ICC Coventry UNI 2nd-Annual Creative Cultures PGR Conference 2023 Schedule & Program

Welcome

Welcome to the second annual Creative Cultures Conference, (Re)Imagine. We are excited to present two days of work from our postgraduate researchers at the Institute for Creative Cultures.

In this two-day conference, postgraduate researchers have the opportunity to present their research and showcase their practice with colleagues, no matter the stage, to foster connections and discussion between our postgraduate researchers in the Institute.

This year’s theme is (Re)Imagine, in which we have invited original contributions that conceptualise creative cultures in broad and unique ways. This theme builds directly from the work of Convergence, the previous year’s conference.

Thank You

With thanks to the Organising Committee:

Godswill Ezeonyeka

Greta Gauhe

Charlie Ingram

Hannah Westwood

With support from:

Olga Baker

Lindsay Balfour

Jayne Beaufoy

Heinrich Escano

Mel Jordan

Helen Laws

Elpida Prasopoulou

Marley Treloar

The organising committee would like to express their thanks to all of the postgraduate researchers that are involved with the conference and the Operations Team at ICC, without whom this conference would not have been possible.

About the Institute for Creative Cultures

The Institute for Creative Cultures (ICC) is a newly established specialist research facility in the Arts and Humanities at Coventry University. It brings together three prominent research centres at Coventry University - Centre for Dance Research, Centre for Postdigital Cultures and Centre for Arts, Memory and Communities - devoted to practice-led research in the visual arts, dance, curating, moving image, creative AI, digital art and photography.

As an experimental research lab for the creative arts, ICC’s mission is to explore the capacity of the Arts and Humanities to address major contemporary societal issues by fostering a sustainable, resilient and innovative environment for cutting-edge transdisciplinary practice-led research. This unique approach enables the Institute for Creative Cultures to continue producing excellent research that reaches across disciplinary boundaries, introducing an arts and humanities perspective into research in computer science, medicine, engineering, social justice and sustainability, among others.

In line with this year’s Creative Cultures Annual PGR Conference, ICC also (Re)Imagines Creative Cultures with an ambitious research and public engagement agenda which aims to:

(1) Extend our transdisciplinary collaborations and enhance our ability to produce and display high-quality practiceled research in the Arts & Humanities in order to provide solutions to contemporary societal problems through experimentation with new digital technologies.

(2) Deepen our engagement with artists, digital practitioners and diverse communities in both Coventry and the wider region. Thus, building on the legacy of the Coventry City of Culture 2021 while also attracting visiting scholars and artists. It also reaffirms its commitment to practice research with a significant investment in advanced media production capabilities and digital infrastructure. Our academic community have been trailblazers in engaging with digital technologies to develop, augment and creatively interrogate structures in the arts and culture. With a renewed infrastructure for production and display, the Institute’s vibrant academic community aims to explore new ways to remix and reuse our outputs, experiment across a range of different mediums, formats and genres and develop transdisciplinary methodologies based on the research ethos of the Creative Arts, while also contributing to a more resilient and thriving arts and creative industries ecosystem in order to create better futures.

Housekeeping

Attending in person:

The address for the ICC building is Parkside, Coventry, CV1 2NE. There is no parking available other than for disabled badge holders. The closest parking is on Mile Lane.

Attending online:

This is a hybrid event that will also run virtually on Teams. The event will be recorded, so please keep your camera and microphone off if you do not wish to be recorded.

Code of conduct:

The conference is an opportunity for PGRs to share their work, no matter the stage, in a supportive environment. We ask that all attendees respect the presenters and do not interrupt or otherwise disrupt when others are sharing their work. Please wait until the designated time to share comments and ask questions.

