeks to engage.

14:00–15:30 Emma French

University of Glasgow ‘‘This Was Supposed to be the Evil Game!” – Playful and Critical Subversion in D&D and Dimension 20’s Escape from the Bloodkeep’

This paper will explain how the tabletop roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) can be used to both playfully critique and subvert aspects of the fantasy genre and its literary canon. It will look at implications of form: how D&D’s status as a game encourages satirical approaches to genre; the impact of its collaborative nature as a storytelling medium upon narrative structure; and how the informal and unofficial status of the stories produced encourages transformative readings of traditional texts. The argument will introduce the key points of my thesis using Dimension 20’s “Escape from the Bloodkeep” as its case study, a D&D campaign that presents itself as a pastiche of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Players play as the forces of evil, allied in a parodic version of Mordor and soon to be defeated by the forces of good. In “Escape from the Bloodkeep”, the cast of ‘vile villains’ begin simply by satirising predominant assumptions within Tolkien’s text, as well as tropes it has helped to establish within wider fantasy genre culture. This playful and comedic approach reflects D&D’s nature as a game, as well as Dimension 20’s roots in improvised comedy. However, as the story progresses, the cast of queer and BIPOC players produce critical feminist and queer interpretations of Tolkien’s work. In particular, the female and nonbinary players within this group – Erika Ishii, Rekha Shankar, and Amy Vorphal - encourage an expansion of female points of view and feminine agency within the text, creating a counternarrative of nuanced relationships between powerful female figures, often relegated to the background of Tolkien’s world. The inherently collaborative structure of narratives created through D&D also results in a challenge to Tolkien and other fantasy authors’ representation of evil. Both these interpretations are examples of tertiary authorship within TRPG narratives (Jessica Hammer, 2007), as players are given equal authority to the game system when crafting their story, and use this empowered narrative agency to question the traditions of genre fantasy.

14:00–15:30 Carlotta Moro

University of St Andrews ‘A Missing Female Genealogy: The Invisibility of Early Modern Women Writers in Contemporary Italy’

The beginning of the seventeenth century witnessed an important episode of Italian history: in 1600, the first female-authored literary works advocating for gender equality were published, penned by the Venetians Moderata Fonte (1555-1592) and Lucrezia Marinella (1571-1653). With their focus on issues such as patriarchal oppression and the the injustice of barring women from politics, professions, and higher learning, these writers can be considered among the foremothers of Western feminism. Yet, Fonte and Marinella are unknown to most Italians. While female artists of the Italian Renaissance have become the subjects of contemporary novels - from Anna Banti’s Artemisia (1947) to Melania Mazzucco’s L’Architettrice (2019) - and exhibitions - Le Signore dell’Arte: Storie di Donne tra ‘500 e ‘600 (Milan, 2021) – and are therefore visible in contemporary Italian culture, women writers of the same era sank into oblivion, excluded from the canon. This prominent invisibility will form the focus of my paper. To begin, I will appraise the extent of this omission from the canon, focusing on two aspects of these authors’ reception: the dearth of modern editions of their writings, and the exclusion of their works from Italian literature textbooks aimed at secondary schools. The second half of my paper will examine the traces of this conspicuous absence within contemporary Italian feminist thought and women’s writing, by concentrating on the practices of the “second wave” Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective, and the motif of the pursuit of a “female genealogy” in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet. Having established that Italian feminism is a continuum that has evolved from the sixteenth century to the present, this paper will demonstrate that the silencing of Renaissance women’s voices not only contributes to a partial, androcentric vision of our history, but also deprives us of crucial points of reference in our current debates on gender equality.

Hilary Clydesdale

University of Edinburgh ‘Narrative, Secrets, and the Nineteenth-Century Historical Novel’

The historical novels of Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson are full of secret activities: from elopement to piracy, masquerade and murder. It reflects the nineteenth-century fascination with secrecy which fostered the development of gothic fiction, social critique novels, sensation fiction and, ultimately, the detective genre. In my current research, I examine how domestic and social secrecy is used by Scott and Stevenson to engage in Scottish historicism: the study of history and its composition. This approach traces a specific, coherent path for secrecy within the historical novel between 1814 and 1894, and allows me to illustrate how domestic, social secrets are used by the authors to articulate, and challenge nineteenth-century theories on narrative history. In my presentation, I examine the relationship between domestic forms of secrecy and the narrative structure of Scott and Stevenson’s historical novels.

Panel 06: Challenging Translations & Interpretations

14:00–15:30

Danya Harvey

University of Glasgow ‘Writing across borders, translating beyond binaries: an exploration of the mutually productive and mutually interrogating relationship between embodied translingual, translational and transgender practices’

