Our internationally renowned London Critical Theory Summer School returns on Birkbeck’s campus in central London this summer from 27 June to 8 July. The LCTSS may revert to either a hybrid model or a full-scale online programme if Covid-related restrictions globally require us to do so.
Throughout the two weeks, attendees will be immersed in a substantial programme of study with the acclaimed critical thinkers Jodi Dean, Achille Mbembe, Sarah Nuttall, Etienne Balibar, Costas Douzinas, Stephen Frosh, Esther Leslie, Jacqueline Rose and Slavoj Žižek. We are also welcoming Sisonke Msimang as part of our strengthening connections to the WISER institute (Johannesberg).
The Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities are pleased to offer three bursaries to Birkbeck students and one bursary to an international student to cover the full cost of fees, travel and accommodation during the period of the Summer School in central London.
This year, there will also be a LCTSS Virtual Programme, an educational experience for those: unsure whether they are ready for the full in person course; with concerns about travel; or on a reduced budget.
The deadline for applications is Friday 18 March. Application forms are available here.
The following events and opportunities are available via the AHRC funded CHASE Doctoral Training Programme. All of the opportunities below are open to all Arts and Humanities PhD students at Birkbeck, regardless of whether they are funded or self-funded.
Future Pathways in Medieval and Early Modern Studies:
Academia and Beyond
Friday, 6 March and Friday 27 March
The aim of these two workshops is to explore the possible
pathways that medieval and early modern studies can open up for future careers.
Both workshops will host a group of speakers with PhDs in various aspects of
medieval and early modern studies that have since pursued a wide array of
careers. Their personal knowledge and experiences will provide the springboard
for informal roundtable discussions and exercises. These events will encourage
current postgraduate students to reflect critically on the ways in which one
can communicate and curate research and teaching expertise, while they will
also offer opportunities for new connections to be made with a variety of
individuals, institutions and sectors.
FRAMES – Friday 20 March The annual TRANSITIONS symposium has been extended with FRAMES,
a day of workshops for CHASE researchers. The workshops are Graphic Medicine
with Ian Williams and Comics as Research Practice with Nick Sousanis.
The workshops are focussed on comics and arts as part of the
research process, but are open to all research students affiliated with CHASE
institutions.
The day is divided into two workshop sessions, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. The morning session is Graphic Medicine with Ian Williams. The afternoon session is Comics as Research Practice with Nick Sousanis.
Transitions: New Directions in Comics
Studies is an annual one-day symposium promoting new research and
multi-disciplinary academic study of comics / comix / bande dessinée /
manga / and other forms of sequential art. The Transitions symposia have been a
fixture on the UK comics scholarship landscape, with a focus on new voices and
novel approaches in comics research. The programme emphasises a range of
approaches in research, and especially invites participation from research
students and early career researchers.
Critical Race Studies and the Premodern: Archive and Seminar
8 & 9 June | University
of Sussex
Decolonising the Curriculum (Practical Funded by the CHASE
Consortium, the Universities of East Anglia and Sussex are hosting two
postgraduate training workshops on critical race studies and the pre-modern.
This, the second of two events, will be held at The University of Sussex, 8-9
June 2020, and will focus on research. The event is designed to develop
students’ professional skills. We invite expressions of interest from all postgraduates
working in the Humanities (giving papers, designing and chairing sessions,
attending).
Auraldiversities is a series of lectures, workshops and in-situ training sessions seeking to encourage creative and critical attention towards aural diversity within the arts and humanities, with particular focus on an ecology of the ear, designed for all those researching within the Arts and Humanities, especially those with an interest in the creative, social and political dimensions of sound and listening.
These sessions specifically address the need for further
study and practice inspired by, and concerning, this specific turn in research
and focus on a particular theme led by an academic/practitioner with invited
guests selected to represent a range of approaches. A CHASE PhD candidate with
associated research interests will also give a presentation.
Sessions are purposefully multifaceted, practical, intuitive
and experimental in approach and encourage collaborative work and collective
activities:
Ethnography and Film. Exploring Labour, Technology and Mediation in the Egyptian Film Industry
Wednesday 19 February | University of Kent
The workshop will offer participants advanced training in
ethnography, applied to the context of the Egyptian Film industry. Dr El
Khachab’s workshop will outline how researchers can successfully apply
ethnographic methodologies, developed in Anthropology, to research issues about
arts and media, especially film. Dr El Khachab will outline the strategies he
developed during his PhD research to gather observations, interviews and
documentary data from creatives and technicians working in the largest and most
influential media industry in the Arab world. He will also provide participants
an insight into how he adapted the presentation of his findings from his PhD
thesis into his forthcoming monograph, The Egyptian Film Industry: Labor,
Technology, Mediation.