TIME SCHEDULE ROOM

Seyashree Mohapatra - Shadows of Criminology

Clare Harvey - Co-authoring with forgotten voices: using remix writing to explore the problematised boundary between historical ‘truth’ and fiction

11.00-12.00

Georgia Rizzioli - Moving Images and Placemaking: for an Environmental Semiology (Room 666)

12:00-1:30

Immersive Session Performance Studio

Hank Bamberger - Killer Heel Confessionals (2023)

1:30-2:30

Session 2 G17

Daniel Rink - Press, Politics and the Post-war Conservative Consensus: 1951-1964

Shiva Shankhari Sundaralingam - A Review on the Historic Tax Relationship Between British Petroleum (then Anglo Persians Oil Company), and The State with Specific Focus on Major Exogenous Ruptures During The 20th Century

2:30-3:00 Break

3:00-4:00

Practice Sharing (Parallel)

Performance Studio

Andrea Puerta - Writing; the body that moves in and out of my body

Hiten Mistry - Reshaping the Routines of our past

4:00-5:00

3:00-4:00

Session 3 (Parallel) G17

Rachael Hughson Gill - Body image, disability, dress and empowerment: Co-designing apparel to support young women with Type 1 Diabetes body image

Megan Shone - Performing Gender: Non-verbal Communication of Gendered Roles

Panel G21

Hiten Mistry - GEN Next New perspectives and growth post-pandemic South Asian Dance Artists in conversation

TIME SCHEDULE ROOM

9:30-10:00

10:00-11:00

Networking/Coffee & Tea Lobby

Practice Sharing (Parallel) G21

Shaniece Martin - Power of spoken word

David Mellor - Cosmotechnics Moment

10:00-11:00

Workshop (Parallel) G17

Hannah Westwood - Instagram and Influencers: Social Media Methods Workshop

11:00-12:00 Session 4 G17

Jagdish Patel - The same but not quite: tracing alternative genealogies of socially engaged art

Eleanor Cook - The Coventry of the future

12:00-1:00 Lunch Lobby

1:00-2:30

Session 5 (Parallel) G21

Madeleine Bracey - Local Views of Coventry’s Early Modern Grammar School

Sarah Capel - The imaginative affordances of the early modern pattern book

Catalina Sirbu - Building RoAWE, the Romanian Academic Written Corpus

1:00-2:30

Interactive Session (Parallel) G17

Zrinca Uzbinec - Unsettling Pauses

Miranda Laurence - Thinking-in-movement through space

2:30-3:30 Break

3:30-4:30 Panel G21

Georgina Cockburn, Stacey Moon-Tracy and Linda Westmoreland - 'Evidencing' alongside Health - acts of care and translation in interdisciplinary studies

Exhibitions

TITLE ROOM TIMES

Exhibition

Godswill Ezeonyeka

Emmylou Laird

NETWORKED NARRATIVE – A digital art installation by Godswill Ezeonyeka & Abhiram Thiruthummal

G01

Dynamic Equilibrium: exploring engagement in Live-Action Role Playing Lobby

Frances Yeung Phygital Lobby

Sarah Capel

Rachael Hughson Gill

The imaginative affordances of the early modern pattern book G01

Disability, dress and empowerment: Co-designing clothing with and for young women with Type 1 Diabetes Lobby

Miranda Laurence Thinking-in-movement through space G10

Day 1: 10.00-5.30

Day 2: 10.00-4.30

Max 2 people in the room

Screening

Giorgia Rizzioli Room 666 (Wim Wenders, 1982) Garage 2

Day 1 (3.00-4.00) Day 2 (12.00-1.00)

Day1: Session 1 (10.30)

Session 2 (2.30)

Zrinka Uzbinec Unsettling Pauses Panel Rooms

Session 3 (4.00)

Day 2: Session 1 (11.30)

Session 2 (2.00)

Sensory performance

Greta Gauhe

Be(in)G Touch

Imaginary Touch: Multi-Sensory Performances for Non-Physical Connections over Distance

Remote Accessible before, during & after the conference.