Repression of literature’s ‘trans*ness’ has resulted in a narrow window of ‘adequate’ and ‘acceptable’ norms-based translation practices,1 whose products are demonstrably less creative and less writerly than the literary texts they so desperately seek to pass as. Translation’s cissexist, source-oriented history has seen translators denigrated and marginalised as uncreative and unproductive, serving to maintain a Eurocentric literary hierarchy that shores up modern colonial divisions of race, sex, gender, language, culture and nationality.2 Modernist myths of ‘mono-’ and ‘cislingualism’ 3 still hold sway, underpinning a conception of translation as a ‘disembodied process of abstraction of semantic equivalents between discrete linguistic formations’. 4 Despite scholarly efforts to foster translator visibility and agency, trans*lator embodiment remains elusive: disciplinary border controls enforce conventional, uneventful, orderly transfers, whilst prohibiting glitches, messy, partial, subversive or spectacular transitions. To break translation out of its subordinate role and transcend epistemological binarism, I hypothesise that “original” writing must re-assert its translationality, recognising translation as ‘an embodied process of dialogic transformation of cultures’ 5 so that writers and readers can celebrate the performativity and referential play that are behind all textual practices. This project considers what alternative creative and critical practices are possible once we are able to imagine a soft border between translation and writing, between queer activism and translingual practices. I intend to actively blur gender distinctions and scramble disciplinary codes, in order to accommodate and nurture non-conforming subjectivities and hybrid creative modes. ‘Translingual’ works represent ‘a microcosm of the entire field of comparative literature’.6 They are also ‘borntranslated’, because ‘translation is not secondary or incidental’, but ‘a condition of their production’.7 I hypothesise that fostering non-binary readings of trans*lingual works will encourage readers and practitioners to reevaluate the cisheteropatriarchal and colonialist assumptions that remain critical structural axes of translation and comparative studies. My work brings Preciado’s trans* paradigm shift in psychoanalysis8 and Russell’s queer critique of conceptual binarism9 into theoretical contact with Reynolds’s ‘prismatic translation’ to imagine trans*lingual strategies capable of ‘blurring the boundaries between languages [and genders] and re-creating an awareness of language [and gender] as a continuum of variety and change’ to resist the exclusion, normativity, ‘regimentation and division’ at work in orthodox translation10 . Re-evaluating frameworks central to translation theory (from fidelity/licence, and adequacy/acceptability, to foreignisation/domestication), my project

investigates the extent to which these conceptual scaffolds are unable to describe and assess contemporary writing’s self-reflexive hybridity, and considers whether they are able to account for and embrace creative-critical resistance to monolingual, cissexist and nationalist categorisations. Inviting prismatic translation to ‘engage with critical feedback from Black, queer, feminist and trans political traditions’, research that connects the ambitions and strategies between gender-, genre- and language-bending practices could faciliate a disengagement from ‘heteropatriarchal normalization and the legitimizing of necropolitical violence’.11 As it has with postcolonial and feminist studies, translation must continue to look beyond itself and learn from marginal voices and liminal bodies it depends on, if it is to ‘become a tool for the invention of subjectivities that are dissident to the norm’.12

1 Gideon Toury, ‘The Nature and Role of Norms in Translation’ In: Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond. (Amsterdam-Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins, 1995), pp. 53-69. 2 Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (London: Routledge, 1995); Yasemin Yildiz, Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2012); David Gramling, The Invention of Monolingualism (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016); Matthew Reynolds, Prismatic Translation (Oxford: Legenda, 2019); Naoki Sakai, ‘Translation’, Theory, Culture & Society 23:2–3 (2006), pp. 71–86. 3 David Gramling and Aniruddha Dutta, ‘Introduction’, Translating Transgender. TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly November 2016, 3:3-4, (2016), p. 337. 4.Elena Basile, ‘The Most Intimate Act of Reading: Affective Vicissitudes in the Translator’s Labour’, Doletiana: revista de traducció, literatura I arts 1 (2007), p. 2. 5 Basile 2007, p. 2. 6 Steven Kellman, Nimble Tongues: Studies in Literary Translingualism (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2020), p. viii. 7 Rebecca Walkowitz, Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature (New York, NY: Columbia University Press 2015), pp. 3-4. 8 Paul B. Preciado, Can the Monster Speak?: Report to an Academy of Psychoanalysts. Tr. Frank Wynne. (Barcelona: Semiotext(e), 2021). 9 Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto. (London: Verso, 2020). 10 Reynolds 2019, p. 9. 11 Preciado 2021, p. 97. 12 Preciado 2021, p. 97.

Panel 06: Challenging Translations & Interpretations

14:00–15:30 Nicola Estrafallaces

University of Glasgow The Orcherd of Syon: Challenging Narratives of Late-Medieval Women’s Devotions’

Late-medieval English translations of religious texts often heavily edit the excessive mystical contents of their Continental sources to prepare texts for a more conservative spiritual landscape, so the standard argument runs (e.g. Lovatt 1982). When the intended audience of such translations is made up by women, pretexts for diluting textual sources double down, as translators elect to omit what they consider material unsuitable to their new audiences for its excessive theological sophistication. In this paper I begin to challenge these two narratives of late-medieval English translation practice by considering The Orcherd of Syon, a Middle English adaptation of a text by the Italian mystic Catherine of Siena (1347–1380) prepared for the benefit of the fifteenthcentury Birgittine nuns at Syon Abbey. Only recently has scholarship begun to recognize the erudition that the Orcherd recognizes in its female readers (Brown 2019; Alakas 2022). In striking contrast to a great deal of medieval religious literature for women, the Orcherd-translator does not provide much guidance to his readers and accords them freedom to navigate the text on their own. I then add to these considerations by investigating how the Orcherd closely follows its source to argue that this faithful adaptation simultaneously elevates Catherine (whose words need little to no editing) and its female readers (who are recognized for their intellectual abilities). The Orcherd of Syon, then, offers us the opportunity to problematize our understanding of women’s role as authors, authorities, and readers in late medieval England.

