SGSAH Year Two Symposium 2025 Programme

Subversion

Monday 23 June 2025

Second Year Symposium

Advanced Research Centre (ARC), University of Glasgow

Welcome from the Director

The Year 2 Symposium is always a highlight in the SGSAH calendar.

We met most of you for the first time nearly two years ago and your PhD research work will have developed in all sorts of intriguing directions since then and, indeed, from your original proposals from even earlier on.

The Symposium is a great opportunity to find out about those developments and, for me, to dip into some of your presentations over the course of the day – as well as to catch up more informally over the breaks.

Indeed, my biggest ROMOOS (Regret Of Missing Out Of Symposium) is always that I can’t attend every single presentation, and I’m sure you’ll find that yourselves with your peers’ sessions. I’m really sorry in advance if I miss yours – come and tell me about it in the break if you have time.

The Symposium is such a brilliant snapshot of your original contributions, your creativity, and your presentational styles.

I also wanted to add a very large round of thanks and applause to the Symposium committee – Eeva, Heather, Joseph, and Lewis – for putting together today’s event. It would not have happened without them and their ingenuity, good humour, and hard work have been much appreciated over the last few months, and will be on the day itself, too.

Enjoy the day, and I look forward to catching up with you and hearing how your PhDs have developed since we first met.

Professor Claire Squires Director, Scottish Graduate School for Arts & Humanities

Contents

Welcome from the Director

2

A note from the conveners

4

Conference schedule

6

I

a

Affectively Queer

9

b Contributions to the Critique of Political Economies 12 Caged Birds Singing?

15

Hauntology and Heritage

19

b

Fertile Terrain

22

c

Beyond the Metropole

24

III a

Outwith the Lines

29

b

Weaving Identity

31

c II a

c Wild! Research: Three Creative Presentations

33

Bodies Bodies Bodies

37

b

Data (T)error

39

c

History, Hoarding and Haulage 42

IV a

Poster abstracts

46

Notes 52

A note from the conveners

Lacan’s headline appearance at a colloquium in Bordeaux, 1967, prompted him to meditate on the word ‘colloquium’ itself. ‘Not bad,’ Lacan concluded, but with a comedic provocation: ‘We talk together, in the same place [...] That does not necessarily mean that we think.’

While Lacan’s grip on the humanities may in some quarters have waned, on this he remains prescient: the value of the colloquium, the symposium, or – to use its more impoverished title – the conference – has been depleted by their frequency, number, and necessity. Colloquia add shine to the CV and numbers to the contacts but less frequently do they meet their Socratic aspirations: challenge, enlightenment, edification.

Your colloquium attendance is mandatory.

We apologise if you would rather be elsewhere but wish also to invite you to recognise the opportunities and pleasures that can be derived from submission. The majority of our cohort, all 60-or-so people, are known to one another. We have eaten haggis, ventured to Dundee, and sailed to Arran. There is no one here to whom you must introduce yourself and no expert with whom you must become ingratiated.

No one in the room is likely to hold sway over your suitability for a job within the next decade. And while some of your peers will no doubt know your subject, this is not a conference of specialists: if you say something convincingly enough we are likely to take you at your word.

The gauntlet we are throwing at your feet is simple: take this conference in good faith and make of it what you will. If you wish to prepare and practice your delivery of a conventional academic paper, we will support you in so doing and wish all power upon you. But for those of you more seasoned in conference life, we are challenging you to make it a little weird: try a new presentational style; throw the seed of an idea and see how it grows; share some material a little sour to the taste. This is conference finishing school; regular rules are suspended.

In the vein of collegiality, however, we encourage some shared principles. First, please stay throughout the day; SGSAH request this of you but it is also a kindness to your peers. Second, please be an active listener. The symposium will feature parallel sessions for scheduling reasons but this divides a small cohort three ways; audiences will, therefore, be small.

We encourage you to use your laptops and mobiles only when necessary and to prepare salient questions throughout the talks. Finally, punctuality is a gesture of respect to the conveners and to the speakers. The schedule is dense but breaks have been generously apportioned; we ask that you use these intentionally and are seated by the panel session start time.

Perhaps we have provided the conditions for your rebellion through our selection of the conference theme: Subversion.

Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities

4

Joseph Brett-Demetre, Heather Maycock, and Lewis Wood The Conveners

In the call for papers, we asked you to consider this already capacious word in broad terms and to find affiliations with your research. The resulting panels are grouped thematically in accordance with synergies emerging across the cohort (and with a quiet playfulness that subverts academic convention). Complementing the papers are several creative presentations and a poster display, the latter of which will be viewable throughout the day with presenters talking attendees through their posters during a portion of the lunch break. We hope that this theme has been a generative provocation and look forward to hearing your responses.

At the forefront of our thanks as conveners is to you, our peers, both for your engagement with this symposium and for your broader camaraderie and support. Particular appreciation is owed to the panel chairs for shouldering an additional responsibility and helping with the organisation as well as to everyone at the University of Glasgow’s Advanced Research Centre – particularly those whose labour is invisible – for making this conference a possibility.

Let us also offer our thanks to Professor Claire Squires, Director of SGSAH, and Jordan McInally, Administrative Assistant, who effectively – and without credit – co-organise this conference with us.

The remainder of the team at SGSAH deserve our appreciation both for the

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quiet ways they have supported this conference but also for the material and logistical support they provide each of us throughout our doctoral research: Dr Andrew Dilley, Deputy Director; Monica Callaghan, Head of Operations and Strategy; Dr Anindya Raychaudhuri, EDI Lead; Helen Kendrick, Partnerships and Placements Manager; Mariam Jack, Communications Coordinator; and Sam Morton, Modern Apprentice. In an era in which PhD funding stands on a precipice, we are more grateful than ever for SGSAH’s provision and for the humour and style with which this commendable team deliver it.

Colloquium is also, for Lacan, a good word because it circumvents the supposedly synonymous term, ‘dialogue,’ which he finds straight up annoying. ‘Being in dialogue is one of the most enormous pretentions of our times,’ Lacan writes. ‘Have you ever seen people in dialogue? Occasions when we speak of dialogue are always a little bit like domestic quarrels.’ Let us accept this, then, as our second gauntlet: to spend a day together in which colloquium and dialogue coalesce, to do so in a way that is unrestrained and generative, subversive and undomesticated, and, in so doing, to share our good work while finding avenues through which to strengthen it. Such is the aspiration of the Symposium and we wish you well.

5

Conference schedule

Time

Programme

Location

09:00

Registration Tea and coffee reception

Foyer

09:30

Welcome remarks

Foyer

09:45

Panel Session I 5 people, 100 minutes Panel Ia, Seminar Suite A

Panel Ib, Seminar Suite B

Panel Ic, Seminar Suite C

Affectively Queer

Contributions to the Critique of Political Economies

Caged Birds Singing?

Chair: Hannah Speed Panellists: Madeleine Banatvala, Heather Maycock, Antonis Stamiris, Lewis Wood, Alice Gibson

11:25

Break Tea and coffee available

11:45

Panel Session II 4 people, 85 minutes

Chair: Trish O’Grady Panellists: Martin Disley, Asher Gibbens, Euan Healey, Jessica Turner

Chair: Gala Morris Panellists: Theresa Kearns, Esme Paul, Judith Spaargaren, David Vescio, Rachael Tarrant

Seminar Suites A, B & C

Foyer

Panel IIa, Seminar Suite A

Panel IIb, Seminar Suite B

Panel IIc, Seminar Suite C

Hauntology & Heritage

Fertile Terrain

Beyond the Metropole

Chair: Rebecca Williamson

Chair: Judith Spargaaren

Chair: Lewis Wood

Panellists: Cameron Taylor, Ciara Bolton, Patricia O’Grady, Alex Gibbons

Panellists: Heather Ford, Synnøve Gravdal Heimvik, Gwenffrewi Morgan, Meike van Lit

13:10

Lunch

13:30

Poster presentations

Panellists: Darius Cret, Mahtab Karami, Samuel Reilly, Erin Symons

Posters will be viewable all day. From 13:30 – 14:00 presenters will attend their posters and engage with viewers casually over lunch.

Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities

Seminar Suites A, B & C

Foyer Studio

6

Advanced Research Centre (ARC) Building 11 Chapel Lane, University of Glasgow G11 6EW

Time

Programme

14:00

Panel Session III 3 people, 90 minutes

Location

Panel IIIa, Seminar Suite A

Panel IIIb, Seminar Suite B

Panel IIIc, Seminar Suite C

Outwith the Lines

Weaving Identity: Three Creative Presentations

Wild! Research: Three Creative Presentations

Chair: Eeva Savolainen Panellists: Chloe Akers-Brewer, Sarah Bresnahan, Daniel Fook-Boon

15:30

Break Tea and coffee available

15:50

Panel Session IV 5 people, 100 minutes

Chair: Gwenffrewi Morgan Panellists: Matt Zurowski, Maria Elena Bertoli, Joseph Brett-Demetre

Chair: Meike van Lit Panellists: Aaron Goddard, Rebecca Cornwell, Gala Morris

Foyer

Panel IVa, Seminar Suite A

Panel IVb, Seminar Suite B

Panel IVc, Seminar Suite C

Bodies Bodies Bodies

Data (T)error

Chair: Heather Maycock

Chair: Sam Reilly

History, Hoarding, & Haulage

Panellists: Ashley Brown, Frances Darling, Hannah Duffew, Angus Gibson, Emma Holmes

Seminar Suites A, B & C

Panellists: Billy Franks, William Gopal, Aleksei Konshin, Bharat Sundararajan, Rebecca Williamson

Chair: Chloe Akers-Brewer Panellists: Laura MacDonald, Sarah Mason, Cian Pappenheim, Hannah Speed, Kateryna Volochniuk

Seminar Suites A, B & C

17:30

Drinks reception

Foyer

17:45

Closing remarks

Foyer

19:00

Conference close

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7

I a

Affectively Queer Chair Hannah Speed

09:45 - 11:25 Seminar Suite A

University of Edinburgh

Madeleine Banatvala

Subverting Subversion: Notes on an ethics of off-modernity Published posthumously in 2017, Svetlana the borders of scholarship and which Boym’s genealogy of modernity, questions academia’s perpetual grasping The Off-Modern, remains an innovative for a quasi-revolutionary, or subversive, and disruptive discourse which confronts thinking. This paper begins first by academia’s need for subversion, in the examining the concept of off-modernism: humanities. Critiquing Boym’s work, Eric exploring three key ideas, the ‘knight’s Naiman argues that her textual analyses move’, ‘estrangement’ and ‘slow-thinking’, are ‘too fleeting’ and show a ‘failure to cite’ as “subversive” modes of thinking; by and yet, Naiman also questions whether understanding how they side-step Boym’s ideas reflect a ‘desire to break historical academic convention, which has the bonds of academic conversation?’ If traditionally prioritised groundbreaking Boym’s work remains disorientating in its “subversive” texts. The second section “failure” to follow academic convention, to explores how off-modernity might be what extent do her ideas warrant further practiced and implemented in literary discussion? Off-modernity explores studies, underlining the challenges already relationships between people and spaces experienced in its practice and reception. that have been historically misrepresented My paper concludes that off-modernity and kept hidden in cultural narratives. challenges the academic conversation Highlighting Boym’s interdisciplinary through self-reflexive engagement and methodology which includes artistic, by embodying its own ideas—not by political, and philosophical (an existential “breaking bonds” with academic pastimes, phenomenological) practice, we gain a but by providing alternative routes and stronger understanding of alternative revealing hidden or forgotten ideas found thinking. That which prioritises ideas in in the margins of scholarship.

University of Dundee

Heather Maycock

Press F to Pay Respects: What queer game theory offers simulated mourning in RPG videogames This presentation argues that many single-player RPG (role-playing game) videogames games which attempt to thematise grief fail to escape a pervasive cultural alienation of death. Reflecting on intersections between grief and interpassivity, as theorised by Slavoj Žižek and Robert Pfaller, this paper proposes that grammarised game moves of and around mourning can be read through this alienation in which that a prioritisation of normative “fun” sees the dead othered and affectively complex encounters with grief be outsourced onto the game itself through mechanisation. In this presentation I will use game analysis to show that while players interact with computer/console hardware in the execution of these moves, they can remain passive as the game takes on the reflective and affectively complex aspects of mourning. I will then go on to assert how queer games, in particular no-fun games as theorised by queer games theorist, Bo Ruberg, offer a possible strategy to side-step these tendencies. This presentation relates to the theme of subversion by showing how by denying player figuration and de-prioritising the (hetero)normative conventions of fun and mastery that have become expectations of game audiences, video games can encounter death beyond alienation.