DAY 1

Seyashree Mohaptra

Shadows of criminology - Session

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, was associated with criminology and the criminologists of his time. He was interested in the science of criminology and had corresponded with prominent criminologists of the era, such as Cesare Lombroso and Dr. Joseph Bell, who was the inspiration for the character of Sherlock Holmes. Doyle was also associated with the Crime Club, whose members were influential in their own right, and their profiles varied widely. The Crime Club members made significant contributions towards Doyle’s writing by providing feedback, criticism, and inspiration. Doyle incorporated criminal theories in his works by using scientific

methods and deductive reasoning to solve crimes. His stories often featured forensic evidence, psychological profiling, and other techniques that were based on the latest scientific knowledge of the time. However, some of these criminal theories also led to racial and colonial prejudices. Doyle’s portrayal of non-European characters, particularly those from colonised countries, reflected the prevalent biases of the time. By the year 1932, a writer from India, named Sharadindu Bandopadhyay created a detective, namely, Bymokesh Bakshi. Even though his works were compared with Doyle, it stayed limited to the local audience. His stories provide an unique perspective from the colony and broaden the understanding of the genre.

Clare Harvey

Co-authoring With Forgotten Voices - Session

Co-authoring With Forgotten Voices is an installation showcasing Clare Harvey’s methodology of using remix approaches to writing historical fiction. Clare is a commercially-published historical novelist who has become fascinated with the way the lives of real people are repurposed in fiction. Her PhD explores how remix (also known as collage, sampling, montage, bricolage, etc.) as a way of writing can help us find new ways of representing lived experience in the stories we tell ourselves about the past. Her work asks the reader to question the distinction between historical fact and fiction, as well as between author and narrative voice. This piece shows the first draft of her remix novella, which has been ‘co-authored’ using the memoirs of a young British woman who lived through the siege of Malta in WW2, and whose image is projected onto the story that her words generated.

Giorgia Rizzioli

Moving Images and Placemaking: for an Environmental Semiology (Room 666) - Screening

In 1982, Wim Wenders wondered what would become of cinema after the various technical transformations that had taken place in the media landscape. As a filmmaker, he poses this question through cinema. In the documentary Room 666, he brings together some of the greatest filmmakers of the 20th Century and invites them to talk about the future of the film medium. After almost forty years, the question is still open: where did cinema go?

Through this experimental screening, I propose a potential response to Wenders’ interrogative. Yet instead of asking solely what cinema is today, I intertwine this query by wondering where cinema is today.

Considering cinema as something not carved in stone, I envisage it as an expanded medium that incorporates the projection site into its nature. I argue therefore a passage from a semiology of images to an environmental semiology.

By screening Room 666 in the ICC building and beyond the classical rituals of cinema-going, I, in turn, suggest considering the connection between cinema and exhibition venue. Specifically, I propose to reflect on how the projection venue can be a defining element of cinema and the cinematic experience. And how film screening can in turn be a way to reconsider, reconfigure and re-imagine materially and virtually our everyday spaces.

In pursuing the trajectory immaterial-material and virtual-real, this contribution proposes to whom cannot attend the event or are willing to experience alternative modality of viewing it, to watch the film via this link:

https://vimeo.com/119919052?signup=true#

Hank Bamberger

Killer Heel Confessionals (2023) - Immersive Session

Video installation of a performance done in Digbeth, Birmingham on March 4th 2023:

Killer Heel Confessionals (KHC) abstractly understands and realises queerness as naturally glitching and commodified. The solo investigation casts me as an effective parasite feeding off a homogenised performance world to which I do not belong.