Clemmie de la Poer Beresford

University of St Andrews ‘Princely Creations in Jacobean England’

Creation ceremonies surrounding the royal children in the Jacobean period in England were seen as important political events by both the crown and those watching. Such rituals, consisting of a portfolio of ceremonial and/or cultural events, elevated King James VI and I’s two surviving sons to higher princely positions. To date, only the creation of the King’s eldest son, Henry Frederick as Prince of Wales in 1610 has received sustained scholarly attention. By comparing Henry’s creation with those of his younger brother, Charles (the future Charles I) as Duke of York in 1605 and Prince of Wales in 1616 (after Henry’s sudden death in 1612), and bringing to the fore an appreciation of precedent and contemporary attitudes towards precedent, this discussion sheds new light on Henry’s creation, and indeed such creation ceremonies more widely. This discussion shows that the approach taken by many scholars when analysing Henry’s creation, looking at it through the lens of a father-son relationship, pitting father against son and casting the King as a saboteur, intent on reducing the splendour of the events and preventing his son from becoming the focus of the occasion, presents a distorted understanding of it. The King’s behaviour was by no means extraordinary; in his actions, James simply followed the example set by his royal forebears. Rather than attempt to sabotage creation ceremonies, the King utilised them to articulate his dynasty and the dynastic security of his royal House. This paper forms one of the chapters of my PhD, and depending on the length of the talks we are able to give, I will either present all or part of it.

14:00–15:30

Workshop 5 and Short Film: Reading and Space

Jenny Elliott,

University of Edinburgh ‘Understanding barriers and possible solutions to delivering better urban public spaces using a design thinking approach’

My research explores the relationship between urban data and built environment design and decision-making. It focusses on the barriers to delivering ‘better’ public spaces in practice, and the changes or actions within the design and decision-making system that could be targeted to address these. This will include exploration of whether novel tools and technologies would best address these barriers to support improved place outcomes - in terms of promoting health, well-being, improved user experience and positive environmental impact - for urban public spaces. Or whether there are less technological, but arguably more pertinent, solutions or ways to mitigate these implementation barriers and create better environmental and social place outcomes from our public spaces. The research uses a design thinking approach based on human-centred design, which aims to get to the root of these barriers as experienced by practitioners that prevent delivery of public spaces that better meet these professionals' aspirations for the future of our urban public realm and which are more in line with urban design best practice principles. It will also include ideation of solutions, prototyping and interdisciplinary user testing with both practitioners (such as urban designers, landscape architects, architects and urban planners) and domain experts in urban data and technology in later research stages. At the symposium, I would like to present via a short film, sharing initial findings from a survey with built environment practitioners, as well as an exploratory case study, that have formed one of the first stages of my PhD research at the University of Edinburgh and are informing next steps.

27

16:00–17:30 Liam Crouse

Sabhal Mòr Ostaig UHI ‘Folklore collections and sound archives as thick corpus in a Hebridean Macroscope’

From at least the mid-19th century, the Scottish Gàidhealtachd has witnessed the intensive, near generational collection of folklore. Fieldwork undertaken by myriad operators, ranging from enthusiasts to trained professionals, produced an extensive assemblage of material – songs, tales, legends, charms and more – which regularly incorporated useful contextual data such as the informant’s name, kinship ties, age, residence, and source. The material survives as a potpourri of unpublished notebooks, edited volumes, sound archives and online repositories. Among these is the Tobar an Dualchais partnership which has preserved, digitised, catalogued, and made available online 12,000 hours of Gaelic and Scots sound recordings drawn from the major archives of the School of Scottish Studies, BBC and the National Trust for Scotland. This paper appraises Gaelic-language material from the isles of Eriskay and Berneray in the Outer Hebrides using two complementary methodologies designed to study large folkloric corpora: thick corpus analysis (Honko 2000) and the folklore macroscope (Tangherlini 2013). Lauri Honko argued for the regular collection of contextualised material to form a ‘thick corpus’. Repeated documentation of the migratory legend “M’ Iteagan is M’ Oiteagan” is offered as a case study in identifying organic variation. Timothy Tangherlini, utilising recent advances in computational capabilities, developed the folklore macroscope to facilitate the research of collections otherwise too large to be considered in their entirety. The macroscopic approach integrates broader contextual information and metadata such as genealogical records and GIS mapping. Both methodologies are broadly synchronic. The Hebridean Macroscope will consider the suitability of a synthesised methodology for researching the Tobar an Dualchais collection and identify opportunities to extend the approach diachronically, grounding the 20th century assemblage within older collections from the same geographies. This will offer an unparalleled level of human detail and historical reach, uncovering variation within the folkloric expression of individuals and their social networks over generations. The paper contends that this rare but significant potential is enabled through the extensive corpus of orally-derived material from the Scottish Gàidhealtachd.