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9

University of Edinburgh

Antonios Stamiris

Pleasure, Pain, and Emotion in Aristotle’s Rhetoric When it comes to emotion research, one cannot help but notice that it is fraught with subversive statements. The realisation that there is no agreement over a universally agreed definition of ‘emotion’ has been characterised as scandalous (Russell, 2012).

Things are not much different in the so-called affective turn within the discipline of Classics itself. In a subversive manner, the most comprehensive account of emotions is found not in Aristotle’s psychological work On the Soul, but instead in his treatise on the art of persuasion. In this paper I examine the function of pleasure and pain in the mechanism of emotion as Aristotle conceives it in his work entitled Rhetoric. A lively debate in the context of Aristotle’s philosophical psychology concerns the polarisation between belief-based and imagination-based understandings of emotion. The former side identifies or correlates emotion with judgement or belief, whereas the latter equates or interconnects emotion with appearance or imagination. In the first case belief is believed to be the efficient cause of an emotional response; in the second, that is achieved thanks to a quasi-perceptual construal. By placing Plato’s Philebus and Aristotle’s Rhetoric side by side, it is maintained that the dilemma between the appearance-based reading and the belief-based view is an either-or fallacy (Krewet, 2011; Pearson, 2014), since to reach an emotional judgement both are explicitly and repeatedly mentioned to play their part.

To illustrate this it will be argued that it is not exercises of imagination (phantasiai) (Moss 2012) but the Rhetoric’s oiēseis that are equivalent to the synonymous doxai (opinions, beliefs) of the Philebus. In order to form a judgement (krisis) it is insufficient to rely on appearances only, without first believing in them. As such, emotional pleasure and pain arise not from belief nor from appearance but from a mixture of both.

University of Edinburgh

Lewis Wood

‘Wouldst Thou Like to Live Deliciously?’: Viral loads and the limits of pleasure in Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu Nosferatu is predominated in its first act by the refrain, ‘he is coming,’ supposedly referring to the familiar and inherited story of the film: the acquisition of, and transportation towards, a property in Wisburg by the titular vampire Nosferatu in pursuit of Ellen, the apotheosis of his desire. However, the overt sexualisation of Egger’s Nosferatu – even amidst a genre in which vampire narratives frequently explore psychosexual domination – loads this statement with an oblique double entendre and Ellen’s whispered somnambulistic repetitions of this line ferment a slide in meaning away from travel and toward sexual climax. But to take this implication literally generates a set of questions which are not satisfactorily answered by the film’s narrative: who is coming? upon what or whom? and across what temporality?

Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities

This paper reads against Nosferatu’s ostensibly heterosexual narrative to identify a queer subtext which transforms the traditional use of vampirism as a metaphor for predation upon women into a depiction of the tension between the mandates of bourgeois homonormativity and the sexual desires and impulses which it renders illegitimate. Furthermore, I will contextualise the queerness of Nosferatu’s characters and narrative in relation to the discourses of illness and health which underscore the film and its narrative trajectories, arguing that Nosferatu’s queer coding, his sexualisation, and his depiction as synonymous with a diseasecum-plague explicitly invokes AIDS and its signifiers with disturbingly moralising implications for the consequences of sexual relations perceived as unorthodox or otherwise perverse.

10

University of Edinburgh

Alice Gibson

Gologras Slash Gawane: Shipping fifteenth-century enemies-to-lovers as a strategy for understanding medieval Scottish audiences How can we conceptualise premodern Scottish literary audiences when traditional methods of tracing readership are unavailable? Despite centuries of scholarship on texts from the ‘Golden Age’ of Scottish literature (c.1475 – 1513), there have been no holistic studies that illustrate who the audiences were that created and sustained the circumstances for such an efflorescence of literary production.

Small-scale, geographically or personally specific investigations have taken place; these focus on particular libraries or miscellany manuscripts (Tod, 2005; Curran, 2015), but the field lacks a broadly useful answer to the question ‘who was reading?’ In light of this, I propose a strategy for reading certain popular texts from this period as evidence themselves of an engaged community of readers and writers, through a comparison between these (critically) fabulated readers and modern fanfiction communities.

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My research incorporates reading strategies from queer theory (identifying the ‘loud silences’ in texts that can be interpreted by diverse audiences) and affect studies (prioritising emotional response, recasting emotion as generative).

These approaches are combined in order to articulate a ‘fannish hermeneutics’ (Wilson, 2016). Applying these subversive methodologies enables the production of an alternative narrative: one in which women and queer communities are part of the tapestry of Scotland’s medieval readers, and thus, to invoke their interpretative stances in scholarship is neither baseless nor anachronistic.

This paper will begin by establishing the limited scholarship available on readers in Scotland during this period, before demonstrating the interpretative possibilities encoded in a fifteenth century Scottish text that might be uncovered when read using the strategies outlined here. I will read an extract of fanfiction based on the anonymous romance, Gologras and Gawane, in order to illustrate the layers of meaning available in the original text when we imagine its reception by a diverse audience.

11

I b

Contributions to the Critique of Political Economies Chair Patricia O’Grady

09:45 - 11:25 Seminar Suite B

University of Edinburgh

Martin Disley

Aesthetic Distillation: Collapse as a Method of Revealing the House Style of Text-to-Image Models This text presents Aesthetic Distillation, a research-through-design project investigating the unique aesthetic character of synthetic image generation models. It develops a technical method to amplify these distinct qualities and explores their creative potential. A novel model augmentation technique was created and applied in a pilot study on Midjourney V5. This produced new images that highlight the model’s preferred lower-order formal elements, synthesising them into clearer renderings and making Midjourney more accessible to formalist analysis. The text covers both the technical method and its creative application.

Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities

The method introduced involves recursive fine-tuning of the target model. The model is repeatedly trained on images it generated in the previous round, causing a phenomenon called model collapse. This collapse truncates the model’s distribution, eliminating extreme variations and concentrating around the mean. Without new data, this results in a derivative model that consistently expresses the target’s house style in every image. The pilot study applied this method to Midjourney V5, with comparative analysis showing how the model’s stylistic traits intensify through recursive training. The distilled model was then used in the Habsburg AI Portraits Studies series, exploring how these formal qualities manifest in human subject representations.

12

University of St Andrews

Asher Gibbens

Subverting Economic Narratives in Late Nineteenth-Century British Naturalist Fiction My research challenges the dominance of economic rationalism by arguing that literature is an essential critical medium for evaluating economic conditions, behaviour, and systems, subverting the idea that economic decisions and human experience can be reduced to mathematical models.

Literature provides powerful narratives to comprehend and navigate turbulent financial times, recessions, and economic change. The research focuses on the context of the late nineteenth-century, a period of unprecedented expansion in global economic interconnectedness.

During this time, Britain was the international economic hegemony but encountered mounting economic pressures due to intensifying imperial competition, the decline of the landed gentry, and a prolonged recession between 1873 and 1896. My research argues that these conditions shaped British Literary Naturalism as a critical literary response, subverting the ideals of liberal economic optimism by exposing the brutal realities of economic precarity and financial capital.

nineteenth-century economic historical context and examine how a British Naturalist novel engages with and responds to this context. I argue that George Gissing’s ‘The Whirlpool’ (1897) artistically represents and critically examines how the speculative economy shapes society and how financial instability and declinism manifest through social behaviour and individual psychology. My research subverts the estrangement between economics and literature by emphasising their interrelationship. It resists the disciplinary silos reinforced by neoliberal academia, which often privileges quantitative analysis over artistic and narrative insight, and my research advocates the primacy of literature as an inherently subversive mode of economic critique that helps to comprehend economic change and financial turbulence.

My presentation will outline the late

University of Glasgow

Euan Healey

Thrown into the Creeks and Promontories of our Coasts: Exploring experiences of coast, shore and sea in the Highland Clearances Most study of the Highland Clearances (c.1750-c1884) is dominated by discussion of crofts, land politics and emigration. What can we learn about the long nineteenth century of the Clearances when we walk beyond the byre wall, over the head dyke and down to the tideline? Utilising landscape archaeology, archival material, and oral testimony to the 1883 Napier Commission, this paper will explore the experiences of ordinary people who experienced the Clearances in the dry and wet spaces of the littoral and maritime Gàidhealtachd. With a focus on labour- and environmentallyminded methods, this paper will highlight how bottom-up studies which take seriously the lives, economies, beliefs and imaginations of ordinary Gaelic people can bring us new and innovative ways to unsettle conventional understandings of the Highland Clearances. Starting in the soil, sand and sea, and working upwards, we can uncover the lives and experiences of fishers, crofters, cottars, women, and children as they happened between the tidelines, aboard open boats, and in the planned fishing village.

In doing this, we are permitted access to underexplored spaces of post-Clearance communities allowing us a deeper understanding of the agencies, environmental changes and capitalisms which defined the Highland Clearances.

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13

University of Edinburgh

Jessica Turner

Teaching Economics and Marxism in 1970s Tanzania In 1967, the Tanzania’s governing party, TANU, committed to the objectives of transitioning to socialism (ujamaa) and achieving self-reliance, goals which served to orientate political discourse and shape an evolving policy program over the next two decades. This political context also shaped the teaching of social sciences and the humanities at Tanzania’s first University, the University of Dar es Salaam (UDSM). A connection was repeatedly made between a commitment to the goals of Ujamaa and the utilisation of Marxism as a transdisciplinary theoretical language capable of furnishing forms of understanding that could serve these political goals.

Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities

In this paper, I explore the ways in which this commitment to the political goals of Ujamaa and utilisation Marxism as a theoretical language subverted received modes of teaching and research in economics, a discipline that is today often considered, amongst the social sciences and humanities, to be uniquely insular and bound up with existing power structures. I argue that, on the one hand, the conceptualisation of economics as central to transdisciplinary research into Tanzania’s political economy provided a framework in which established modes of disciplinary thinkings were broken down. On the other hand, I argue that the perceived need to train economists for the task of designing and managing the implementation of economic policy led to the utilisation of a far more eclectic range of analytic tools, raising questions about the meaning of subversion in economics.

14

I c

Caged Birds Singing?

Chair Gala Morris

09:45 - 11:25 Seminar Suite C

Queen Margaret University and University of Aberdeen

Theresa Kearns

Embracing Subversion in Children’s Rights Based Research: A case study of Imaginate My PhD is a case study of an arts organisation called Imaginate who through their Creative Encounters project are striving to implement a children's rightsbased approach and bring young people and their voice into creative decision making.

Power is central to my topic, in particular the power relations between children and adults within the creative industries. Children’s rights as a field of study is inherently subversive in its theory and practice.

Article 31 of the UNCRC, children rights to arts and culture is often perceived as the forgotten right which means children’s role as cultural citizens are rarely explored.

We live in a world where it is the norm

for children to be excluded from policy and decision making and children’s rights seeks to change that be elevating the voice of young people.

The hope is that this paper will traverse the pathways of subversive thinking and research to make participants think more about the status of children and their cultural rights in Scotland. It will do so by presenting my methodology which involves co-research with young people and my initial findings. While subversion traditionally focuses on undermining established institutions, my focus is on sharing power and the relationality and emotionality of children’s rights in practice.

University of Glasgow

Esme Paul

Challenging the ‘Outside In’ Representations of Autism in Theatrical and Literary Narratives In the field of psychology, the ‘insideout’ approach to studying autistic cognitive processes and behaviours through qualitative research is relatively underdeveloped. Modes of researching autism have often utilised the medical model of analysing autistic subjects using quantitative ‘outside-in’ approaches.

Unsurprisingly narrative depictions of autistic characters have followed suit. Therefore, literary tropes and pervasive stereotypes permeate popular narratives of autism.

This paper will analyse these existing depictions, looking at the common pitfalls of both theatrical and literary narratives.

Notably, I will focus on what has been named the Autistic Family Drama (AFD),

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and the idiot/savant dichotomy seen in many representations. These representations often act as palatable depictions of autism for a wider audience or readership and designate the autistic characters as a vehicle for the personal development of their neurotypical counterpart.