This workshop is aimed at CHASE students from a variety of
backgrounds and developed with an interdisciplinary audience in mind. Hence,
attending the training does not require any specialised prior knowledge or
skills, apart from an interest in the topic of the workshop.
Daniel Hahn is a writer, editor and translator with over sixty books to his name. His work has won him the International Dublin Literary Award, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the Blue Peter Book Award, and been shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize, among others. He is a past chair of the Society of Authors, and on the board of a number of organisations that work with literature and free speech.
Future Pathways in Medieval and Early Modern Studies: Academia and Beyond
Friday 6 & Friday 27 March | University of Kent
The intended audience for both workshops is first and
foremost students currently undertaking PhDs in any aspect of medieval or early
modern studies (including Archaeology, History, History of Art and Literary
Studies). Students will be able to register for one or both of the workshops,
both of which will be hosted at the University of Kent’s Canterbury campus. The
first workshop (‘Beyond Academia’) will take place on Friday 6 March 2020. The
second workshop (‘Early Career Academia’) will take place on Friday 27 March
2020.
Embodied Approaches to Performing Experimental Music
This training explores embodied approaches to performing experimental music, and methods of observing and reporting on research observations that arise as a result of such performance. It employs an approach to methodological training through practical, hands-on workshops.
The Essay Film Festival, now in its sixth edition, presents a global range of contemporary and restored essayistic works, each exploring the creative zone of possibilities between experimental and documentary modes of filmmaking.
This year’s programme features
several key themes and strands:
New work by the Otolith Group and restored essay films by Ruchir Joshi and the Yugantar Collective engage with the cultural history and politics of India, providing imaginative and insightful perspectives on the educational projects of Rabindranath Tagore, the wandering Baal musicians, the changing cities of Ahmedabad and Kolkata, and the political struggles of Indian women. A symposium on the work of author and filmmaker Joshi will take place during the festival with guests from India, France and the USA, while Yugantar member Deepa Dhanraj will join researchers from Berlin Arsenal and Goldsmiths to discuss the restoration of the collective’s films.
From Argentina, France, UK and the Philippines come challenging found footage experiments by Leandro Listorti, Frank Beauvais, Sarah Wood and John Torres, which critically examine the status and uses of images today while transforming them into moving and fascinating new creations. A student-led research workshop with guest filmmakers will analyse the theory and practice of found footage in the digital age.
US artists Garrett Bradley and
Cauleen Smith investigate and celebrate the depth and diversity of
African-American lives, past and present, with works that, like all good
essays, both question the viewer and invite us into an ongoing conversation.
Both Bradley and Smith will give lecture-workshops about their practice
alongside the screenings of their films.
Developing the theme of ‘the
living archive’, a series of events will address the cultural politics of film
restoration, featuring works by Jocelyne Saab, Mostafa Derkaoui, Ingemo
Engström and Gerhard Theuring, in addition to the restored films of Ruchir
Joshi and the Yugantar Collective.
Finally, Israeli filmmaker Tamar Rachovsky will join the festival to present and discuss Home in E Major, which looks at complex questions of identity and belonging through the deceptively simple lens of the diary film.
Simple and complex, contingent and
reflective, hybrid and critical, the essay film that we celebrate at our
festival is a constantly renewed invitation to engage with the world and to see
it in new ways.
Michael Temple (Director), on behalf of the Essay Film Festival group: Matthew Barrington (Manager), Kieron Corless, Nicolas Freeman (CHASE intern), Catherine Grant, Ricardo Matos Cabo, Janet McCabe, Raquel Morais, and Laura Mulvey.
The Essay Film Festival is a collaboration between Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image and the ICA, with support from the CHASE Doctoral Training Partnership.
The following events and opportunities are available via the AHRC funded CHASE Doctoral Training Programme. All of the opportunities below are open to all Arts and Humanities PhD students at Birkbeck, regardless of whether they are funded or self-funded. If I could also draw your attention to a couple of calls for papers/participation that are currently open.