Elizabeth Robertson

University of Glasgow ‘Creating Sound and Place in Glencoe’

Representations of the Scottish Highlands have often been subject to romantic notions of the sublime – with landscapes being perceived as empty, wild and rugged. Memorialised pasts have become the focus of many narratives about the highland experience. Such perceptions have a tendency to overlook the archaeological past and present realities of highland life, where landscapes were busy with the activity of human and non-human actors and supported a rich tradition of Gaelic language and culture. Creative and innovative approaches to archaeological methodologies and interpretation have played an increasing role within the discipline, with interdisciplinary collaborations between archaeologists and artists paving the way for new spaces in which archaeology can be a creative process. Parallel to this, emerging forms of immersive technologies present new mediums through which to further explore creative forms of archaeological practice and interpretation. Through the use of immersive soundscapes, my research is about creating new forms of interaction with Scottish Highland landscapes through their archaeological, historical and geographical dimensions, and how this differs to representations that primarily rely on visual stimuli. As part of this practice-based research I will seek to explore the ways in which creative audio experiences, experiments and acoustic reconstructions can engage audiences with the past in emotional, meaningful ways. These augmented and mixed reality experiences can show how such technology can enhance an audience’s experience of cultural heritage landscapes, and how immersive audio can play with the lack of visual presence versus sonic presence when it comes to interpreting such landscapes. These contemporary digital interventions will promote more nuanced interpretations of highland life that, as mentioned above, have often been subject to romantic stereotypes and a memorialised past.

16:00–17:30 Jacob Browne

University of St Andrews ‘Listening to the Wind: Anemophobia as a Cure for Audiophilia’

[Content Warning: Mention of sexual assault] Though it survives only as a ‘silent’ film, The Wind (1928, Victor Sjöström) is full of visual sound – the effect I call ‘phantacusis’ in my research. Since the time of its release(s), critics and viewers have commented, both positively and negatively, on the overwhelming sensory impact of the film. The first part of my presentation will explore these responses, before detailing some of the techniques by which the effect was achieved. In doing so, it will demonstrate the thematic importance of ‘listening’ in the film, as the audience is phantacoustically prompted to listen along with its protagonist, Letty (Lillian Gish). The second part uses the film to intervene in an implicit trend in sound studies towards a utopian view of listening, in what has been called ‘audiophilia’ (Ikoniadou 2014:4) or even ‘acousmania’ (Connor 2015). Noting the film’s distinct focus on doors and windows, I explore the properties of sound as intruder or transgressor of boundaries. One common metaphor presents the sensorium as a house or citadel, with the senses its doors or gates; if so, listening represents a weak point, an opening that cannot be shut, as one can shut one’s eyes. This dovetails with the dramatization of Letty’s fears – of the wind itself on the one hand, and sexual assault on the other. In interweaving these considerations, and in its visual prompting of the viewing audience to ‘listen,’ I argue that The Wind presents a double challenge to commonly held notions of sound and listening in cinema.

16:00–17:30 Cecilia Mazzocchio

University of St Andrews ‘Reconstructing the Narrative: The Case for Taking a Global Approach to Sienese Art History’

Embracing innovative global approaches to art history, my research reconstructs the narrative of Sienese art through cross-cultural perspectives, exploring Siena’s understanding of ‘otherness’ and thereby contributing to academic agendas that seek to expand the geographical boundaries of Renaissance art. While a ‘global’ reassessment of Italian art is currently being undertaken with regards to Florence, Venice and Rome, the predominant approach to Sienese heritage still focuses on inward-looking narratives. Challenging traditional art-historical biases that portray Siena as a city that was unreceptive to everything happening outside its gates, my PhD research reassesses Sienese art as the product of global connections. Within this framework, I seek to determine how ‘otherness’ was understood and visualised by an early-modern Sienese audience, from 1300 to 1492, a timeframe that predates the rise of the Atlantic slave trade and notions surrounding ‘race’ or European selfhood. After offering an overview of how global scholarship is enriching art history as a discipline, my paper will apply this methodology to Sienese art through specific case studies drawn from my PhD research, such as Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Martyrdom of the Franciscans and the Libyan Sibyl in the marble intarsia flooring of Siena cathedral. The aim of my talk is to engage the audience with a counternarrative to Sienese art, one that accentuates inclusivity, connections and artistic reciprocity between this centre and extraEuropean cultures, namely the Mongol Empire and Ethiopia.

16:00–17:30 Rowan Munnery

University of St Andrews ‘Amphorae Reuse in Antiquity: Impact on Maritime Archaeological Analysis’

When discussing maritime movement in the ancient world, material objects are often evoked as one of the most detailed and robust pieces of evidence we can use to trace the missing paths of distribution and connectivity. One of the most important categories of this evidence are amphorae. These ceramic transport containers are usually seen as ‘throw away’ objects, often characterised by the Monte Testaccio which was built up through the deposition of the discarded sherds of an innumerable number of these vessels. Their survivability, ease of dating, and heavily catalogued places of manufacture, mean that should an amphora be found at a site it is usually taken as unquestioned evidence of direct connectivity with their point of origination. However, as more and more evidence are found surrounding the reuse of amphorae in terrestrial excavations, what could this mean for understanding maritime archaeological data if their life cycles consisted of multiple paths? Examination of shipwrecks evidence that has been collected as part of my thesis reveals several instances of reuse for varied purposes, with deeper appreciation of this phenomenon potentially resulting in new understandings about local industries in the late antique western Mediterranean.