This paper will invite the audience to consider the existing narratives of autism and how they compare with wider representations of neurodiversity in the cultural zeitgeist seen through social media and autobiographical writings.

Furthermore, I will touch on how my own modes of research, through theatre and performance, aim to subvert and overthrow the popular, narrative representations of autism using an ‘inside-out’ approach.

15

Edinburgh Napier University

Judith Spaargaren

The Role of the Prison Museum in Public Culture: The case of Peterhead In her 2009 assessment of the culture of punishment, Michelle Brown stated that “dead prisons reconfigure living prisons, not in a clear chain of direct institutional transformation but in a larger cultural imaginary.” It is this reconfiguration of a penal imaginary which both im- and explicitly underpins academic concern regarding the prison museum’s ethical responsibilities. Research in the field of prison museum studies frequently conclude these museums create narratives of penality which reinforce what Mathiesen (2006) refers to as the ideology of prisons, wherein the continued existence and use of prisons are not only legitimised, but its failures obscured from the public.

Prison museum narratives frequently base themselves on the testimony of former employees, and what prisoner voices can be found are frequently presented as historical figures, whose past suffering serves to reinforce progressivist penal narratives. A commonly offered suggestion of subverting this prison ideology is a reintroduction of the modern prisoner’s voice to the stories told within the walls of the decommissioned prison-turned-museum.

Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities

This case study critically examines the actual subversive potential of prisoner narratives as they are present in Crumlin Road Gaol, Belfast. This prison museum features a separate Troubles exhibit with talking head presentations from two political prisoners discussing their time at the site. Narrative analysis of this Troubles exhibit reveals that these prisoner voices are framed as political, foregoing the opportunity tell subversive prison stories by framing these prisoners not as criminals but political activists. It is argued that this framing does a disservice to the political prisoners themselves, whose real prison experience is framed as less brutal due to its political connotation as well as their eventual release, as well as reinforcing the prison ideology by presenting political imprisonment as an incorrect “use” of prisons in society.

16

University of Stirling

David Vescio

The Culture of Optionality – For better or for worse?

The point of research is, arguably, to be subversive. The term derives from the French “to seek out” or “to search closely”. Research is an act of scrutiny, keeping society’s (pre)conceptions in check, in the hope that academics, and others, ultimately reach consensus thanks to findings which have been replicated, ultimately verified or challenged. However, positionality and politics can affect the dynamics of research within and outwith academia.

Through my research, I have discovered the differing expectations and reactions of government officials, academics and policy makers based on my thesis which unapologetically subverts the current understanding of Scotland’s language learning policy across sectors.

This paper explores the subversive nature of my research with a specific focus on the “culture of optionality” within Scottish Education which, in itself, is a controversial and relatively unexplored concept in academia. While my research focuses specifically on language learning policy, I have noticed through conversations with a range of stakeholders in education that the Curriculum for Excellence’s design, which provides learners with flexibility and choice, has led to a range of unintended consequences, including a detrimental effect on learners’ educational opportunities. While the structure of the Curriculum for Excellence should allow learners to develop key skills until the end of compulsory schooling (and beyond?) in an increasingly competitive and globalised society, it seems to have paradoxically deprived them of a well-rounded education. The following paper explores a potential new and subversive curriculum which is backed by academic research rather than unfounded preconceptions.

University of Glasgow

Rachael Tarrant

Reading Romanticism in the Margins: An analysis of marginalia and borrowing records in Scottish universities, 1788-1833 Within the covers of Glasgow University Library’s works of Romantic-period imaginative literature, penned and pencilled side-profiles gaze at printed texts, side-figures cluster in various stages of (dis)embodiment, scenes of land and naval warfare explode into being, and character and author sketches take shape thanks to the imaginative contributions of eighteenth and nineteenth century students. It is these marks, more than any (textual) other, that pushes my own mother past her tolerance for marginalia, seeing them as ‘downright vandalism, surely’. These playful marks seem to more aggressively flout societal and institutional rules around shared book use and subvert textual seriousness. Following the example of Mercurio and Gableman’s Element The Form and Theory of Literary Doodling, in which they theorize the ‘literary doodling’ of professional authors, this paper embraces marks typically seen as ‘trivial, inconsequential, and inscrutable’ (2025: 1). This paper applies a ‘more subjective interpretative approach than literary scholarship typically embodies’ to marginalia made by Romantic-period Glaswegian students (ibid: 4). By doing so, the paper extends influential definitions of marginalia as ‘a responsive kind of writing permanently anchored to pre-existing written words’ to include responsive decorations, doodles, drawings, and sketches (my emphasis; Jackson, 2001: 81).

It will combine approaches from literary criticism, the history of the book and art history to begin to piece together the ‘habits and visual lexicon’ of annotating Romantic-period Glaswegian student readers (Mercurio and Gableman, 2025: 44). By doing so, it will situate the importance of ‘playful modes of reading’ to Romantic-period Glaswegian students’ engagement with wider literary culture (ibid: 107).

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II a

Hauntology and Heritage Chair Rebecca Williamson

11:45 - 13:10 Seminar Suite A

Cameron Taylor University of the Highlands and Islands

Subverting Narratives: Reimagining Neolithic archaeology and visitor engagement through storytelling In this paper, I explore the role of subversion in reshaping how Neolithic archaeology is communicated to visitors in heritage tourism settings, with a focus on narrative methodologies like transmedia storytelling. Traditional narratives in archaeological interpretation and tourism destination marketing often reflect dominant, top-down perspectives, which can marginalize potential audiences and limit engagement with them. Despite seeming authoritative, such narratives sometimes fail to keep up to date with the latest research and can be disconnected from other aspects of the tourism experience. I argue that subverting these conventional approaches through innovative storytelling techniques can challenge entrenched assumptions and create more inclusive, dynamic experiences for visitors.

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This paper examines how archaeological storytelling can disrupt traditional forms of interpretation by integrating alternative narratives, multivocal perspectives, and immersive media. Telling stories across landscapes and media and making use of digital tools such as mixed reality, mobile apps, and interactive websites empowers visitors to engage with Neolithic sites not just as passive recipients of information but as active participants in reimagining the past.

By subverting the authority of traditional archaeological narratives, we can foster a more participatory, emotionally resonant experience for visitors while enhancing their cultural, social, and economic engagement with the host destination.

When people feel deeply connected to the history of a place, they are more likely to return, share their experiences with others, and contribute to the local economy. This paper will argue that such subversive storytelling practices have the potential to transform the relationship between tourism, heritage, place, and identity, ultimately enriching visitors’ engagement with the past in the present.

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I Participate; You Participate; We Participate...

They Profit – The subversive potential of retrofit regeneration in post-war estates

University of Edinburgh

Ciara Bolton

This paper foregrounds resident resistance to demolition and regeneration in post-war housing estates, framing these actions as critical acts of subversion against dominant narratives of stigma, obsolescence, and failure. It interrogates the complex role of retrofit regeneration projects — often functioning as mechanisms of aesthetic-led gentrification — and argues that retrofit can, instead, become a reparative and subversive practice when shaped by and aligned with resident resistance and interests.

First, the paper critically examines prevailing tenant participation models (Cairncross et al., 1994) and established strategies of resistance (Hickman, 1970), highlighting the logic behind tenant disengagement within a dysfunctional housing system. Drawing on Nixon’s (2011) concept of slow violence and Pain’s (2019) theory of chronic urban trauma, it reframes disengagement not as apathy but as a rational, embodied response to prolonged neglect, identity erosion, and the loss of elective belonging.

Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities

Using Goffman’s (1963) theory of stigma, the paper demonstrates how social tenants are systematically discredited through constructed narratives of dysfunction, justifying demolition and marginalising regeneration. Conway et al., (2011) insights illustrate how stigma operates both discursively and materially, determining whose homes are valued and whose are deemed disposable. These narratives do not merely reflect change — they actively produce it, often against tenants' interests, as evidenced by Watt’s (2022) findings that residents perceive regeneration efforts as political gestures motivated by market palatability rather than their welfare.

In response, the paper advocates for a radically different approach to regeneration — one that challenges, rather than reproduces, stigmatising narratives.

It argues that genuine participation and the validation of resident resistance are essential if retrofit is to serve not as a tool of erasure but as a powerful act of subversion in itself.

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Local Libraries, Galleries and Museums: Resisting capitalist logics where it counts

Queen Margaret University

Patricia O’Grady

My research examines culture trusts and local authorities to understand how their relationship impacts how culture is supported. I am looking at OnFife, Fife’s culture trust and Fife Council as a representative case study.

Culture trusts are companies that local authorities establish to manage their cultural assets: libraries, museums, galleries and theatres. They often manage sports and leisure as well, although this is not the case in Fife. More than half of Scotland’s local authorities have adopted the trust model. It became popular in the wake of the 2008 global financial crash, the benefits mostly framed in terms of savings and earning potential made possible because of trusts’ status as separate companies to local authorities.

While they are separate companies to local authorities, culture trusts are not independent: they rely on local authorities for a management fee, councillors sit on their boards, they are bound by various legal

agreements and subject to regular formal scrutiny processes from the council. The two organisations also linked by reputation and the accountability that comes with relying on public money to operate.

This paper contends that while the existence of the culture trust model is effectively a consequence of a capitalist event and the model continues to be valued in economic terms, in practice libraries, museums and galleries have not been completely colonised by the logic of capital. While formally these cultural institutions and activities are evaluated in the measurable, quantifiable frameworks of rationalism and New Public Management ideals, this attribution of value has not been completely internalised by the people who make, manage and participate in the activities that culture trusts support. This paper explores the hypothesis that gendered value systems and legislation both play a part in subverting capitalist logics in libraries, museums and galleries and discusses why theatres are different in this conceit.

University of the Highlands and Islands

Alex Gibbons

Craftsmanship as Research: Subverting the concept of the ‘academic’ and ‘non academic’ As a working craftsman, the academic world was (and remains) something of a mystery to me. Having been fairly unimpressed by the quality of education and lack of pedagogical underpinning in my undergraduate studies, I was eager to return to my roots working practically on buildings as soon as possible. Surrounding myself with deeply down to earth craftspeople from a diverse range of backgrounds and beliefs was the tonic I needed after several years dabbling in the empirically challenged world of the so called ‘professional’.

After 20 years of practical experience, I decided to turn this on its head when I applied for my PhD studying the craft of Highlands and Islands thatching, believing there could be as much to be gained for my craft, as there could be give through my perspective. In doing so, I intended to subvert the received binary of ‘academic’ and ‘non academic’ subjects.

Finding a framework and appropriate methodology for how to achieve a study rooted in the practical craftsmanship was challenging until I sought out my supervisor’s work in ‘creative ethnology’, essentially pairing the traditional ethnological study with being ‘proactive in developing contemporary and future orientated fields of inquiry’ (Kockel & McFadyen 2019, p.202). This, combined with my co-supervisors work on recognising traditional craftsmanship as a domain of Intangible Cultural Heritage (Nic Craith, 2019) gave me the framework I was seeking to carry my work forwards. Taking its lead from the handful of craftspeople who remain thatching in Scotland, I intend for my research to make a real world impact in safeguarding what is currently a critically endangered craft. To do this I will go beyond ‘apprenticeship as methodology’ (Marchand, 2022) by building on my previous practical experience to replicate a traditional ‘journeyman’ tour, rooted in the values of correspondence, fellowship and perspective.

Second Year Symposium

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II b

Fertile Terrain Chair Judith Spargaaren

11:45 - 13:10 Seminar Suite B

University of Glasgow

Heather Ford

Phenomenology and Other Hard Sciences: Structured approaches to embodied experience Phenomenology is emblematic of postprocessual archaeology. It is a reaction to processual archaeology, existing in challenge to the fallacy of objectivity, the lack of consideration for human agency, and the logical positivism the earlier model hinges upon. Consequently, it is often accused of hyper-subjectivity and criticised for its unstructured methodology and lack of replicability.

While phenomenology may be considered mainstream by many, especially within Britain, recent conferences underline the controversy that stems from the subject.