I live in an isolated installation that explores light, sound, objects, and proprioception through the precarity and confidence of ten-inch stiletto heels. These shoes act as an extension of the body and an engaging, reciprocal parasite. I attempt to understand something greater than myself through practical killer heels and discover alternative movement techniques, ones exploring alterity, otherness. I am out of place in this work, consistently exploring melancholia through the physical fallacy of heels. Ruptures in thought, consciousness, and physicalism are employed through a choreographic heels practice that seeks to upend heteronormativity and conventionality through ritualistic activities and landscapes—decorating spaces and creating mechanised ecosystems. Heels’ physical and emotional effects are measured on the body while simultaneously, dystopian environments and altar-like light installations are built. This process questions linearity through sensual body-based confessions realised through aggressively high-kink shoes. Occasionally, heels are further heightened with additional platforms constructed from household materials such as plastic composite pipe ends.

Daniel Rink

Press, Politics and the Post-war Conservative Consensus: 1951-1964 - Session

The project that this researcher is currently working on is concerned with the political press from 1951-1964. This project explores the fourth estate, election campaigns during this period and the ties between newspapermen and politicians, among other themes. This twenty-minute presentation will be presented as a work-in-progress and will discuss the literature surrounding these topics, as well as the methodology that will be used during the project. It will also discuss the experiences of this researcher thus far and what this researcher hopes to achieve by the end of their PGR journey.

Shiva Shankhari Sundaralingam

A Review on the Historic Tax Relationship Between British Petroleum (then Anglo Persians Oil Company), and The State with Specific Focus on Major Exogenous Ruptures During The 20th Century - Session

The presentation today will cover the work in progress of my thesis till date. The focus of the presentation will be my thesis research questions, how I used The British National Archive and the British Library as sources for sourcing archival data and other secondary sources available at both places for research purposes.

During the presentation, I will be sharing my initial experiences whilst finding the required data to answer my research questions and what tools I used to find available archival sources. This will include techniques and tools introduced at the British National Archive whilst going in person to collect materials and tools introduced by archivist during the archival training workshop (PAST Skills & Methodology: Medieval & Early Modern) conducted by The National Archive.

Andrea Puerta

Writing; the body that moves in and out of my body - Practice Sharing

I have been trying to exercise a tongue that is both language and muscle to invent a body that is unknown – my writing. A body that stretches and composes whilst finding alliances between felt experience, imagination, creativity and theory. This is an endeavour that looks to move as a tongue does; in and out of the body to savour, think and speak.

This presentation will aim to share and explore the possibilities of writing to become embodied, to be a body. A writing where thinking can be sensing and sensing a possibility to understand. To contemplate the possibility of thoughts appearing because we sense and where we sense because we think.

Hiten Mistry

Reshaping the routines of our past into dances of the new normal - Practice Sharing

Lockdown was announced in March 2020, everything shuts down. Shops, schools, gyms, restaurants - everything! We all know of at least one enthusiastic person who pursues dance. Maybe in our family, a cousin or a friend who goes to a dance class, either as hobby or as a serious passion. This PhD study investigates what happened to the Indian Dance Communities in the UK when lockdown made our world stand still. How did they adapt? What did they do to keep their dance classes going when confined to their homes with only televisions, computers, and handheld devices as their sole connection to the world? Through interviews and case studies, this project has unearthed the narratives of adaption, unique dance teaching approaches and stories of triumph that shows the resilience and human tenacity among the UK South Asian Dance sector.

This session will start off with a virtual Zoom Session of Indian Dance as a workshop and then turn into an oral presentation of the developments of my research journey.

In the Oral Presentation, tracing the history of the UK South Asian Dance sector and then introduce Hiten’s research ideas and the process he has been on the past 1 year and now into the fieldwork journey. The session will be accessible to anyone in terms of the language and presentation style being less formal with interactive elements. The presentation will be of 25 minutes in duration and split into two parts. The first being the virtual Zoom session (15 mins) with a Projector in the main performance studio logged into a Zoom Session and the attendees following an Indian Dance Zoom session instructions. The second part of the session will continue with the presentation with PowerPoint slides (10 minutes in total with time for a short Q&A).