Journal recruiting members for next Editorial Board
Brief Encounters is currently recruiting the next Editorial Board to oversee the creation of issue 5 – see below press release:
Seaside, Ruin and De-Industrialisation on the Cleveland Coast
Friday 10th to sunday 12th of January
Redcar/Cleveland
Following the critical excursion Beyond the Heartlands and building on themes of de-industrialisation, landscape and ruin, the ‘Space Place Time’ research collective are calling for participants for a two-day critical excursion to Redcar and Cleveland. Completed in 1846, the Middlesbrough and Redcar Railway hoped to attract tourism, but like much of the region, Redcar’s expansion came with the 1850 discovery of iron ore in the Eston area of the Cleveland Hills. The engine of Britain’s Industrial Revolution, Redcar was simultaneously home to a Victorian pleasure pier. The pier’s demolition in 1981 can be seen as an allegory of the decade’s slum, which saw the simultaneous decline of both industries.
The Frankfurt Exotic: broken objects and porous walls in Naples
Beginning of April (deadline to apply 15 Jan)
Naples, Italy
Following the critical excursion Re-mapping the Arcades
Project in Glasgow, and building on the field engagement with the work and
cities of Walter Benjamin, we are calling for participants in a critical
excursion in Naples: The Frankfurt Exotic: broken objects and porous walls in
Naples. This critical excursion will take place over 4 nights at the beginning
of April 2020 and will involve a series of workshops, walking tours and
screenings with the anticipated outcome of a publication recording
conversations, presentations, works in progress, creative responses and
translation work.
Friday 17th of January (from 12:00) – Norfolk Heritage Centre
Saturday 18th January – Blickling Estate
The second of the CHASE DTP-funded Bookscapes workshops, offering PhD students advanced training in palaeographical, codicological and bibliographical skills, will take place on 17th-18th January 2020, hosted by the University of East Anglia and led by Tom Roebuck and Sophie Butler. At the Norfolk Heritage Centre, on day one of the workshop, attending students will have the opportunity to engage with the collections of the original Norwich City Library (founded in 1618). The workshop will move to Blickling Estate on the second day, where the students will focus on the techniques and history of bookbinding and the history of the book. The second day’s workshop will be led by Nicholas Pickwoad, one of the leading experts on bookbinding and an adviser to the National Trust on book conservation.
Numbers for the workshops are strictly limited. We encourage all interested PhD students to contact bookscapes@kent.ac.uk as soon as possible. You can also follow us on twitter at https://twitter.com/bookscapes.
—
CHASE Essentials – Thesis Boot Camp
Saturday 1st and Sunday 2nd of February
University of Sussex
Are you a mid- or late-stage doctoral researcher, struggling
to make progress with your thesis? Do you keep putting off your writing? If so,
Thesis Boot Camp could be the solution. Deadline to apply – 17 January.
Aural Diversity is a series of lectures, workshops and in-situ training sessions seeking to encourage creative and critical attention towards aural diversity within the arts and humanities, with particular focus on an ecology of the ear, designed for all those researching within the Arts and Humanities, especially those with an interest in the creative, social and political dimensions of sound and listening.
These sessions specifically address the need for further study and practice inspired by, and concerning, this specific turn in research and focus on a particular theme led by an academic/practitioner with invited guests selected to represent a range of approaches.
Session #1 | Thursday 13 February | 1000-1800 | Goldsmiths,
University of London – Register
here
Session # 2 | Thursday 27 February | 1000-1800 | Room 264,
Senate House, London – Register
here
Session #3 | Thursday 12 March | 1000-1800 | Goldsmiths,
University of London – Register
here
Plenary | Thursday 26 March | 1500-1800 | Keynes Library,
Birkbeck, University of London – Register
here
—
Ethnography and Film. Exploring Labour, Technology and Mediation in the Egyptian Film Industry
19 Feb (14:00-20:30)
University of Kent
The workshop will offer participants advanced training in
ethnography, applied to the context of the Egyptian Film industry. Dr El
Khachab’s workshop will outline how researchers can successfully apply
ethnographic methodologies, developed in Anthropology, to research issues about
arts and media, especially film. Dr El Khachab will outline the strategies he
developed during his PhD research to gather observations, interviews and
documentary data from creatives and technicians working in the largest and most
influential media industry in the Arab world. He will also provide participants
an insight into how he adapted the presentation of his findings from his PhD
thesis into his forthcoming monograph, The Egyptian Film Industry: Labor,
Technology, Mediation.