Defending phenomenology’s continued relevance in archaeology, this paper will explore the phenomenological approach

that underpins the methodology of my thesis and informs the methods I use to identify the re-use of re-used prehistoric standing stones in Early Medieval Scottish epigraphy. An approach which also subverts the traditional expectations associated with studies of embodied experiences.

This paper will present a structured approach which channels phenomenology, creating a rigid framework on which to pin and balance subjective experience.

This creates a process which capitalises on phenomenology’s ability to capture holistic approaches to monuments in the landscape but avoids the risk of arbitrary decisions in the field which can disrupt data collection.

Animals are living beings with the ability to act-back, and alongside humans, shape the world around them. This dynamic relationship underpinned many socio-political developments in early urbanising societies of the Late Chalcolithic (LC) (4000-3100 BCE) in Mesopotamia, modern-day Iraq. Interpretations of human-animal relationships in this transformative period have, however, largely been shaped by later administrative texts, which retroactively impose economic narratives. These texts reduce animals to passive resources — i.e., ‘walking larders’ — exploited for their secondary products such as milk, wool, and traction.

This perspective has influenced (zoo)archaeological scholarship, reinforcing top-down economic models that obscure the complexity of human-animal interactions.

University of Edinburgh

Synnøve Gravdal Heimvik

The Role of Animals in Early Urbanising Society: A multiscalar zooarchaeological analysis of faunal remains from Late Chalcolithic Shakhi Kora, Iraqi-Kurdistan

This paper aims to subvert this dominant interpretative model through a detailed zooarchaeological analysis of the faunal material from the ongoing Sirwan Regional Project’s excavations at Shakhi Kora, Iraqi-Kurdistan. Situated along the Sirwan/Upper Diyala River, the site span nearly 1000 years of continuous LC occupation, offering a unique opportunity of detailed diachronic understanding of this transformative period. Employing traditional zooarchaeological analyses, this research foregrounds a broader spectrum of human-animal interactions, including engagement with fish and bird life, to challenge reductive economic narratives. By centring dynamic, multispecies entanglements within a wider environmental and cultural context, this approach dismantles economic determinism in early urbanisation models. Ultimately, this paper calls for a reconfiguration of (zoo)archaeological perspectives—one that recognises animals not merely as economic resources but as integral to the socio-political and cultural fabric of early urban societies.

Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities

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University of St Andrews

Gwenffrewi Morgan

Medieval History in the Omni-Crisis Twelfth-century historical writing does not normally have the environmental past as its primary focus. Attempting to understand the role of environments in these texts therefore subverts many of the (anthropocentric) intentions of the original twelfth-century author: whether they be to find origins of institutions or peoples, place these origins within broader histories, or to present models of rulership.

In a contemporary world on fire, this intellectual work perhaps seems quaint and picturesque, pondering the significance in the designs foliative capitals inscribed on the skin of animals by their human kin, whilst ignoring the blemishes and pores that recall the life lived, whilst we now sit on the precipice of mass-extinction.

However, drawing on Anthropocene thought (especially the work of Amitav Ghosh amongst others), I will highlight that – beyond the mechanics of destruction – much of our current crisis is the product of a particular (modern) way of thinking about how we fit into broader networks of Terrestrial actors. I will then argue that whilst we cannot ‘return’ to medieval modes of thinking, nor should we seek ‘moral examples’ in the medieval past, the unfamiliarity we often feel when confronted with the medieval world is productive in re-thinking our place in the world. Confronted anew by a world shaped by our actions but beyond our control, making Terrestrially subversive readings of medieval texts is perhaps a first stage in reverting our present world towards a more sustainable and equitable state.

University of Glasgow

Meike van Lit

Limitless Homogeneity or Limited Interdisciplinarity?

A critical review of institutional expectations of disciplines What are the limitations of established interdisciplinarity? There are many aspects to discuss: different methodologies, different ways of collecting and sharing data, different expectations on what the outcome should look like, et cetera. But this paper argues that the main limitation of interdisciplinary research is the institutes and frameworks in which we work. This paper uses the field of Archaeology as a case study and incorporates personal experience of conducting interdisciplinary research as well as information gathered from fellow interdisciplinary archaeologists.

Archaeology commonly self-identifies as an inherently interdisciplinary field, as it incorporates environmental studies, literary studies, material studies and anthropological studies. But are institutes

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in Scotland (and further afield) actually facilitating this, or is the interdisciplinarity of archaeology limited by the system?

This paper will highlight the historical developments that shaped the field of Archaeology and which have contributed to defining disciplinary boundaries.

However, the continuous development of research as a whole and Archaeology as part of that means that those disciplinary boundaries are limiting rather than helpful. As such, this paper questions the terminology of ‘hard sciences’ versus ‘soft sciences’ and ‘humanities’ versus ‘STEM’. It also critiques the (systemic) expectations that surround research in the field of Archaeology and how that impacts the ability to conduct interdisciplinary research.

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II c

Beyond the Metropole Chair Lewis Wood

11:45 - 13:10 Seminar Suite C

University of Edinburgh

Darius Cret

Subverting Insanity, Subverting the Human: Black masculinity and the ethnological foundations of Western psychiatry This paper traces the philosophical underpinnings driving the systemic psychopathologisation of Black and other racialised males within the fields of psychology, psychiatry, and ethnology, from their emergence during the late 18th century through to the first half of the 19th century. Reading this genealogy through Sylvia Wynter’s concept of Man as supercultural abstraction, I argue that the very notion of insanity, by virtue of its initial articulation in relation to a Eurocentric philosophical anthropology of the secular subject, was rendered inapplicable to the ‘inferior’ ontologies of racialised otherness.

In contrast to both dominant frameworks and landmark critiques in the philosophy of psychiatry (e.g., Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilisation; Bruce Cohen’s Psychiatric Hegemony) which persist in their retention of a claim to universality, I confront this unsubstantiated assumption by demonstrating how the field’s historical emergence was predicated upon a process of erasure which rendered the raced and gendered category of Black maleness as the ontological antithesis of white humanity, defined by Tommy J. Curry as the Man-Not. This phenomenon, I maintain, was paradoxically legitimised by the denial of mental illness as a possibility amongst racialised peoples. Ethnologists and psychiatrists constructed the non-white psyche as a non-entity, departing from the Rousseauian notion of tabula rasa and the Lockian view of mental illness as a disorder of reasoning towards a concept I term mens nullius, understood as a vacuous category within which insanity could not de facto exist, and onto which the Eurocentric episteme could perpetually graft its internal contradictions for the purposes of maintaining a hierarchy of being governed by whiteness. Altogether, my intervention provides a corrective theoretical foundation and research methodology for the cultivation of subversive understandings of insanity in relation to race and gender which fundamentally disrupts both hegemonic accounts and existing critiques of Western psy-disciplines.

Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities

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Reclaiming Agency: Postcolonial feminism and the painting of women from Iran, Iraq, Egypt, and Afghanistan

University of Dundee

Mahtab Karami

Art history has long been dominated by narratives celebrating male artists’ successes while marginalising women’s artistic contributions. This exclusion extends even to feminist art history, which have largely centred on Euro-American artists, leaving women artists from the so-called Middle East underrepresented or misrepresented. Within feminist discourses, from Linda Nochlin’s influential essay, ‘Why Are There No Great Women Artists?’ (1971) to recent books such as Women Artists (2019), A world of our own: women artists against the odds (2024), Western women’s artistic agency remains the primary focus.

Meanwhile, non-Western women artists continue to be framed through limiting, essentialist categorisations rather than recognised as active agents within global contemporary art.

Building on Nazli Madkour’s critique (1991) of the Western-centric notion of artistic greatness (as defined by Linda Nochlin, 1971), this paper questions/addresses the limitations of white feminist theory, which often overlooks the cultural and political specificities of non-Western art practices.

Focusing on women artists from Iran, Iraq,

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Egypt and Afghanistan – countries with shared colonial histories and ongoing sociopolitical struggles – it examines how painting has become an accessible and impactful medium for subverting both patriarchal and colonial narratives.

Drawing on postcolonial feminist perspectives (Yeğenoğlu, 1998) and the importance of exploring cultural nuances and intersectional feminist theories in studying Middle Eastern art (Özpinar & Kelly, 2020), this study explores the artistic agency of figures such as Soheila Sokhanvari (b. 1964, Iran), Kubra Khademi (b. 1989, Afghanistan), Hayv Kahraman (b. 1981, Iraq), Rozita Sharafjahan (b. 1962, Iran), and Inji Aflatoun (1924–1989, Egypt).

Through visual analysis, it highlights how these artists deploy subversive strategies – such as irony, reappropriation, and political critique – to challenge dominant, misleading representations of women and resist systemic oppression. By doing so, this paper disrupts Western-centric narratives of liberation while offering alternative feminist lens rooted in local histories and struggles.

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Notes

Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities

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A Decolonial Archive? The Case of Frank Willett’s Excavations at Ita Yemoo

University of St Andrews

Samuel Reilly

The multifaceted relationship between archival records and the exercise of power has been exhaustively theorised (Foucault, 1972; Derrida, 1995), with postcolonial scholarship paying particular attention to the colonial archive: subverting the ‘official record’ by exposing its distortions and manipulations, as well as its silences and absences (Spivak, 1985; Richards, 1993). Less examined, however, are the discrete challenges posed by archival sources from the period in the mid 20th century at the end of empire, when nations across the globe had become engaged in processes of decolonisation.

This paper attempts to situate within theoretical discourses of the archive and its relation to imperialism a long-forgotten cache of archival materials and archaeological finds, on long-term loan to the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow but now slated for repatriation to the National Museum, Ife. They relate to excavations at the important site of Ita Yemoo in the ancient city of Ile-Ife, Nigeria, conducted from 1957–63 (straddling the year of Nigerian independence in 1960) by Frank Willett, who would later become the Hunterian’s first professional director. Seen one way, Willett’s unpublished notes evince an urge towards the empirical, taxonomic classification of West African material culture that has be understood as a direct inheritance from empire by the discipline of African art study. However, the ambitious yet unwieldy attempt to provide a comprehensive classification of Ife pottery decorations that is documented within this archive resists any simple reading according to postcolonial archival theory. In light of recent revivals of interest in Willett’s legacy by scholars in Nigeria and elsewhere (Ugiomoh, 2008; Roth, Chouin and Ogunfolakan, 2021; Olaleye-Otunla 2022), this paper will consider this archive as a case study for how knowledge produced in the immediate aftermath of empire might be re-evaluated and reframed today – one made more pertinent by the forthcoming transfer of these archival materials to Nigeria, alongside the repatriated objects to which they refer.

University of Edinburgh

Erin Symons

Continuity, Crisis, and African Canonicity: T. S. Eliot and Chinua Achebe’s No Longer at Ease Commentators on the history of AngloAmerican literary studies have typically organized their accounts of the twentieth century around a perceived ‘crisis’ in the discipline originating in the 1960s and ‘70s. It was in this period that the rise of continental theory and the emergence of new national literatures from formerly colonized nations provided ammunition for a broad ideological challenge to the formal approaches and canonical revaluations advanced – in the British context – by socalled ‘Cambridge Critics’ like F. R. Leavis and T. S. Eliot, who had increasingly come to be associated with a conservative tradition of insular literary ‘Englishness.’

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What has been missed in typical accounts proclaiming ongoing disciplinary ‘crisis,’ however, is that in colonial contexts, the very model of English criticism that the decolonization of the syllabus was meant to overturn in fact played a key role in the formation of new national literatures by postcolonial writers in Africa in the 1950s and ‘60s. Using Chinua Achebe’s novel No Longer at Ease (1960) as a case study, I seek to subvert existing disciplinary orthodoxies by documenting the ways in which a generation of Nigerian writers drew on Eliot’s criticism to recontextualize, revise, and ultimately supersede the traditional English canon in the period of colonial independence.

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III a

Outwith the Lines Chair Eeva Savolainen

14:00 - 15:30 Seminar Suite A

University of St Andrew

Chloe Akers-Brewer

The Fish Seller’s Funeral and Books that Don’t Exist: Ephemera and the new book history Dusty old antiquarians studying luxurious tomes of intellectual or theological significance in the world’s great libraries: is there a discipline less subversive than this picture of the history of the early modern book? In many ways, book history deserves its fusty reputation. The meticulous compilation of bibliographical databases, joy in the discovery of obscure and as-yetuncatalogued editions and library fieldwork are, after all, the bread and butter of the scholarly bibliophile. But what about the loose-leaf printed works which were never intended to be collected by libraries?