Rachael Hughson Gill

Disability, dress and empowerment: Co-designing clothing with and for young women with Type 1 Diabetes - Session

Young women with Type 1 Diabetes have a unique and often extremely challenging experience of body image. Our research has sought to better understand these challenges and to co-design a support solution.

Through this research we have explored how managing this condition can lead to an enhanced connection and awareness of body and body image, while too influencing it. Wearable medical technology, bruising, weight fluctuations, and influences on the clothes individuals chose to wear were found to impact individuals’ body image. Through a series of co-design workshops the codesign group showed their desire for clothing that empowers them to choose how, when and if they show their condition and project it as part of their body image and identity.

To impact the design of clothing both within academia and industry the findings of this work are being turned into a toolkit for clothing designers. The aim being that through a better understanding of young women with Type 1 Diabetes wants and needs they can create more inclusive clothing that supports their body image.

The exhibition and presentation of this toolkit, and the process to develop it, will present insights into the relationship between Type 1 Diabetes, body image and clothing, and the co-design practice of enquiry and creation.

Megan Shone

Performing Gender: Non-verbal Communication of Gendered Roles - Session

This paper discusses the outcomes of a theatre workshop conducted in the summer of 2023 wherein the participants through a series of theatre games and exercises that explored the way in which we perform and convey gender to one another, both on stage and off. It will discuss the ways in which participants responded to prompts and explored the characteristics and modes of communication that they would assume for a gendered character. Throughout the session participants were encouraged to investigate the way in which they would convey gender through their bodies, voice and expressions. They found that they held strict gendered notions of different modes of behaviour and character traits, and drew on exaggerated representations of these to convey such traits to one another. The utilisation of creative methods of inquiry offered significant benefits for opening up interesting and fruitful dialogues to discuss naturalised modes of behaviour and begin to unpack them. This paper will draw on Judith Butler’s work on gender as performance, alongside discussions of non-verbal communication through embodiment and will hope to provide evidence of the way in which these creative methods can offer significant and valuable data both for the researcher and the participant.

Hiten Mistry

GEN Next New perspectives and growth post-pandemic South Asian Dance Artists in conversation - Panel

DAY 2

Shaniece Martin

Power of spoken word - Practice Sharing

As a poet I have found myself moving towards the medium of spoken word and recognising the power in the spoken VS the written. This power of the spoken VS the written word became most apparent to me on my PhD journey as I found myself using my poetry to have a voice, to speak up and to be heard. Through my spoken word performance as part of the ICC PGR Conference I hope to share my voice, share my words, and share my stories, in order to ultimately share the power of storytelling through spoken word.

David Mellor

Cosmotechnics Monuments - Practice Sharing

Cosmotechnics Monuments is a practice-led project that uses contemporary art practice and philosophy of technology to produce works that challenge current discourses about technology and morality.

Philosopher Yuk Hui argues that there’s no singular ‘technology’. Technologies in different cultures are affected by their cosmological understandings. So technologies are always cosmotechnics and they could always be otherwise. Presently, one cosmotechnics is globally dominant. The ecological and moral consequences are troubling. But the outcome isn’t inevitable.

My practice asks: how can we think technodiversity at this disruptive moment? How is art especially suited for this? How can we maintain the incalculable and unknowable and bring technology back to life? How might we develop ‘other senses’, to preserve and renew our relations with each other, other beings, and the world itself?

Inspired by Thomas Hirschhorn, Cosmotechnics Monuments are provocative temporary artspaces. Monuments of the why rather than who, and a future in recollection, these are experiments in ‘recosmicizing’ through modes of collaboration eschewing the logics of dominant politics and thought techniques. Loose and without formal closure, the expressivity within them will draw on the disruptions and tensions inherent to contemporary technology, inviting open re-conceptualizations of technical forms and the ways of being they potentialize.