Sue John

University of Glasgow ‘What It Will Come To: Women’s Rights in Everyday Material Culture in Britain, 1900–1930’

In the intense debates on women’s suffrage during the period 1900-1930, the British public bought, posted and gifted a wide variety of mass-manufactured memorabilia, including postcards, decorative items and board games - a unique body of ephemera constituting propaganda both in favour of and against women being granted the vote. Literature on British women’s suffrage has focused on individuals, organisations, campaigning strategies and the creative production of goods to raise funds and support for the cause. However, what has remained largely occluded is how the campaigns were represented and responded to within popular discourse - in the politics, life and material culture of the everyday, beyond the press, and outside campaigning organisations. This illustrated paper will critique examples of mass-manufactured items relating to women’s suffrage held in the collection of Glasgow Women’s Library (GWL), the UK’s sole Accredited Museum dedicated to women’s history. A particular focus will be on GWL’s sizeable collection of anti-suffrage postcards, which range from benign campaign souvenirs to explicit ridiculing, vilification and graphically violent depictions of women. Hand-written messages on the back offer up an array of insights into the use of satire, humour, and wider public attitudes to women. These products offer insight into broader shifts in gender relations and public responses to women’s growing political agency. As they also contain commentary on other major contemporary events such as the outbreak of World War One, and women undertaking what was considered ‘men’s work’, they poignantly illustrate how shifting gender roles were, in the public consciousness, linked with wider socio-political changes. The paper will open up questions surrounding wider societal engagement with the issue of women’s changing social and political roles, and examine the economy behind popular-political objects, including the contemporary motivations for production, consumption and use of these items between 1900 and 1930.

16:00–17:30 Lucy Henry

University of Stirling ‘Gender and Justice in the Eighteenth-Century Scottish Highlands: Women in the Sheriff Court of Inverness, 1748–1800’

This paper will act as a summary of my Collaborative Doctoral Award project. The aim of the project is to list the criminal cases of the Inverness sheriff court from 1748-1800 for the NRS online catalogue, hugely improving public access to these important records. The thesis will then assess these documents for their evidentiary value in illuminating the lives of women otherwise missing from the historical record, and consider what conclusions can be drawn about how gender impacted the court system in terms of women’s agency before the law. It will examine how women accessed the judicial system of the sheriff court, for instance through lawburrows petitions, which, when granted, were essentially a type of restraining order. A connected theme is how women resisted the enforcement of the law; case studies show women harbouring outlaws, and physically obstructing sheriff officers to stop the arrests of their male family members. The thesis will also look at what can be gleaned from these documents about how Gaelic was spoken and interpreted in the court, and what impact this had on Gaelic-speaking defendants and witnesses. Overall, the paper will argue that these documents represent an invaluable source of information about Highland women and the communities they lived in, particularly in terms of how the law was used to resolve – or indeed, escalate – interpersonal disputes.

James Fox

University of St Andrews The rise of numeracy and quantitative thinking in Britain, 1660–1800?’

This paper reassesses the hypothesis of my PhD research as it was originally proposed in my SGSAH DTP application. It argues that the concept of a ‘rise of numeracy’, which I initially intended to explore, is a less viable model for analysing the changes in British numeracy over the period of my research than I originally supposed. Instead it offers a more nuanced assessment of how we might conceptualise these developments. Understanding both the nature and extent of early modern numeracy are concerns at the heart of my doctoral research, which explores how lower- and middle-ranking people learned and used number skills in their daily lives. Historians have written much about the extent to which certain aspects of numeracy expanded over the early modern period, with much attention paid to the proliferation of vernacular arithmetic textbooks, the transition from Roman to Hindu-Arabic numerals, and the development of financial accounting. Yet it has also been acknowledged that the basic capacity to understand and use numbers was perhaps equally present prior to these developments. Certain competencies no doubt proliferated, but numeracy itself was ever-present in society.Building on this debate, this paper first considers the merits of the case for a ‘rise of numeracy’, charting some of the key developments of this period, such as the proliferation of arithmetic textbooks and education. I will then reflect on the limitations of this model and discuss how the changes that did occur might be incorporated into a more robust picture of the development of numeracy in this period. I suggest that the important question is not whether levels of numeracy increased over time, but rather how numeracy changed to meet the evolving demands of contemporary society. For all the aspects of numeracy that did proliferate in this period, I will also consider the decline of other numerate practices, and how in some cases older – but no less sophisticated – modes of numeracy persisted alongside new ones, rather than being superseded by them. Finally, I will reflect on the wider significance of this model of the history of numeracy for researchers in history and the humanities.