Pieces of paper produced for a single day’s use, later re-purposed as scrap or tossed away as rubbish? How can we trace these fleeting objects, and what do they say about early modern social practices?

Second Year Symposium

This paper presents a sampling of the foci and methods employed in my research, which subvert – and invert – book historical norms. My work explores festive print. As well as pointing the lens at printed scraps which only just exist or exist no longer, I foreground the celebrations of the ordinary people of early modern Europe. This turns on its head a historiography of festivity which focuses on royal, ducal and papal celebrations: my work is, at its heart, a statement about class. Telling stories about the everyman through the transient print of everyday life: this is the new book history.

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Achieving Reflection – The ecocritical potential of videogame achievements

University of Glasgow

Sarah Bresnahan

Achievements have become a ubiquitous part of videogames and are now required by most gaming platforms and distributors.

Current scholarship on achievements has primarily focused on the ‘achievement hunter’ phenomenon (Peltonen & Nummenmaa, 2020; Jukić, 2024) and achievements’ impact on players’ intrinsic motivation (Jakobsson, 2011; Blair, 2011).

However, there has been limited discussion on the critical inflections introduced to game texts by achievements’ responses to players’ in-game actions and decisions.

This paper resists the scholarly relegation of achievements as an ‘optional’ metagame (Montola et al., 2011; Björk, 2011; Jakobsson, 2011) and examines their subversive, ecocritical potential in critiquing players’ choices and actions toward non-human others. Whilst there are multiple achievements that criticise players’ skills or use meta-textual humour, few employ an environmentally conscious inflection. By adopting this, achievement systems can prompt moments of critical reflection during gameplay that challenge players’ ideological understandings and highlight their wider social and ethical implications (Fleck & Fitzpatrick, 2010; Mekler, Iacovides & Bopp, 2018).

To demonstrate this, I explore two achievements from games centring human-nonhuman relationships during ecological apocalypses. After extracting blood from the gigantic creature in The Wandering Village (Stray Fawn Studios, 2025), the ‘Parasite’ achievement enacts a chastisement of the player through its socially charged title. Opposingly, ‘Comfort’ in Neva (Nomada Studios, 2024) reframes the players’ destruction of corrupted, humanoid statues into acts of empathy, despite the depicted humanoids’ environmental violence. The prevalent gameplay mechanics of resource extraction and destructible objects in these games trigger achievements that reframe player actions, encouraging players to re-examine their response-ability to non-human others (Haraway, 2012).

I conclude by proposing that achievements are underutilised in addressing players’ in-game actions and critiquing established game mechanics to foster more ecologically aware gameplay.

I also acknowledge the limitations of an explicit reward system in altering player ideologies and videogame conventions.

The Subtle Subversion of Paratexts

University of Glasgow

Daniel Fook Boon

In 1987, Gérard Genette, a French literary theorist, introduced the concept of paratexts, which he defined as the sum of both peritext and epitext — textual elements that frame and contextualize a primary text. These elements include front and back covers, titles, subtitles, the author's name, the publisher’s note, prefaces, footnotes, page numbers, bibliographies, and other textual features that guide interpretation. Paratexts function as reading aids, reflecting the illocutionary intentions of their editors and shaping the reader’s engagement with the text. Although they are ubiquitous in literary works, paratexts often remain unnoticed (hidden in plain sight) despite their significant influence on the reading experience. Virtually no literary text is presented to readers in complete isolation from paratextual framing.

This phenomenon is also evident in biblical manuscripts, where paratexts structure and mediate the text to elicit particular interpretive and perlocutionary responses. Among the most comprehensive paratextual systems in ancient manuscripts is the Euthalian apparatus, which supplements and organizes scriptural texts. Readers often assume they engage with texts in a state of neutrality; however, in the Catholic Epistles, for instance, the Letter of James is frequently positioned as the frontispiece of the collection, accompanied by its own preface. To examine how such paratextual features influence the reading experience, this paper focuses on two components of the Euthalian apparatus: the κεφάλαια-τίτλοι (chapter titles) and the ὑπόθεσις (hypothesis). Through this test case, I aim to demonstrate the subversive nature of paratexts in shaping textual interpretation.

Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities

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III b

Weaving Identity Chair Gwenffrewi Morgan

14:00 - 15:30 Seminar Suite B

University of Glasgow

Maria Elena Bertoli

Understanding Archaeological Practices: Weaving on a warp-weighted loom Experimental archaeology developed as part of the positivistic research approach applied within the processual archaeology of the 1960s and 1970s.

Experimental archaeology consists in performing practical tests to address archaeological questions and gain a better understanding of the past. This approach has been criticised by proponents of the post- processual movement since the beginning of the 1980s. the main criticism of experimental archaeology was that the experiments were influenced by subjective values of the present, which inevitably would have affected the outcome of the experiment. Therefore, various scholars began to question what constituted experimental archaeology. Today, experimental archaeology is considered a valuable practice-based research method, frequently applied in the field of textile research. Textile experimental archaeology is crucial to investigate production processes in the past and the functionality of textile tools.

In my research, I will use textile experimental archaeology to investigate the modes and times of the adoption of wool in prehistoric northern Italy. The transition from plant to wool fibre textile economies in northern Italy during the Bronze Age (c.2200-1200 BCE) is a crucial economic juncture and would have affected many aspects of daily life, such as social organization of textile production and animal husbandry and forms of breeding. Rare wool fabrics in northern Italy come from a few sites of the Middle-Late Bronze Age. However, changes in the shape and weight of numerous textile tools found in these settlements suggest that, from the Early Bronze Age, wool played a consistent role in their economy. To verify this hypothesis, I will use experimental archaeology as the main research method. In my research, I will weave linen and woollen textiles on a reconstruction of a prehistoric warpweighted loom, to understand if the textile tools found in the settlements were more suitable to weave one fibre or the other.

In 1873, a dramatic rise in coal prices resulted in a coal famine. Factories were forced to close, and impoverished families suffered through a fuel-scarce winter. Unsurprisingly, coal companies became a prime target for public anger. However, elements of the middle-class press identified an alternative culprit — the coal miner.

University of Stirling

Joseph Brett-Demetre

Rags, Bonnets, Fowls and Machines A doll house tour of the Coal Famine

In my thesis, I have used frame analysis to examine this anti-miner press narrative.

Whilst this methodology has given my research focus and structure, it has rarely translated into compelling presentations.

Explaining frame functions, framing devices and reasoning devices can be dull and disengaging.

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This video is an attempt to bypass the tedious technicalities of frame analysis.

Instead of presenting my findings through framing devices, the video will instead guide the audience through a series of thematically ordered (digital) rooms which ‘house’ my newspaper extracts.

Each room’s extracts reveal a crucial component of coal famine coverage.

Through this presentation, viewers will be able to visualise how each component contributed to a wider anti-miner narrative.

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‘The Waterfall Laments’

University of Edinburgh

Matt Zurowski

The Waterfall Laments is a musical performance that reimagines Cumha Choire an Easa (The Lament for the Waterfall Corrie), an early example of Gaelic nature poetry by 17th-century poet and piper Iain Dall Mackay — Am Pìobaire Dall (The Blind Piper). Linked to a pìobaireachd (piping piece) of the same name, the poem reflects the structural and rhythmic conventions of ceòl mòr (the classical music of the Highland bagpipe) in a verbal form, offering an early example of pìobaireachd poetry.

Transmitted orally and preserved in various archival versions, the poem frames a dialogue between bard and landscape.

Mackay’s personal lament for a lost patron expands into a meditation on societal and ecological loss, mourning the decline of clan systems and the fraying of reciprocal relationships between humans and the more-than-human world. The corrie emerges as a voice of lament, articulating the breakdown of long-held systems of ecological and cultural stewardship.

Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities

At a turning point, the bard plays for the corrie, and the poem transforms into a rich sonic evocation of the landscape, drawing on the conventions of Gaelic praise poetry.

Mackay’s musical language—cascading rhythmic adjectives—mirrors the structural flow of ceòl mòr.

This performance embraces the mutability of oral tradition through a hybrid composition for Scottish Smallpipes, voice, reel-to-reel tape, and electronics.

Fragmenting and looping material from both the poem and its pìobaireachd counterpart, The Waterfall Laments explores how ecological knowledge from the Gaelic oral tradition persists and adapts in contemporary creative practice.

This approach foregrounds a fluid, collective mode of knowledge—where human and more-than-human voices converge to convey the acoustic and ecological richness of the historic Gaelic landscape. In doing so, the piece reconsiders the poem as a living form, responsive to oral culture, piping traditions, contemporary environmental change, and evolving understandings of place.

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III c

Wild! Research: Three Creative Presentations Chair Meike Van Lit

14:00 - 15:30 Seminar Suite C

The Usually Unseen: A practice-based enquiry into the invisible labour of operatic worlding and unworlding

University of Dundee

Aaron Goddard

This practice-led PhD is a SGSAH funded Collaborative Doctoral Award at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, University of Dundee and in partnership with Scottish Opera. The project is supervised

by Professor Maria Fusco (Principal) at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design (University of Dundee) and Aurelien Froment at Edinburgh College of Art (The University of Edinburgh).

This PhD project utilises experimental essay-film as primary method to investigate gaps in the representation of invisible and informal labour through the close study of marginal spaces and practices in large scale theatre production.

This builds from my own lived experience working as a backstage labourer in order to explore representations of class, queerness, labour and visibility of labour.

Second Year Symposium

I seek to reevaluate terms of theatricality, dramaturgy, diegesis and scenography from a fragmentary perspective of labouring bodies, providing a basis for new practice-led outcomes which forefront marginal, incomplete sources of knowledge and the socio-political present of the usually unseen. Using queer and working-class embodied research methods which theorise the status of prop objects as discontinuous and the collapsibility of theatrical worlds as a framework, I investigate the margins of diegetic reality. This research takes form through a critical engagement with structural and contextual strategies of citation, assemblage, fragmentation, and deconstruction as explored through contemporary essayistic filmmaking discourse, resulting as generative interruptions which respond to cyclical renewals of theatrical continuity as cultural and industrial practices.

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University of the Highlands and Islands

Rebecca Cornwell

(Re)(con)figuring the Researcher: Finding joy in relational becoming Barad stated that diffraction ‘troubles dichotomies’ (Barad, 2014: 68), drawing extensively on their deep knowledge of quantum physics to develop a diffractive approach to research. When working across disciplines, Barad emphasized the importance of attentiveness to disciplinary nuances, stating that ‘it is crucial that in using a diffractive methodology one is attentive to fine details of different disciplinary approaches. What is needed are respectful engagements with different disciplinary practices’ (Barad, 2007: 93).

This perspective challenges traditional notions of research, where ‘data is often treated as passive matter to be interpreted’ (Taguchi, 2012: 269) and lacks agency. In contrast, diffraction positions data as ‘a co-constitutive force, working with and upon the researcher, as the researcher is working with the data’ (Taguchi, 2012: 272).

‘There is no 'I' that exists outside of the diffraction pattern, observing it, telling its story. In an important sense, this story in its ongoing (re)patterning is (re)(con) figuring me’ (Barad, 2014: 181).

This film is an exploration of my evolving relationality with my research process, and my ongoing (re)(con)figuration as a scientist within the environmental humanities. In embracing diffraction, I find joy in (re)positioning myself not only as a researcher, but as a human entangled within the more-than-human world. This process invites me to move beyond rigid disciplinary boundaries and into a space of wonder, curiosity, and relational becoming.

University of Glasgow

Gala Morris

Resonant Landscapes: A sonic exploration of conservation and heritage Resonant Landscapes: A sonic exploration of conservation and heritage is an immersive, interactive performance that explores conservation and heritage through sound.

Participants will use a digital keyboard programmed with field recordings from Scotland and Aotearoa New Zealand, layering environmental sounds such as wind, water, birds, and human movement to construct their own sonic landscapes.

This experience challenges the dominance of visual representations in archaeology and conservation initiatives, emphasising sound’s role in shaping landscape memory and perception.

This interactive performance will use sound samples from field recordings taken during my fieldwork. My research encourages the decolonising of conservation initiatives through creative practice, and this performance critiques

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the use of static, historical baselines in landscape management and invites a more fluid, sensory-based approach.