Hannah Westwood Instagram and Influencers: Social Media Methods Workshop - Workshop

Led by Hannah Westwood, this workshop invites participants to learn how to conduct social media analysis. Building from Hannah’s research which uses data from social media influencer adverts, this workshop introduces participants to the method and allows them to explore how social media analysis may be relevant in their own research. Drawing specifically on principles from discourse and visual analysis, this workshop examines how to work with text (including captions and comments) and images from social media together to draw out meaning.

The workshop consists of a short presentation in which Hannah will share examples of social media analysis from her own work and walk participants through the process of conducting an analysis. This will be followed by a collaborative and interactive session that will allow participants to analyse a range of data from social media. Participants are encouraged to bring along any social media post relevant to their research for use in the workshop.

Please note that there is a limited capacity for this workshop.

Link to sign up for the workshop: https://forms.offi-ce.com/e/VqhuR9kgie

Jagdish Patel

The same but not quite: tracing alternative genealogies of socially engaged art - Session

The history of socially engaged art can be traced back to the avantgarde movements in the last century. This was a period of social upheavals in Europe and its colonies. Since socially engaged centres people, and people are partly made through their interaction with this broader world, how Black, Asian and other people from the global majority community, as well as women, LGBTQ and other communities, experienced the past century is an essential aspect of this history. Here the issues of recognition and subjection, alongside issues of equality, justice and difference, inevitably lead art not only closer to politics and also towards some form of democratic intent, and this consideration is also part of the history of socially engaged art.

African American men and women posed for a portrait on steps at Atlanta University, Georgia. Photographer Thomas Askew for the 1900 Paris Exhibition

Eleanor Cook

The Coventry of The Future - Session

Despite its symbolic status as city of ‘peace and reconciliation’, Coventry’s post-war reconstruction has been overlooked in favour of major cities such as London. As such, ‘The Coventry of The Future’ exhibition, a municipal planning exhibition held in the city’s Drill Hall from 8th - 20th of October 1945, provides an understudied medium through which to observe how Britain’s post-war recovery was negotiated in relation to the provisioning of the built environment. This paper examines the ‘Coventry of The Future’ exhibition to explicate how idealised representations of the future, devised by planners on domestic and city-wide scales, sought to shape and inform both the physical and social reconstruction of home in the post-war period. Comprised of plans for the construction of new housing estates, amenities, road layouts and shopping facilities, the exhibition offered the citizens of Coventry the promise of a more affluent, efficient, beautiful, and fundamentally better tomorrow. The exhibition’s pictorial imaginings of the future thus provide a nuanced insight into the way in which Britain’s post-war recovery was negotiated and envisioned in relation to the provisioning of home.

Madeleine Bracey

Local Views of Coventry’s Early Modern Grammar School - Session

Madeleine’s thesis investigates the social significance of Coventry’s Early Modern Grammar School, the King Henry VIII School. This paper will explore how three key texts answer the question ‘how has the school’s Early Modern life been seen by the people of Coventry?’ These texts are a catalogue of the school’s manuscript collection produced by Humfrey Wanley in 1697, and the two major studies of the school’s history: Thomas Sharp’s Illustrative Papers of the History and Antiquities of the City of Coventry (1871) and A. A. C. Burton et al.’s King Henry VIII School, 1545-1945 (1945).

Wanley, Sharp, and Burton et al. respectively portray the school as the home of an insubstantial and insignificant library, as an institution plagued by financial and administrative mismanagement, and – only in 1945 – as a centre of education. By comparing the differing forms, aims, and historical perspectives with which these works were written, Madeleine will discuss how they present three different local views of the Early Modern life of the King Henry VIII School.

Sarah Capel

The imaginative affordances of the early modern pattern book - Session

My research explores the imaginative affordances of the early modern printed pattern book.

Pattern books were made to be destroyed – sections of the book were cut out or pricked in order to transfer designs onto fabric. The gaps left behind in extant copies lead the contemporary reader to imagine the missing patterns while pin pricks evoke practices of transferring patterns and the stitches that follow.