16:00–17:30 Ebba Strutzenbladh

University of Aberdeen ‘Women and Social Networks in late medieval Scotland: The Case of the Countess of Huntly’

I outline and investigate the social and legal networks of Elizabeth Hay, Countess of Huntly, in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century. The Countess’ long life as a legal actor, visible through multiple marriage contracts and appearances in various local and national courts, indicates a confident knowledge of the law that increased over time. Contrary to the widespread belief that medieval and early modern women were passive and exploited, this case study indicates the agency and power available to elite women. Nonetheless, it also raises questions about the origins, boundaries and nature of women’s legal agency in the period; I ask when a woman’s legal persona can usefully be said to have emerged, given that some marriage contracts render daughters from the same family virtually interchangeable. With this issue in mind, I compare the Countess’ marriage contracts to the arrangements made for her female relatives, demonstrating the varying degree of agency available to women. My talk also challenges geographical divides that are sometimes assumed to be absolute in this period. The landed families of the countryside are often studied separately from the urban elite, though my case study suggests that there was much interaction between the two. I note that the Countess’ networks, some based on familial connections and others on urban ones, were wide-ranging and diverse. The Countess often appeared in the Aberdeen burgh court, participating in the local economy and enjoying considerable respect in town. The sources available for the Countess are varied enough that we get to see her interact with urban and rural courts, with women as well as men, and in cooperation as well as in conflict with family members and others. Thus, the overall theme of the talk is that of connections; how are they to be discovered and interpreted, and to what extent do our preconceived notion of medieval women impact the ways in which we interpret their means of creating and maintaining social and legal connections?

37

12:30— 13:00

Room 1

Joe Nockels

University of Edinburgh and Glasgow ‘Introduction to Transkribus Lite’

This presentation will demonstrate a pioneering handwritten text recognition (HTR) tool named Transkribus, a method of image-to-text recognition, often used to automatically transcribe historic manuscript artefacts. I’ll start by offering a brief history of digital recognition technologies, beginning with optical character recognition (OCR), then explaining where HTR sits in this chronology, and go on to talk more specifically about Transkribus – the largest consumer-level HTR software.

Room 2 Ellie Mitchell

University of St Andrews ‘“Can Prose Be Dramatic?”: Close Reading Virginia Woolf’s ‘Mrs Dalloway’ via Performance’

This workshop aims to work with and through the central question of my PhD thesis: Can Prose Be Dramatic? Virginia Woolf poses this question in a 1927 essay, and she poses also the possibility of an affirmative answer. Hypothesising the novel of the future, she writes: “It will be written in prose, but in prose which has many of the characteristics of poetry. It will have something of the exaltation of poetry, but much of the ordinariness of prose. It will be dramatic, and yet not a play. It will be read, not acted.” My research seeks to establish how far Woolf realised this form in her own work by combining close reading with theatrical practice. This workshop will therefore take a short extract from Woolf’s 1925 novel ‘Mrs Dalloway’ and close read it through performance. I will provide brief contextualisation for the extract, but ultimately the aim of the exercise will be to discover how far the text might realise its own interpretation through our interactions with it. As with close reading, then, little prior expertise or context will be necessary. In groups, I will ask participants to discuss how the extract might be performed in a theatrical setting. What would be represented through speech? What would be represented through gesture? How would they block or stage the scene? How would they utilise set, lighting, and sound, if at all? I will then ask groups to condense their ideas into three representative tableaux and to present these. I will ask groups which elements of the text led to these particular tableaux, what do they illuminate in the text, and what do they perhaps obscure? I will conclude the workshop by asking participants for feedback on how far, and in what ways, this exercise has changed their understanding or experience of the text. This workshop will be explorative, experimental, and playful. To quote Mrs Dalloway herself, it will be an opportunity to ‘feel the fun’, to interact with this seminal modernist text in a new way, and to gain new insights into the importance of the dramatic to Woolf’s prose.

This workshop will involve some movement from participants, but this will be self-directed. Participants will be encouraged to move within their comfort and capability. If you have any accessibility needs or concerns, please email me on em321@st-andrews.ac.uk and I will be happy to work with the symposium committee to arrange accommodations.

14:00— 15:30

Room 3 Lucia Szemetova

University of St Andrews ‘Archival Excavation Workshop: Alternative History Through Private Films’

What can we learn from home movies? How are private film collections collated and curated within archives? Given the increasing prominence and value placed on home movies, what are the challenges and possibilities for scholars, users and archivists engaging with these private, personal collections? This workshop will allow participants to interact with primary archival sources (digital records) to consider how best to work with vulnerable audio-visual historical materials. It will be using a specific case study, the Private Photo and Film Foundation (PPFF) which holds one of the largest repositories of Hungarian private media produced between 1925-1985. This collection is currently held in OSA, an international archival repository collecting and preserving documents dealing with the history and afterlife of Communism and the Cold War. Today the PPFF is popularly known as the collection of the internationally acclaimed media artist, Péter Forgács, who creatively recycles home movies in his documentary films and installations. However, the complex development process and institutional framework of this archive (from questions of selection and preservation to ones of access) call to attention the ideological underpinnings of archival practice. This workshop offers an opportunity to examine the methodologies for processing previously neglected documents and working and pursuing research in a contemporary and innovative archive. To understand how private records of the past fundamentally shape and structure the future histories told over the following years, it is crucial to how these archival objects are curated. Through my internship in the OSA I will reflect on the steps and challenges of physical processing and initial cataloguing of the PPFF textual records. Examining the far-reaching and complex work of PPFF’s does not only provide an insight into alternative historiography and new ways of appreciation, use, and contemplation over private film heritage but also understanding how archival practice can function as an act of resistance, challenging authoritarian regimes. The workshop aims to critically reflect on the importance of archival excavation and provide an occasion to consider specific practical, ethical and ideological challenges through engaging with these materials.