By actively composing soundscapes, participants engage with conservation not as a fixed, textual discourse but as an evolving, participatory experience. The performance highlights how landscapes are not only seen but also heard, and how sound can deepen our understanding and connection with the world around us. Through this multisensory approach, participants will be encouraged to reflect on their own relationships with landscapes, questioning how soundscapes influence memory, placemaking, and environmental awareness.

This performance ultimately seeks to foster a more holistic and intuitive engagement with conservation and heritage management that transcends conventional frameworks.

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Notes

Second Year Symposium

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IV a

Bodies Bodies Bodies Chair Heather Maycock

15:50 - 17:30 Seminar Suite A

Me, Myself, and I: Being a disabled researcher in the academic world

University of Glasgow

Ashley Brown

Academics usually separate their research from their experience of being a researcher, compartmentalising the different parts of themselves that go into the process of producing a piece of writing. Despite being told to consider our positionality and how we relate to our research, we are not taught how to do this, resulting in us awkwardly grappling with where the ‘me’ comes into our work.

As a disabled researcher, I’m forced to face up to my positionality, in the most literal ways. From managing my energy levels, to considering things like agency and disability more carefully in my sources, to working out where I can actually carry out my research, I think about the relationship between myself and my work all the time.

This, and the inherently ableist nature of academia, have prompted me to develop subversive practices. In looking at masculine practices at Scottish universities in the post-Reformation

period, I have spent a long time considering the embodied experiences of the men living and working there, thinking about manhood in terms of projection, ability and performance. This is heavily influenced by my own experiences as a disabled researcher. Outside of my immediate research, I also dedicate considerable effort to trying to improve the experiences of PGRs, utilising my voice and putting myself in difficult situations to make a point and precipitate change.

This paper will invite the audience to consider what the life of a disabled researcher might look like, based on my own experiences. I will talk through how I relate to my research and how my experiences as a disabled PGR shape my research. I will signpost ways in which everyone can bring in more subversive elements into their research and practice, interrogating current systems and behaviours to advocate for inclusive change.

University of Glasgow and University of Edinburgh

Frances Darling

Intellectual Disability’s Challenge(s) to Philosophy Given widespread historical and contemporary injustice and violations incurred by disabled people – material and epistemic – theoretical resources which aim to account for various kinds of wrongs, and ameliorate injustice, should have significant value for the pursuit of disability justice. However, despite this potential value for disability justice, I submit that this will likely be forestalled without acknowledging and moving to address the neglect of intellectual disability in philosophy, particularly in epistemology, which has been slower than other sub-fields in dedicating attention to disability. This neglect incurs the cost of some existing justice-aimed accounts in epistemological theorising being unable account for the ways in which people with intellectual disabilities can be epistemically wronged, as they are not considered to be knowers. I sketch out two varieties of exclusion of intellectual disability in philosophical theorising – one direct, and one indirect – and demonstrate why these are significant challenges to the pursuit of disability justice. I then argue that correcting the neglect in inquiry that contributes to these exclusions requires at least two things: (i) challenging foundational philosophical assumptions and frameworks which exclude people with intellectual disabilities from the scope of knowing; (ii) acknowledging shortcomings around the formal category of intellectual disability.

Second Year Symposium

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Constructing Crip Design Methodologies: Can we achieve design justice in the academy?

University of Edinburgh

Hannah Duffew

Design justice and crip technoscience destabilise design and its processes. Both arenas reject hegemonic narratives that centre the design “expert” above the user. They reconceptualise productivity, knowledge exchange, and actively renegotiate power dynamics within design processes and their resulting systems, artefacts, or infrastructure (CostanzaChock, 2020; Hamwraie & Fritsch, 2019).

However, academic spaces are constructed to entrench power. Central to the dominant model of scholarship is the very notion of higher expertise.

Simultaneously, the barriers to academia experienced by disabled people are extensive, particularly for disabled People of Colour, Black, Indigenous, and/or working class disabled people. Disabled marginalisation exists within and beyond physical infrastructure, and concurrently deepens ableist conceptions of the

lazy, inadequate disabled person and prevents disabled knowledge from being disseminated. Cripistemological critiques of these barriers in academia include time expectations, the construction of policy and protocol, digital infrastructure, knowledge exchange, and pedagogical methodologies (Khúc, 2023; Rogers, 2023; Wernick, 2023; Mills & Sanchez, 2023).

Through this paper I will be discussing the frictions between crip technoscientific and design justice methodologies, and the realities of working on a PhD thesis within an academic institution, where disabled people are often denied entry. Furthermore, I question my situatedness as a disabled PhD researcher working with disabled participants, and reflect upon further tensions that emerge between academic expectation and our varied lived realities.

The central question I ask is, can we actually follow design justice in the academy?

University of Edinburgh

Angus Gibson

Silenced Expertise: Testimonial injustice in sport The purpose of my paper is twofold. First, I wish to demonstrate that testimonial injustice as a result of male hegemony in sport is possible, and that sport through the lens of epistemic injustice gives us a fruitful analysis of other reported injustices facing women in sport. Secondly, I wish to contribute to the wider discussion of testimonial injustice by presenting instances of testimonial injustice in sport that are crucially different to standard cases of testimonial injustice. The first case involves the devaluation of a speaker’s testimony based on gender prejudice, yet this devaluation does not directly dispute the content of the testimony given, as such this represents a novel injustice arising out of familiar dynamics. The second case, however, does not involve the direct devaluation of a single agent. Rather, it is representative of a type of testimonial injustice arising out of distinct sporting dynamics whereby speaker’s credibility is pegged to their athletic ability. As such, this represents a familiar injustice arising out of novel dynamics.

Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities

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University of St Andrews and University of Stirling

Emma Holmes

Do we have a collective duty to try to subvert oppressive beauty norms in how we dress or otherwise present ourselves?

IV b

Some beauty norms have an oppressive function. For example, the norm that women should be thin, constantly dieting and ‘watching what they eat’. Some of these oppressive norms are partly sustained through our compliance with them. In the case of dieting, our policing of ourselves and others helps to keep the norm relevant and powerful. So, some have argued that with norms like these, we ought to try to subvert them – that is, we have a collective duty to present in ways that violate them (for example, by refusing to go on a diet).

There are many views like this in the context of beauty and aesthetic presentation. For some examples: Anne Eaton (2016) says we ought to try and change what we find attractive to be more inclusive of different body shapes; Zheng (2018) argues that we have a responsibility to “push the boundaries” of our social roles to help undermine oppressive norms, for example, wearing “gender-transgressive clothing”; Manne (2024) argues that it is “good” (as well as “cool, gutsy, admirable”) to refuse to try to become thinner. Similarly, it’s a common idea among feminists that women ought to refrain from shaving their body hair. So, the view that we ought to subvert beauty norms is reasonably prevalent.

Data (T)error Chair Samuel Reilly

15:50 - 17:30 Seminar Suite B

University of Edinburgh

Billy Franks

Exploring the Normative Pressure Enacted by Institutional Arrangements of Support in the Creative Industries The rapid development of creativity support tools (CSTs) compels creative practitioners to frequently adapt and advance the digital skills that facilitate their practice. Nascent research in human-computer interaction (HCI) has framed this a normative pressure enacted by digital tools, their designers, and the sociocultural contexts of their use. In recognising the relationship between creative practitioners and CSTs as one imbued with power, interaction design researchers have spotlit the actions taken by creative practitioners to subvert the normative pressure of digital tooling. Sharing, hacking, play, misuse, and appropriation are among the many subversive behaviours foregrounded in this recent work, which brings to light questions on the possibility of designing tools for deliberate misuse, the role of peer-to-peer support among creative practitioners in (de)constructing normative pressure, and the pursuit of more equitable design futures. In this paper, we consider these subversive behaviours in relation to new forms of institutional support for innovation in the screen and performance sectors of the creative industries. In so doing, we develop a framework for future research that aims to explore how new institutional arrangements of digital tools and sociotechnical support enact normative pressure on their users, how creative practitioners navigate this pressure, and to what end they share their experience with their peers.

Second Year Symposium

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University of Glasgow

William Gopal

Testimonial Injustice and Large Language Models Recently, testimonial injustice (TI) has been applied to AI systems, such as decision-making-support systems and large-language-models (LLMs) within healthcare (Byrnes, 2023; Proost, 2023; Walmsley, 2023), the COMPAS recidivism algorithm (Symons, 2022), and generative AI models (Kay, 2024). Extant accounts of algorithmic TI identify the morally problematic epistemic issue as being when the user of an AI system mistakenly assumes an AI system is, in some sense, at an epistemic advantage in contrast to another human, such that they’re assigned a credibility deficit – call these Mistaken Assumption Accounts. In this paper, I focus on how algorithmic TI emerges in quotidian uses of LLMs, such as ChatGPT.

In the pars destruens, I offer counterexamples to Mistaken Assumption Accounts, highlighting their extensional inadequacy. In the pars construens, I provide an alternative which fares better: Undue Acknowledgement as Testifier.

To achieve this, I draw upon work in human-computer-interaction and feminist science and technology studies to show how user-experience design and the current social imaginary of AI contributes to algorithmic TI. Consequently, this paper subverts the current focus in the literature (a discussion of how proposed conditions for TI obtain emerge from issues of bias within training data or the opacity of AI systems) by highlighting how the interactive relationships between humans and LLMs enable TI.

Transparent Data Cleaning Using Generative AI: The challenging case of the 'knife crime' newspaper corpus

University of Glasgow

Aleksei Konshin

Within the field of Corpus Linguistics, it is essential to employ a variety of ready-touse software, such as AntConc (Anthony, 2024) or Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff et al., 2014), to analyse vast quantities of textual data. While available toolboxes offer functions for creating, annotating, and examining datasets, they lack capabilities for removing unwanted texts.

This raises a specific question: what should one do if, after collecting texts over a six-month period, they discover that almost half of the data must be removed due to unanticipated sampling errors? What steps can be taken when no technical solution or textbooks are available to guide the process? These are the pressing questions that required prompt answers after the creation of the 'knife crime' newspaper corpus.

The sampling errors were caused by 'semantically ambiguous' (Kantner et al., 2011) search terms, which introduced significant 'noise' into the dataset.

For example, the search term 'puncture

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wound' mostly referred to news about animal attacks; and 'stab' introduced many football-related texts due to its use in expressions like 'stabbed the ball', etc.

Instead of outsourcing the data cleaning, the appropriate course of action was to establish a tailored technical solution – a Python script created using generative artificial intelligence, ChatGPT (OpenAI, 2024). The script is adapted to the corpus analysis toolkit AntConc (Anthony, 2024), which displays specified search terms or expressions in context in the 'Key Word in Context' (KWIC) along with filenames.

The simple principle behind the script is to generate lines of context containing expressions that indicate irrelevant texts, copy and paste these lines along with filenames into an Excel spreadsheet, and run the script to automatically move the files to a specified folder. This semiautomatic, supervised solution harnesses the power of AI while enabling the creation of records for moved files, thereby allowing researchers to keep track of their decisions.

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What happens when your archive does not pre-exist your research? When there is no index and no established norms of access and use? In my research on industrial decline and working class life in Pondicherry’s textile mills, I have routinely encountered this situation. The archives of the mills lie outside formal archival systems, fragmented across offices, homes and the crumbling structures of the mills themselves. There they are consumed by termites and mold, sometimes damaged beyond recovery by natural calamities and everyday neglect, resting cheek by jowl with other rusty remnants of an industrial past. They stubbornly resist forms of archivization that the conventions of historical research rest upon, calling for a reimagination of the archive and our ways of engaging with it. They subvert established conventions about how historical knowledge is constituted, accessed and interpreted.

University of St Andrews

Bharat Sundararajan

What are you looking for?: Archiving Pondicherry's industrial past

Rather than seeing this as another manifestation of institutional neglect and dysfunction in the global south, I argue in this paper that the story of this ‘archive’ – its fragmentation, its silences and its incoherences – is part of the story of Pondicherry’s deindustrialization.

The city’s growing disconnect with its industrial past is mirrored in the vagaries of its archive. I propose that the partial and fragmented materiality of this archive, often at odds with its evidentiary value, is a significant key to understanding the historical processes that have produced this paper trail. The archive, in its failure, embodies and enacts one of the long term consequences of deindustrialization.

