Sign Up Sessions - Day 1 - 12:15 - 13:15

Sessions Available:  

There are two options to choose from for the first block of sign-up sessions. The details of both sessions are below, and you must use the relevant link to register your attendance for your chosen session via Inkpath.

Both sessions will run from 12:15 - 13:15.

Workshop: Decolonizing Academic Writing

Session Details: 

In this workshop we explore and practice techniques that writers use to create electric prose. We explore evocative and descriptive writing, space and character, and metaphor and tension in the context of creative, performative, autoethnographic and academic pieces of writing. We reflect on how these techniques disrupt hegemonic modes of academic writing, examine normative structures and hierarchies in which academic writing is published, and challenge ideas of who gets to write, how they get to write and what they get to write about. Please read more on Decolonial Dialogues here. 

Speakers / Facilitators: 

Dr Amita Nijhawan is an Educational Developer in Academic Enhancement at UAL. She mentors staff and students in using creative writing techniques to develop a writing voice and radically deploy their stories in creative and academic work. Understanding the impact of imperialism and exploring the possibilities of social justice are an important part of her work. She has a PhD in Dance Studies and as an author, she publishes novels and short stories, and has been writer-in-residence with Spread the Word, Leverhulme, UCL, Literature Works, the British Council and others. Please visit her research profile for more information. 

Robin Longobardi Zingarelli (Facilitator) is a PhD student in Games Design at Brunel University. In his research, Robin focuses on transgender and gender-diverse subjectivities in video games both in a mainstream and independent context. His research will involve blending a critical investigation on the medium with autoethnography and player reception studies to analyse the emergence and challenges of trans-affirmative games in the gaming industry.

Workshop: Thinking through Making

Session Details:

There have long been debates about the separation between ‘having ideas’ and ‘making objects’ and the ways in which this separation has troubled the art/craft divide and the value of intellectual versus manual labour in Western society (Dormer, 1997). 

Can centring craft, as Katherine Neidderrer suggests, join emotion and knowledge, and challenge some of the strictures of mainstream academic research? (Niedderer & Townsend, 2014) 
  
Does practice-based research offer new ways of resisting empiricism, seeing and unpicking the qualities of research outputs, illuminating the “gappy”, “layered”, “incomplete” and always contingent nature of knowledge (Rippin & Vacchani, 2018)? 
 
As a collective of PGR scholars researching craft and crafting research, we seek to share our experiences of navigating this boundary, and the ways in which craft as research and research into craft are positioned and valued by our various institutions. 

In the first half of the event the Craft Research PGR Community, facilitated by fellow PGR Rosemary James-Beith, explore some of their experiences as practice-based researchers, and the ways in which they seek balance and connection between “showing” through practice and “telling” through text-based outputs.

In the second half of the event, each panel member will join a table to guide a simple making activity whilst also facilitating a short discussion with the audience / participants.  

Three simple questions are proposed: 
1. How is practice as research showing up in your work? 
 2. What are the troubles, tensions or difficulties you face as a practice-based researcher in academia? 
 3. What resistances, opportunities or possibilities does practice offer you and your academic community?

Speakers / Facilitators: 

Julia Schauerman (Chair) is an electroacoustic composer, with  interests in composing ecologically themed works and exploring the use of electroacoustic techniques within community arts practice. Julia works closely with digital art group Genetic Moo, creating sound designs for their immersive digital ecosystem exhibitions. Her works have been presented internationally, including México, Canada, Norway and Italy. 

Julia’s PhD is concerned with developing a method of collaborative creative practice which will facilitate electroacoustic composers and thematic experts to co-compose works that tell complex stories, with multiple protagonists, including the ‘other than human’ such as birds and soil. 

Daisy Bow du Toit, is a practise-based, Techne-funded student at Kingston University. She is a crafter and content creator looking at the craft of content creation as part of her PhD. She created the PGR craft group in an effort to build community, share skills and develop practice among those in the world of craft research.

Emma Friedlander-Collins is an Instagram Content Creator, academic and lecturer at the University of Brighton, and her work explores themes of sustainability, craft and connection. She has written six books and has had papers published about the contribution of digital craft communities to the wider sustainability conversation.

Lauren Warner-Treloar is a Techne-funded PhD student from Kingston University. Her project, entitled 'Sound Art and Visual Culture: The Anti-Book Experiment in the Romanov Empire and the USSR, 1881-1932' examines the innovative multi-sensory books, or ‘anti-books’, produced through the experimental collaborations of the early twentieth century by artists and writers in the Romanov Empire and USSR known as the Futurists. 

Nicola Dillon is a researcher with a background in design, anthropology and material culture studies. Her work focuses on our relationships with materials as a way to explore and challenge socio-cultural issues. She is a PhD candidate at Kingston School of Art, supported by the Crafts Council (UK) and funded by the London Design Doctoral Centre and the Arts Humanities Research Council. Her PhD research draws the concept of material imaginaries to reflect on race, otherness and the politics of making, particularly as they relate to practices of diversity in the creative industries and African diaspora experiences with the UK.

Shai Akram is a designer, educator, and researcher based in East London, with 20 years of professional experience. She was awarded the inaugural Artisa Fellowship at the Crafts Council and achieved a prestigious LDoc PhD scholarship. Her PhD research challenges the binary between industrial manufacturing and hand-making, aiming to unite all forms of making as expressions of embodied agency. Shai recently completed a two-year research period in Costa Rica, exploring decentralised and collective making models. Co-founder of Studio Alt Shift, she also developed and led the innovative BA (Hons) Idea Material Object programme at Bath Spa University, blending academic rigour with creative innovation.

Viveca Mellegard is a Techne-funded PhD student from Royal Holloway/Kew working in the Economic Botany Department: linking Kew’s collections of Indigofera tinctoria from India to contemporary indigo production and dyeing in West Bengal. Interested in the knowledge and skills embedded in the craft of dyeing with natural indigo and how embodied practices can cultivate human-plant relationships.

Mona Craven (facilitator) is a fine artist, researcher and educator. Her praxis intersects a ‘south’ perspective and material culture research with creative research methods to think about the relationality between cloth things. Using space, light, paper and textile media she reframes cloth histories into spatial encounters with cloth.