Room 4 and 5 Charley Matthews and Joshua Smith

University of Edinburgh and University of Stirling ‘Reading practices in the nineteenth century – a workshop’

This workshop is an interactive and reflective session for anyone interested in interrogating their own reading practices, or interested in the reading habits of historical individuals. The workshop’s aims are twofold: • to introduce participants to our work on nineteenth century reading practices; • and to invite reflection and dialogue between participants about the nature of their own scholarly (and leisurely) reading practices. Josh will discuss his work with the politically active members and borrowers of the Bristol Library Society in the 1810s. Charley will discuss their work with the diaries and letters of Anne Lister and Geraldine Jewsbury, queer women who were prolific nineteenthcentury readers. As humanities PhDs, reading can take up an overwhelming part of our time. Through interactive engagement with historical examples, participants will be invited to reflect upon reading practices in their daily academic and personal lives. The workshop will be split into two parts. The first part will use post-it polls to debate types of reading, and the workshop leaders will introduce similar debates about reading from the nineteenth century. The second part will give participants the opportunity to explore different methods from the history of reading, and the leaders will discuss their own experiences of these methods, and their benefits and disadvantages. Please note, this session may involve gentle movement around the room, but this will be optional and low-pressure. Let us know of any accessibility requirements and we will accommodate.

Posters can be seen here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1scxZnMi96ggvE2zUh9gkcxo9kcT6x Ge2wKlyDxntizY/edit?usp=sharing

Rowan Rush-Morgan

University of Edinburgh ‘Cultural Geographies of LGBTQ+ Entrepreneurship in Scotland’

This poster presents initial findings from collaborative PhD research with the organisation Somewhere, whose aim is to connect LGBTQ+ enterprise in Scotland. Through the lens of queer geographies, this research combines network analysis and ethnography of Somewhere’s Rainbow Enterprise Network, the first formal network for LGBTQ+ business owners in Scotland. Key themes include participants disconnects from heteropatriachal modes of profit driven business, experiences of creating LGBTQ+ inclusive spaces whilst catering to heterosexual majority, and the role that physical spaces and places play in the connection of LGBTQ+ self-employed individuals

Victoria Evans

University of Edinburgh ‘Listening to the Tides: Tidesong.app Mobile Sonic Artwork’

Tidesong is an interactive sonic artwork that allows users to make music from tidal data. The artwork uses smartphone technology and data sonification to allow audiences to connect to the natural rhythms present in their local tidal landscape. The poster presentation invites you to experience Tidesong on your own mobile device and contribute to the evolving online map. This practicebased research project was made possible through a Creative Informatics Small Research Grant. It was developed in collaboration with Ray Interactive, with Data supplied by the UK Hydrographic Office and the National Oceanography Centre.

Lilli Scott Lintott

University of St Andrews ‘Reduced to Tears: Understanding Grief in Twelfth-Century England’

What does it mean to grieve – in the Middle Ages and today? What should be included in – and excluded from – a history of grief? Which aspects of experience and which behaviours does the word ‘grief’ refer to? Indeed, is grief specifically (and emotion more broadly) a meaningful or helpful category to apply to the medieval past at all? The history of emotions is a rapidly expanding field that, over the course of the twenty-first century, has increasingly been integrated into ‘mainstream’ scholarship and teaching. Despite earlier attempts made by Lucien Febvre, it took a shift among some biologists, anthropologists, psychologists and neuroscientists in the 1960s and 1970s towards viewing emotions as culturally constructed to trigger widespread, rigorous historical research into emotion. The work of these (social) scientists ultimately shaped the field’s central thesis: that if emotions are – even partly – determined by culture, then they have a history. But writing the history of individual emotions is fraught with methodological complexities – complexities that resist easy solutions and demand interdisciplinary perspectives. The very act of using a modern category such as ‘grief’ to understand past emotion(s) is problematic – particularly if one believes that modern signifiers of emotion do not refer to stable, discrete, universal, pre-cultural phenomena. In my poster, I will explore some of the many methodological issues that trying to write the history of emotion produces. I will focus particularly on the subject of my own research – kingly grief in the twelfth century – but I will endeavour to spark a broader discussion about the benefits and pitfalls of studying the past through the lens of modern emotional categories.

Edward Stewart

University of Glasgow ‘Repopulating the uplands past: exploring the past busyness of shieling landscapes in Highland Scotland’

Shieling Practice developed at least as early as the Early Medieval, and continued to exist in various forms until the late 1800s across much of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. This pastorial transhumance practice transformed upland landscapes with intense networks of practices, taskscapes, connections and interactions - and yet popular interpretations of these landscapes often focus on themes of wild sublimity, liminality and freedom. Through archaeological fieldwork this research has attempted to produce new narratives of these upland landscapes which move away from these tired notions of upland emptyness - to represent the full livelyness and busyness of these landscapes in the recent past.

Emma Hall

University of Glasgow ‘SEASOH Deep Dive: Learning Story’

Arts-based interventions are increasingly being used to target complex sustainability issues. The Learning Story presented reflects on the role of creative practice in the Seas of the Outer Hebrides (SEASOH) project, reviewing the ways in which arts-based interventions can promote sustainable practice. Different approaches used in the SEASOH project are appraised to draw out common themes on the role and benefits of creative practice, as well as the challenges of working collaboratively across disciplines. The poster seeks to share collective learnings from the project and reflects the conditions required to support the effective use of creative practices in public engagement projects.