Call for proposals | The Essay Film Festival: Research, Critique, Practice
As part of its new
collaborative partnership with CHASE, the Essay Film Festival is inviting
proposals from doctoral students for a student-led symposium exploring
essayistic forms and their relationship to academic research, social critique
and artistic practice.
The conference will combine
research presentations and film screenings, including examples of practice-led
researchers talking through, questioning and “essaying” their own work. This
event will follow the sixth edition of the Essay Film Festival, which will take
place at Birkbeck Cinema, ICA, Goethe-Institut and Institut Français, from 26
March to 4 April 2020.
The symposium will be held at Birkbeck Cinema in May 2020
(exact date to be confirmed), more than a month after the end of the festival.
The idea of the conference is, therefore, to provide a space for critical
reflection and debate, with a certain detachment from the EFF programme itself,
as well as to propose and discuss new directions for the festival in the
future.
Call for Papers | Critical Race Studies and the Premodern: Archive and Seminar
23rd to 24th March – University of East Anglia 8th to 9th June – University of Sussex
Universities of East Anglia and Sussex are hosting two postgraduate
training workshops on critical race studies and the pre-modern. The first of
these will be held at the University of East Anglia, 23-24 March 2020, and will
focus on teaching and pedagogy; the second will be held at The University of
Sussex, 8-9 June 2020, and will focus on research. Both events are designed to
develop students’ professional skills. We invite expressions of interest from
all postgraduates working in the Humanities (giving papers, designing and
chairing sessions, attending).
Current Birkbeck PhD students are invited by the BBSRC-funded LIDo PhD programme to attend events in their multi-disciplinary Teaching Week in February 2020. The sessions are open to all University of London PhD students regardless of their subject area.
This year the week consists of a series of separate day-long workshops on themes of Drug Discovery, Software Development in Biology & Medicine, The Psychology of Wellbeing, Insects in Agriculture and Ethics in Health Sciences .
PhD students should express their interest in attending each event by clicking here and completing a short form, full details of locations (London – UCL) and speaker biographies will follow in the new year.
Places are limited so please let us know as soon as you can.
Drug Discovery: Monday 17 February 2020
Translational Genomics in Drug Discovery
Data-driven drug discovery
AI and Drug Discovery
Data mining in Drug Discovery
Computer-Aided Drug Discovery
Software: Tuesday 18 February 2020
Development and implementation of intelligent
patient monitoring systems
Information Management in Systems Biology
Software Solutions for Research Communication
Software Engineering for Research Computing
Problems of uncertainty in Sensor System
Software
Psychology: Wednesday 19 February 2020
The Impact of Social Identity on Mental Health
Outcomes
Emotion Regulation and the Brain
Psychological wellbeing following atypical
prenatal hormone environments
Big Data Psychology: measuring well-being in
transactional data
Impact on brain anatomy of allele risk for
mental disorders
Entomology: Thursday 20 February 2020
Applied Ecology: making fundamental research
relevant to real-world problems
Understanding and mitigating arthropod vectors
and vector-borne diseases as ecosystem disservices
The use of biocontrol as an alternative to
pesticide
The following events and opportunities are available via the AHRC funded CHASE Doctoral Training Programme. All of the opportunities below are open to all Arts and Humanities PhD students at Birkbeck, regardless of whether they are funded or self-funded.
Performing Theory Series – Nuclear Hallucinations
Thursday, 24 October 2019 | 17:00 20:00
Goldsmiths, University of London, New Cross, SE14 6NW
MRB Screen 1
This event inaugurates a new academic year for those of us
doing Screen related research, by hearing from practitioners about the
relationship between their ideas and their images.
Fathima Nizaruddin will be here to screen and discuss her
2016 film, Nuclear Hallucinations.
Various dates from 28 October | 1400-1600 | University of East Anglia
This series of masterclasses is by translators of creative writing for creative writers and is designed to provide insight into these acts of translation that many if not all creative writers engage with. The sessions are small group and are led by the world’s leading translators – including two Booker Prize nominees and one Booker winner. Sessions will be craft focused. Session leaders include Jeremy Tiang, Antonia Lloyd-Jones, Duncan Large, Daniel Hahn and Marilyn Booth who will share their expertise and insights exclusively on the topic. Each masterclass will explore from a different perspective the relationship between translation and creative writing – which, although inextricably connected, are rarely considered together.