One such scrap of a used, pricked paper pattern was found in 2020 under the floorboards of Oxburgh Hall, Norfolk, alongside fragments of blackwork embroidery and other high status Tudor textiles. Through my print and stitch practice I have pieced together the traces of patterns discovered at Oxburgh and created a pattern book that expands upon these designs and the multiple ways they could be configured and reconfigured.

This new pattern book, alongside the close reading of the earliest surviving pattern books from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, will demonstrate the material and metaphorical importance of these objects. My practice explores the potential to broaden understandings and interpretations of this material world over time and establish connections between contemporary and historical practice.

Catalina Sirbu

Building RoAWE, the Romanian Academic Written Corpus - Session

My Master of Research (MRes) at the Centre for Arts, Memory and Communities (CAMC) at Coventry University (CU) will result in building the Romanian Academic Written English Corpus (RoAWE), a collection of graded written academic assessments produced by Romanian-speaking students at CU.

RoAWE will include linguistic background data on Romanian-speaking contributors who may have various first language (L1) backgrounds (e.g., Hungarian, Roma), nationalities (e.g., Romanian, Moldovan), and different migration routes into the United Kingdom (UK) or who may enrol as UK home (as opposed to international) students. The scripts, collected in an already word-processed form and further coded and tagged for dozens of features, will become available for linguistic analyses once the corpus becomes an open-access source.

For the purposes of this presentation, I will introduce my audience to the broader context of my project and its premises, several essential corpus compilation concepts and principles, some relevant details concerning the RoAWE data collection, and last yet not least importantly, provide a first-hand insight into the ups and downs of building a corpus from the perspective of the student researcher. For the last ten minutes of my contribution, I will welcome questions from the audience.

Zrinka Uzbinec

Unsettling pauses - Interactive Session

At some point, the pauses between several presentations will be another kind. They will become choreographic disturbances of the flow of the conference, acting as affective intrusions in the usual composition of the symposium. These intermissions will appear as an image, a short audio, and a video. They are vignettes from practice research that explores entanglements of cuteness/ violence through the lens of choreography.

With this proposal, I wish to experiment with the choreographic effects of these pauses, so I would appreciate hearing about their impact through a planned sharing session or in the form of an email or a message.

Miranda Laurence

Thinking-in-movement through space - Interactive Session

Explore thinking-in-movement in this interactive installation, in an activity which forms a central aspect of my movement-inquiry practice into dance dramaturgy and spatiality.

Moving ‘along’ the string route of the installation offers ways of thinking about abstract and concrete concepts in relation to moving through space. Ideas such as forwards/ backwards, orientation, following, tension, beginning and end, behind/in front, through, stillness, etc, interact between physical experience and thought processes in a logic that resembles ‘dream logic’ (Božić, 2021).

Thinking-in-movement, I pay attention to how thoughts follow one another, connected along a string of time, and influenced by my memories, kinaesthetic sensations, and states of being. This offers a very different logic of ‘making-sense’ than the ones I conventionally occupy in my practice as a dramaturg and indeed as an academic. This form of thinking finds structures that are reminiscent of pathways, drifts, meanders, experienced in time as you go, rather than of objects, buildings, or artefacts, experienced out of time as a whole.

Participants are invited one by one to gently investigate this practice, following or diverging from suggested modes of engagement. We will meet for a short online reflection session at the end of the conference.

Georgie Cockburn, C-DaRE:

Researching dance as a catalyst for living well – with People Dancing - Panel

Stacey Moon-Tracy, CAMC:

Exploring & representing the COVID-19 lived experiences of women who are ICU nurses through playwriting - Panel

Panel: ‘Evidencing’ alongside Health - acts of care and translation in interdisciplinary studies.

These panel presentations discuss ideas of justice and care in health & wellbeing situations in relation to interdisciplinary and mixed methods research and its dissemination.