45

Digital and pre-recorded contributions can be viewed here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1scxZnMi96ggvE2zUh9gkcxo9kcT6x Ge2wKlyDxntizY/edit?usp=sharing

Emma Partridge

University of Glasgow ‘Traditions of Wellbeing Past and Present: Critical Perspectives in the Arts and Humanities’

This talk will compare and contrast historical approaches to wellbeing and self-improvement, beginning with early twentieth century popular psychology and spiritualism, and ending with the emergence of the ‘positive psychology’ movement at the turn of the twenty-first century. In demonstrating striking (and sometimes troubling) similarities and continuities in self-directed initiatives, it presents a challenge to those universalistic approaches to wellness and wellbeing which are frequently and uncritically employed in corporate and educational settings. Here, critics have increasingly pointed to their capacity for perpetuating health-related moralism, encouraging a homogenous approach to happiness and satisfaction, and for creating and reproducing social hierarchies at the expense of addressing structural problems. Finally, it makes a tentative argument for the capacity of those working within the arts and humanities to provide a unique contribution to wellbeing concepts and initiatives, on both practical and epistemological grounds.

Alexandra Gallagher

University of Glasgow ‘Dangerous Respiratory Aesthetics of Regency theatre’

In Coleridge’s plays, explosive morality, and personal drama (that of the playwright and the characters) interpret global politics for a Romantic audience. This paper uses research from History of Science and health humanities perspectives, including respiratory philosophy, on shared and overlapping breathing spaces to examine how Coleridge's stagecraft sustains these multiple narratives and finds them joined by the material and the ethereal, in the form of shared respiratory universes, between actor and their character, audience and playwright. ‘’Osorio,’’ ‘’Zapolya’’ and unfinished fragment ''The Triumph of Loyalty'' use familiar themes of imprisonment, betrayal and war-blighted love to communicate Islamic, French or Prussian suffering to the audience. They are often depicted by scenes of suffocating metaphoric and physical incarceration that mark characters’ moral jeopardy. I read the plays as illness narratives in which telling stories alleviates perceptions of suffering and illness (Frank, 1995; Kleinman, 1988) and specifically as respiratory narratives (Carel 2018). Cathartic in purging Coleridge of demons, the dramas stage befouled atmospheres shaped by their eighteenth-century respiratory science context. Literal and metaphoric prison scenes of ‘malignant chaos’ (Erving, 2000) use miasmic airs to represent a troubled, revolutionary Europe of Christian-Islamic tensions. On a visceral level, fashionable pneumatic science that atomised air for better health outcomes bridges a theatrical space between 14th Century Granada, the playwright’s imagination and an eventual Drury Lane audience in 1815.

Dan Faichney

University of Dundee ‘Playing Nature: Rediscovering Musical Communication & the Films of Jean Painlevé’ Content Warning

How do we reimagine and recreate onscreen storytelling in musical accompaniment? How do we communicate this clearly as a group? And how do we relearn to communicate intuitively through music after a break of 2 years and more? My current project, a series of scores for the early wildlife documentaries of French filmmaker Jean Painlevé, created with two fellow musicians, aims to address and answer each of these questions. Attempting to sidestep the potential of ‘pantomiming’ emotion, in the sense that Painlevé’s work has been accused of manipulating both its subject matter and its audience, in favour of a more authentic emotional identification with the material comes with particular challenges when our collective communicative faculties have been so frequently neglected this last couple of years. It follows that the act of creating music together serves a dual function in this context: both its initial one (as an original, partially improvised score for Painlevé’s work) and an additional function as a means of relearning how to share space (in both the musical and literal senses) and of emerging from two years of relative isolation. I intend to discuss the above as well as to demonstrate some of the initial recorded material created in the sessions with my collaborators.

Niamh Gordon

University of Glasgow ‘The researcher body in practice: flexibility, process, and the precious unknown’

As a lived-experience researcher focusing on suicide bereavement, grief and trauma, I’ve never felt there to be a solid boundary between my life and my research. One necessarily informs the other, and an important part of the first year of doctoral study was examining this symbiotic relationship and attempting to understand where it might lead the research. However, I believe this to be the case whether or not you work from material informed by your own experiences. We are not researching minds detached from human bodies but complete people with embodied, material concerns. I have felt this keenly when I experienced a bereavement whilst studying and had to take sick leave. I felt it again when I became pregnant and had to negotiate a rough first trimester while teaching my first ever creative writing module. I feel it now as I attempt to finish a draft of my novel at the same time as moving towards the end of my pregnancy. This talk will first trace the interactions between the researcher body and the teacher, and then move into a focus on writing process, before including a short reading from the work-in-progress novel which constitutes the creative, practice-based part of my research. The structure of a PhD application necessitates the setting out of specific research questions, and this implies that doctoral research would be an attempt to answer these questions. However, practice as research is resistant to this binary equation. Over the last 18 months both my research, and the material concerns I experience as an embodied researcher, have required of me that I stop seeking answers and instead embrace process. This talk will finally explore how the unknown in both my work and my life has transformed the doctorate so far.