Working With and Against the Legal Archive: An 1858 trial for procuring abortion in Linlithgow

University of Glasgow

Rebecca Williamson

Content warning — Discussions of suicide and abortion.

Margaret Taylor, a 21-year-old domestic servant working in Linlithgow, died on the 6th of September 1858 in the home she shared with Janet Reid, her mistress, and Janet’s son, William. Before her death, Margaret confided in her mother that she was miscarrying following an abortion performed on her by William Reid, the father of the child, with the assistance of a local surgeon, Thomas Girdwood. Upon hearing of Margaret’s death, Girdwood committed suicide by taking a lethal dose of laudanum. Reid, after attempting to flee Falkirk, was eventually charged with murder and procuring abortion. He was found guilty of the latter charge and sentenced to 7 years penal servitude.

Second Year Symposium

In this much abridged version of events, Margaret Taylor features at the heart of the story. However, in assessing the archive of sources pertaining to this case, she is practically nowhere to be found. This paper represents an attempt to grapple with this reality and consider the myriad of reasons why Margaret’s life was sidelined in the process of Reid’s trial, and how the construction of the archive cemented this erasure. Inspired by the work of scholars such as Julia Laite and Saidiya Hartman, I consider the different approaches historians can take in subverting, re-working, or working ‘with’ oppressive archival structures. Using Margaret Taylor’s erasure as a case study, I explore the extent to which historians can center marginalised individuals in historical narratives when the only source material available renders them irrelevant.

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IV c

History, Hoarding and Haulage Chair Chloe Akers-Brewer

15:50 - 17:30 Seminar Suite C

Archiving Agnes Owens: New insight into a neglected Scottish writer

University of Strathclyde

Laura MacDonald

Oral history is a research method which passes on information through the spoken word. It often provides the opportunity to hear from people whose perspectives were not already recorded in written histories. In this sense, oral history as a research methodology has the power to subvert established narratives.

This paper is based on the oral history interviews conducted for my PhD research on late-twentieth-century Scottish writer, Agnes Owens. In her writing, Owens gave voice to characters from the margins of working-class life, but she too was a marginal voice in the literary sphere.

She was relatively neglected by critics and publishers because she was seen as a Scottish, working-class, wife and mother who happened to write, and was frequently reduced to being read through this biography.

Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities

Although Owens died in 2014 and so it is not possible to interview the author herself, I am in the process of interviewing her family, friends, and writing collaborators to gain new understandings of who Owens was, how she worked, and how she creatively responded to her own lived experience. Owens did not give many interviews during her lifetime, so these new interviews provide information which is currently lacking in the public and academic domains.

This paper will give insight into Owens’s biography and writing processes by drawing on clips from interviews conducted with one of Owens’s sons, John Crosbie. Crosbie donated the materials acquisitioned by the newly established Agnes Owens Archive. He also attended writing groups with Owens in the past.

Crosbie’s reflections help to map Owens’s life events and influences, which aids in contextualising her oeuvre and individual items in the archive’s collection. Crosbie’s personal, idiosyncratic perspectives on Owens and her work help to challenge the reductive ways in which some critics have previously discussed her literary output.

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‘We just look good in a book’: Research Fatigue and Post-Conflict Fetishisation. Reflections on an oral history of West Belfast, Northern Ireland

University of Edinburgh

Sarah Mason

The academic persona seeks difference; indeed, in the pursuit of self-preservation within the academy, one must always cultivate a relative difference, a subversive edge. This is, of course, to take the nihilistic route. As we work under the yoke of academic production and engagement (Clark, 2008) we too subscribe to the cyclical obsession with new form, new method, alterity and the hungry devour of subject material.

The UKRI ‘Impact Agenda’ and the growing business in ‘Public Engagement Practice’ has produced a monolithic (and oppressive) structure that rewards and venerates ‘subversion’ as a form of ‘innovation’. As summarised by Hopkins, “the new cannot necessarily respond to the same old questions”, (Hopkins et al., 2021).

Subversive research practice, in the echochamber of its own subjectivity, has created another schema to which researchers must subscribe for fear of being castigated as part of the old-guard (Leeman, 2010).

West Belfast, Northern Ireland, is illustrative of this growing dilemma. The designated ‘Hot Spot’, (Morrissey, 1997) of the Northern Irish Conflict, this region has drawn a wide pool of international scholarship and sustained academic interest. However, in 2012, the West Belfast Forum, spoke of a ‘growing unease in regard to the scale of continued Troubles research’. Beiner and McBride have also identified an increasing pathologisation of a ‘plagued Irish condition’, which has reinforced academic voyeurism and conflict-centrism (Beiner, 2009, McBride, 2010).

Following more than 30 oral history interviews in the region, I found a growing disgruntlement amongst community-based organisations to continued academic interest. Susie McCroy, manager of the Falls Women’s Centre, summarised the issue bluntly: “the smart one’s come and go, they don’t really care about us here, we just look good in a book”. Northern Ireland is one of the most researched This has had a detrimental impact areas in the world (Jackson, 2001); for conflict and post-conflict studies. however, who is benefitting from this Conflicted societies have always stimulated research? Will ‘subversive’ methods, and obsessive forms of research with victims ‘revised’ techniques assuage the problem and survivors exhibiting irritation to or are we plagued by our own self-interest sustained academic intrusion (Brewer, 2011). and commitment to academic output?

Second Year Symposium

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Tea and Tennent’s: Considering the validity of ‘chitchat’ for interviewing techniques within oral histories and ethnography

University of Glasgow

Cian Pappenheim

This paper highlights the emergent moments of socialisation which arise between interview subject and interviewer in the course of a research project employing oral history and ethnographic methodologies. Throughout any oral histories interview series, not everything recorded by the microphone is voiced exclusively in response to the interviewer’s research questions. Chitchat and small talk are exchanged by consequence of the irrepressible human inclination to strike up a rapport through conversation, regardless of context.

Though on the surface, such a phenomenon may seem to subvert the research goals of the scholar by producing primary material surplus to the information they seek to extract, this paper presents the case that exchanges of this sort retain their own value in relation to the overarching research project and constitute valid ethnographic practice in their own right.

Further ethical considerations are afforded to the application of academic lenses to these moments of intimacy necessary in presenting such material as legitimate research. This process is scrutinised via the use of my own doctoral research in the field of Jewish ethnography as a case study, which employs literary close reading techniques in the analysis of testimony often denied legitimacy by traditional practices of historiography. Finally, in determining whether these techniques (if they can be cynically referred to as such) work to subvert academic methodologies or, in fact, reappropriate human socialisation within its structures, reactions are solicited from my former interview subjects to viewing their conversation recontextualised as a piece of scholarship. These insights are presented in tandem with my own reflections upon the afterlife of our acquaintanceship in the halls of academia.

Subverting the Gender Order and the Autobiographical Canon in the Life-Writing of Scottish Suffrage Campaigners

University of Glasgow

Hannah Speed

This paper explores how the Scottish suffragists and suffragettes challenged the gender order through their actions, and autobiographical convention through their later writings. It argues that the Scottish suffragists and suffragettes used their life-writing as a feminist tool to celebrate the achievements of other women and the importance of relationships (family, friendship and romantic) to the campaign. They constructed the self through integration in communities and collective action.

While literary critics have traditionally privileged autobiographical writing which presents the unified, isolated, coherent self-construction of ‘great’ individuals, I apply the productive theories of feminist scholars who have emphasized the value of reading autobiographies to understand how the self is curated through relationality, intersubjectivity and social networks (Friedman, 1988; Miller, 1994; Stanley, 1992).

There is a rich historiography on suffrage autobiographies. However, many of the

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foundational studies focus predominantly on how the largely London-based Women’s Social and Political Union leaders used their life-writing to build a community based around shared experiences of militancy, imprisonment, hunger strike and forcible feeding (Kean, 1994; Mayhall, 1995; Joannou, 1995).

This paper opens promising avenues for interpreting the wider British movement, through exploring alternative ways in which suffrage autobiographers built community and intersubjective identities. It examines under-used autobiographies, memoirs and oral histories of campaigners from across the movement based in Scotland: staunch constitutionalist Louisa Lumsden, WSPU member turned constitutionalist Helen Fraser, and committed militants Helen Crawfurd and Ethel Moorhead.

Ultimately, it finds that the Scottish suffragists and suffragettes were not only seeking to subvert the gender order and autobiographical tradition, but to develop more positive alternative possibilities instead.

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The Wartime Body as an Archive

Kateryna Volochniuk University of St Andrews

In this paper, I aim to reflect on the new decolonial and feminist practices, which challenge the positivist and emotionless discourse that dominates academia.

As a researcher living abroad under a humanitarian visa, amidst the ongoing war in my home country of Ukraine, I want to explore what it means to produce knowledge as a displaced person.

The subject of my PhD revolves around a precarious family archive, already fragmented by the Russian invasion.

I focus on two key concepts: family research and embodied knowledge.

Using my family archive as the primary source for this work, I approach it not as an external observer, but as an individual intimately connected to and situated within the core of the study. This positioning challenges the traditional conventions in the Humanities, which typically favour a separation between the researcher and the subject of study. Such detachment is often considered necessary for ensuring ‘objectivity’, which is viewed as essential for producing a valid analysis.

Second Year Symposium

The second part of this paper examines the intersection between the body, war, and the production of knowledge. This strategy highlights the privileges often taken for granted in academia, such as stable living conditions, adequate rest, personal safety, and reliable infrastructure — privileges that are not universally accessible.

My own fieldwork was shaped by the realities of war, with only three hours of electricity available in the morning and a similar window in the afternoon or evening to scan documents and work on my laptop. During my work in the archives, sleep deprivation imposed its own constraints, distorting my vision and influencing the selection of resources accessible to me. This interplay between physical and mental states summarises how archival research, particularly under such conditions, becomes an embodied practice, influenced by both external barriers and internal struggles.

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Poster abstracts Inaccessible Spaces in Live Music Places: Documenting disabled musicians access to live music venues in a UNESCO City of Music Glasgow Samantha Barr Glasgow’s live music culture speaks for itself. Crowned an UNESCO City of Music in 2008, the city is home to more than 30 venues, more per person than any other city globally. From one of the world’s busiest arenas, to basement bar venues and ballrooms illuminated in a neon glow, the cities live music presence is world renown.

of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD), which protects disabled persons from discrimination and enshrines persons with disabilities right to equal ‘participation in cultural life, recreation, leisure and sport’, persons with disabilities are discriminated against in everyday life. History, politics, and socio-cultural biases lead to the world’s largest minority group being actively discriminated against, known as the ‘last civil rights issue’ yet to be addressed.

However, a major issue lies beneath the surface – inaccessibility. Specifically, musicians access to live music venues in the city. Housed in listed buildings and facilitated in ‘whatever space is available’, venues currently fail musicians trying to grow their careers in the city’s live music circuit. More than a lack of wheelchair access or poorly functioning hearing loop, inaccessible venues exist due to systemic imbedded physical and attitudinal barriers.

Despite the UK Equality Act of 2010 and United Nations Convention on the Rights

This research explores the impact such discrimination has on the lives of musicians who live with disabilities, in working partnership with the Musicians Union. Utilising ethnographic qualitative research methods, centralising musicians with disabilities as experts on the issue, this research provides a place in academia for those often spoken on behalf of, and in working with those in the Glaswegian live music industries, seeks to find solutions to such discrimination in the form of recommendations.

University of Glasgow

Thumbs Up: Medium-Dark Skin Tone Dannielle Deans University of Glasgow How is race conceptualised on and offline?

Who gets to decide the boundaries and salient features of a race? What are the repercussions of being racialised in online spaces?

My current research explores race and identity in online spaces through the phenomena of race-faking and digital black face. I argue that our current online social structures force every person of colour to wear their race like a fungible costume when inhabiting online spaces. If I want people online to know that I’m not a cishet-white-male, I must put on the costume of my otherwise embodied identity through Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities

rigid and flat identity markers such as skin-coloured emojis, profile biographies and pictures. If I want to share that part of my identity in online spaces, these identity markers decide what aspects of my race are salient. They highlight the fragile and socially constructed nature of the very concept of race.