The speakers will share how their PhD studies explore and examine lived experience integrated with embodied ways of knowing and transformative experiences in a health & wellbeing context. We ask how research can speak to policy makers and funders, and carry the same weight as the ‘randomised controlled trial gold standard’ (McGill, 2022: 25.08) that is privileged by the medical scientific approach to health.

Objective health indicators that contribute to medical intervention or policy making are often at odds with nuanced notions of wellbeing and in some cases ignore increasing evidence that supports interdisciplinary interventions. With a focus on wellbeing, treatment, healing, cure, care, compassion and transformation, the researchers share their methodological choices, which form radical responses to researching lived experience and seek to challenge epistemic injustice.

https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scidance/episodes

/11-Dance-for-Parkinsons-with-Ashley-McGill-e1dj306/a-a7aed9i

Lin Westmoreland,

C-DaRE:

Researching the role of improvised dance and movement for people experiencing anxiety - Panel

Exhibitions

Godswill Ezeonyeka

NETWORKED NARRATIVE – A digital art installation by Godswill

Ezeonyeka & Abhiram Thiruthummal - Poster + Digital Display

My research is focused on the (r)evolution of social media activism in Nigeria. This exhibition is made up of a collection of visual material shared by a pool of activists and non-activists who participated in the #EndSARS protests.

The #EndSARS protests were a series of protests across Nigeria and other cities across the world that demanded the end of the notorious Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) unit of the Nigerian Police.

According to Neumayer and Stald (2014), the smartphone expands the range of mobile communication strategies for disseminating information in street action by enabling communication outside personal networks and sharing more potent visual examples of oppression and injustice. Through this interactive digital artwork, you are encouraged to learn about the protests from the numerous and various views of people using social media as activism and for activism. They show how social media activism offers a distinctive alternative to the dominance of attention traditionally exercised by legacy media by affording a more inclusive and representative method of creating narratives.

*The images and videos represented are collected from public social media accounts and anonymised where necessary.

Emmylou Laird

Dynamic Equilibrium: exploring engagement in Live-Action Role Playing - Poster + Digital Display

Emmylou Laird is completing a part time PhD about engagement in larp (live action role playing) and is in the midst of discovering ways to measure affective experiences. Emmylou sometimes updates emmylou.uk.

Frances Yeung

Phygital - Poster + Digital Display

The installation explores the blurring boundary between physical and digital space, and how this affects our perception of self and environment, private versus public, individual versus collective. The installation is the visual representation of the five-week workshops and artist-in-residence that I undertook recently at the Warwick Art Centre.

It consists of a series of miniature style physical buildings and habitats, including houses, urban spaces, and landmarks, created using a variety of materials. These physical structures are then scanned into digital space using the Polycam app, creating a digital version of the 3D townscape. Visitors can view it on screen, or access via their own mobile devices.

It aims to provoke questions about the relationship between physical and digital space and the role it plays in shaping how we perceive the world. It encourages visitors to consider how they navigate and interact with these spaces, and to reflect on the ways in which their physical and digital lives are intertwined.

https://yikkiyeung.editorx.io/artist-in-residence

Image by Oliver Facey at ZapFest by Mandala LRP, 2017

Greta Gauhe

Be(in)G Touch

Imaginary Touch: Multi-Sensory Performances for Non-Physical Connections over Distance

- Participants phone

Join us for a unique and immersive online performance that brings the experience of touch to your own home. Our multi-sensory performances will guide you through a series of activities that allow you to engage with your senses and connect with others, even over distance. Using pre-recorded audio recordings, participants will follow the guidance of their performer as they interact with materials and objects in different locations throughout their home. Through imagination and visualization, our performances create a sense of co-presence with both the performer and other participants. Accessible via our website, you can choose the performance that suits you and participate in your own time. After the 15-20 minute performance, we encourage you to share your experience through a brief written or visual response on our website. Join us and explore the power of imaginary touch.

http://www.gretagauhe.com/beinggintouch

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