Our lives today are inextricably intertwined with the digital world, and thus our conception of our identities. This poster aims to reflect on the relationship racialised agents can have with their own identity, with a focus on people in diasporas, such as myself, who often can be or feel more estranged from the cultures associated with their race.

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You Can’t Subvert the Thesis: The ideal and real of trying to do PhD research within the UK higher education system Gabriela Domené López University of Aberdeen The state of the increasing neoliberalisation and commodification of UK higher education is concerning.

However, it is not surprising when we consider that historically UK universities have been places to develop, teach, and reinforce imperial or colonial paradigms.

Staring from this historical contextualisation of UK universities this poster considers whether any research can be truly subversive, especially when created and disseminated within the structures of an academic framework deemed to be acceptable.

One of the structures of this framework is the doctoral thesis itself, whose standards and accepted language have been determined, and little changed, since a time when few persons who were not from a specific socio-economic or ethnic background could attend UK universities.

Second Year Symposium

I consider navigating the realities of my currently ongoing fieldwork, involving living descendants of both British settlers and Indigenous communities in Latin America, in comparison to the idealised PhD and funding applications I submitted at the beginning of my studies – both fieldwork and applications also being part of the academy’s framework.

I also consider my positionality and how my personal intersections of class, ethnicity, gender, and neurotype may or may not be subversive by simply existing in UK higher education.

I ask about the increasing standard of the academy asking PhD students to be subversive in their research can ever be truly subversive, stemming from the thought that if everyone is subversive, then no one truly is.

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Zootropolis: Multi-species archaeological, ecological, and historical approaches to animals in medieval urban Scotland Jovita Fawcett University of Aberdeen In the Medieval period, urban settlements were defined and created by intense anthropogenic activity. However, humans were not the only creators of urban spaces, which were also shaped by non-human animals. Integrated studies using bioarchaeological methods and historical analysis provide an opportunity to illuminate human-animalenvironmental interactions in the past through the incorporation of complementary (and sometimes opposing) lines of evidence. Using an integrated approach of isotope archaeology, zooarchaeology, and textual analysis of historical sources, this research investigates the economic, ecological, and social spaces that animals occupied in the Burgh of Aberdeen (AD 1200 to 1500). Here, zooarchaeology informs on the various species that were present; the locations in which animals and animal-centred activities were found; the nature of animal lives and animal deaths. Stable isotope analysis of the faunal skeletal remains is shedding new light on diet, feeding ecology and movements for wild, domestic and commensal species, allowing us to examine the creation (and filling) of novel urban niche spaces, the management and provisioning of past animals, and contemporary trade networks. Bioarchaeological analyses are complemented by textual analysis of the historic Aberdeen Burgh Records (AD 1398 – 1511), allowing the examination of the social spaces occupied by animals and the ways in which animals were utilised, managed, and regarded by the Aberdonian populace.

Not Just Noise: Uncovering system in nonnative English vowel variability Xuesong Li University of Glasgow Communication between native and nonnative speakers is often framed as the sole responsibility of nonnative speakers to improve their pronunciation, while native listeners are seen as passive observers or all-knowing judges evaluating nonnative speech based on accentedness, comprehensibility, and intelligibility. A widely held view is that nonnative-accented speech is not only more variable than native speech (Bent et al., 2016) but also variable in non-coherent ways (Floccia et al., 2009), making it disruptive to communication.

This study challenges that approach by investigating vowel variability in nonnative English speech, examining whether such variability is chaotic or follows systematic patterns. Specifically, it focuses on rhythmically governed vowel variability in native and nonnative English speech.

Participants included 6 native speakers of Standard Southern British English and 48 nonnative English speakers from 8 different native language backgrounds, classified Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities

into rhythm classes: stress-timed (Arabic, Danish, Punjabi, Russian) and non-stresstimed (Bengali, Polish, Slovak, Telugu), with 6 speakers per language. Participants read 54 English sentences designed to elicit different vowel types (short monophthongs, long monophthongs, and diphthongs) and rhythm patterns (simple monosyllabic feet vs. complex multisyllabic feet). Acoustic analysis was conducted to compare vowel production patterns. Preliminary results indicate that vowel variability in nonnative speech follows structured phonetic patterns rather than random fluctuations, correlating with the rhythmic properties of speakers’ native languages and their English proficiency levels.

The findings contribute to our understanding of nonnative-accented speech, challenging the notion that its variability is inherently disruptive. This study lays the groundwork for the future perception research on how native listeners adapt to the variability in nonnative speech, advocating for a shift from a speaker-centred model to a more balanced, interactional approach in crosslinguistic communication.

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Semantic Differentiation of Gaelic Place-Name Elements for ‘Bay' Rebecca Madlener University of the Highlands and Islands We tend to think of landscape vocabulary as being universal, because everywhere where people live, they are surrounded by natural landscapes. However, landscape vocabulary is highly variable across languages and cultures. Landscape features do not have clear, natural boundaries. Because of this, different speech communities map language onto the landscape in varying ways, drawing the boundaries between features based on different concepts. Providing translation equivalents, therefore, often does not do justice to the semantic nuances expressed by individual terms. This mismatch can, for example, be seen in the large number of Gaelic terms that are frequently given the same English translation in dictionaries.

The Gaelic place-name elements bàgh, camas, geodha and òb illustrate this issue: all of them are usually translated as ‘bay,

cove, harbour’ in dictionaries. However, languages tend to avoid having multiple terms that have the exact seem meaning and context of use, as that would be linguistically redundant. It is, therefore, much more likely that bàgh, camas, geodha and òb express differences in meaning or usage that are obscured by their English translations.

Previous work on the meaning of Gaelic place-names has focussed on the etymologies of names and elements appearing in names. But there is valuable information to be gained from the physical reality of the features that different elements are applied to as well. This study compares the physical realities of places containing the elements bàgh, camas, geodha and òb on the Isle of Skye, as well as the terms they frequently combine with in place-names. This provides new insight into the differences between these terms and, thus, the ways in which coastal landscapes are distinguished in Gaelic.

Colonialism Undressed: Recontextualising the figure of ‘Modern Woman’ in Shidai Manhua (Modern Sketch) (1933–1937) Beth Price University of Edinburgh The dual-figure of “New Woman” and “Modern Girl” (here conflated as “Modern Woman”) are generally regarded as defining the visuality and urban culture of Republican China (1911 – 1949) (Stevens, 2003: 86) and have been the focus of a considerable amount of scholarship on the period (Gulliver, 2012; Hershatter 2007; Judge, 2012 to name a few). From advertisements to art classes, sexualised women’s bodies were a key feature of visual imagery in Shanghai in the 1920s and 1930s. Modern Woman has been argued to have driven wider socio-cultural change in Republican China as much as she reflected it (Barlow, 2013: 53) and much has been made of the female figure somehow embodying a neutral philosophical conceptualisation of what it meant to be “modern”.

This research rejects the supposed neutrality of Modern Woman’s emergence, instead arguing that she was a product of colonialism in East Asia. Although Mainland China was not a colonised state in the same way as Singapore (formerly British Malaya), Indonesia (formerly Dutch East Indies), or Vietnam (formerly French Indochina), it was still subject to forced economic, political, and cultural change, particularly in Shanghai. By analysing images from Shidai Manhua (Modern Sketch) – a popular satirical magazine produced in Republican Shanghai – in the context of semi-colonialism, we can better understand the role of Modern Woman. Far from a neutral figure embodying “modernity”, she represents an attempt by Chinese leadership at legitimising their new nation in the eyes of colonial powers and therefore the extended influence of Western colonialism.

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Subverting Victorian Diagnosis: Occult technologies in Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s A Strange Story (1861-62) Eeva Savolainen University of Stirling In 1847, a Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine article stated that “[t]here are few families to whom [the stethoscope] has not proved an object of horror and the saddest remembrance, as connected with the loss of dear relatives, though it is but a revealer, not a producer of physical suffering”. Rene Laennec’s 1816 invention of the stethoscope constituted a revolutionary event within clinical diagnostics, and the instrument soon became a symbol of medical authority (Foucault, 1963; Bray, 2022; Dickson, 2023).

Nevertheless, scepticism related to its validity as a source of medical information and propriety as a diagnostic tool was expressed by the public and professionals alike: in particular, anxieties related to the reliability of this new form auditory information, as well as sexual morality and the considerable strain that stethoscopic examination was considered to put the patient under, were voiced (Reiser, 1979; Majumdar, 2002; Mangham, 2021). This poster examines the imaginative cultural afterlife of the stethoscope in Edward Bulwer-Lytton's Gothic occult novel A Strange Story (1861–62).

Through cross-analysing the representations of the magic wand and the stethoscope in the novel, I will demonstrate how Bulwer-Lytton imagined occult technologies turn the stethoscope from a “revealer” into “a producer of physical suffering”, subverting the project of Victorian diagnostic progress (Blackwood’s 1847). This poster is drawn from the research for my PhD thesis Gothic Diagnostics in British Fiction 1830–1897.

Mapping Musical Materialities Edda Starck University of Aberdeen Violins are made from over seventy parts, most of which come from two trees: the European spruce (picea abies), from which the instruments’ fronts are carved, and the Sycamore maple (acer pseudoplatanus), which makes up the violin’s back, sides, and neck. Whilst both species are common in European forests, the specific qualities that violin makers need for their craft are rare amongst the trees. The tonewood spruce, for instance, requires a range of highly specific qualities that cannot be found in lowland plantation trees but rather exist only in mountain trees from niche Alpine habitats: good tonewood spruce usually comes from trees growing Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities

at over 1100 meters altitude on rough terrain, where harsh environmental conditions cause trees to grow slowly and to make dense, strong wood. To source wood for violin making necessitates an intimate knowledge of mountain geographies and forest ecologies.

The practice of violin making is thus deeply entangled with various ecological knowledges, practices, and industries that revolve around the local mountains and their sonorous trees.

Focussing on the European spruce and Sycamore maple, this poster offers an insight into my ongoing ethnographic fieldwork on alpine violin making and the role that tonewood trees play therein.

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Against Rigid Event Structures: Contextual and crosslinguistic insights Fred Whibley University of Edinburgh "Event structure" is a key part of natural language semantics, focusing on formal representations of actions, processes, and causation.

Traditional truth-conditional theories of meaning and event structure often assume strict rigidity in what is required for a sentence to be true. Traditional theories predict that telic sentences such as “John watched the film” require the “watching” event to be fully completed relative to the “film”, for the sentence to be true. However, these theoretical assumptions overlook both inherent contextual variability and crosslinguistic diversity.

Imagine John goes to the cinema and watches a terrible film. He leaves before it finishes. Speakers can truthfully say “John watched the movie, but left before he finished it” even if John did not watch the entire film.

Furthermore, under-represented languages that are neglected in models of event structure often pose strong counterexamples to existing theories. In Thai, if John puts on an old, scratched DVD, but gives up after three minutes because it is unwatchable, it is possible to truthfully say the sentence “Jon doo năng dtàe doo mâi jòp” (John watched the movie but didn’t finish it).

My poster will illustrate my current efforts in achieving two main goals.

Firstly, embracing the nuanced contextual variations and flexibility inherent in language, to better capture the finegrained nature of contextual variation.

Secondly, making understudied languages central to the analysis. Both are necessary to improve understanding of the linguistic systems that underpin our everyday lives.

By working towards these goals, we subvert existing theories in semantics that assume strict rigidity in the semantics of event structure. We can develop a more representative, empirically grounded understanding of how event structure works both within and across language.

Research as Ecological Relation: Living a Subversive Method in Nature Tessa Wotherspoon University of Glasgow More than anything, it is a connection to the more than human world which grounds myself to my research. As a researcher in the growing field of Black ecologies, my work is rooted in an intimate connection to nature and often interrogates the ontological separation between humans and more than human life. Without the ability to live within this question in my daily rituals, there would be a kind of disconnection between myself and my research, a disembodiment which my research practice is resistant to. In this way, my way of being is itself a kind of subversive method; I am living my research in a way that resists normative productivity culture, detaches from institutional validation, and prioritizes personal and ecological alignment. As this poster explores, my research practice is one grounded in a connection to nature through movement, communion with nature, and plant medicine practices – all of which enable me to think in terms of relation rather than disconnection.

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Thank you for attending and participating in the Second Year Symposium 2025.

Scottish Graduate School for Arts & Humanities