CHASE Latin for Medieval and Early Modernists 2019/20
4-8 November & 1-5 June 2020 | University of East Anglia
The CHASE Latin for Medievalists and Early Modernists course is a series of workshops and residential weeks designed to provide Latin tuition from beginner to intermediate levels, as well as facilitate the discussion and development of Latin methodologies and research practice. A grasp of Latin is essential to cutting-edge work in medieval and early modern studies but tuition is often hard to come by – we aim to provide CHASE scholars with the necessary skills to produce top-quality research and to form a network of Latin scholars throughout the academy.
Wednesday, 20 November 2019 | Sussex Humanities Lab, University of Sussex
‘Mapping Feminists Coding Practices’, a one-day symposium at the Sussex Humanities Lab, University of Sussex, is the first in a series of events that explore feminist coding practices and the historic context of feminism and technology. It explores some of the affordances and resistances of computational technology. Its aim is to develop a wider understanding of current practices and research which make positive interventions into and within computation, in its widest possible interpretation, from a feminist perspective.
Fifty Years of Skinner’s “Meaning and Understanding in
the History of Ideas”
Friday, 29 November – Saturday, 30 November 2019 |
University of Sussex
This programme takes the opportunity of the fiftieth
anniversary of one of the most influential article on intellectual-historical
methods, Quentin Skinner’s “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas”
(1969), to introduce doctoral participants to the methodological commitments
within the field, engaging them in cutting-edge critical reflection on method.
Participants will gain a thorough foundation in the available methods in the
history of ideas, engage in debates regarding method, and participate in the
critical evaluation of such methodologies, considering possible
alternatives.
The following events and opportunities are available via the AHRC funded CHASE Doctoral Training Programme. All of the opportunities below are open to all Arts and Humanities PhD students at Birkbeck, regardless of whether they are funded or self-funded.
Applications for this placement are open to all arts and humanities PhD student at Birkbeck, regardless of whether they are funded by CHASE. The successful applicant will receive a stipend, fee reimbursement and the opportunity to claim expenses. The deadline for applications is 29 March.
From 22 March to 24 May, Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image and the Essay Film Festival is hosting a unique programme of research events about the work of filmmakers and film theorists Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen. The programme comprises an exhibition at Birkbeck’s Peltz Gallery, a film season, a series of ‘In Conversation’ events and Gallery Workshops, a Curators’ Talk, and a student-led Symposium.
This interactive workshop leads from identifying the elements of a good media story in academic research, through the challenges of dealing with the media and the competing pressures of academic and journalistic methods to final on-camera interviews and playback analysis. Run by Media Players International, this one-day workshops will help you understand what makes for good communication through the general media. It also directly address the issues of impact and media strategy required by the Research Excellence Framework.
This series of Master Classes aims to present a wide variety of approaches to the artistic production of ideas in audio-visual form. We are inviting performance artists and moving image makers whose work (written, performed, filmed) manifests theoretical innovation. The latter part of the 20th century produced body of Anglo-American writing and work that are recognised today as canonical as with Hollis Frampton, Maya Deren, Peter Gidal for example. With this series we want to produce a sample of this kind of interplay between ideas and creating that are underway today. In so doing, we hope to open the field of play between theory and works to create new conversations.
The inaugural session in the series is Speaking in Tongues: a lecture-performance by Christopher Harris. Throughout his career artist and filmmaker Christopher Harris has used film and video installations to re-stage and explore African American accounts of history. Using experimental film techniques, Harris brings disparate mediums into dialogue with one another, in order to present multiple perspectives highlighting experiences of the African diaspora.
Wednesday 27 March | 1400-1600 | The Enterprise Centre, UEA, TEC 0.02
Sabrina Mahfouz has recently been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and is the recipient of the 2018 King’s Alumni Arts & Culture Award. She has been shortlisted for The Stage Award for Best Solo Performance, a Women in the Creative Industries Award, an Arts Foundation Award for Performance Poetry and has won a Sky Arts Academy Award for Poetry, a Westminster Prize for New Playwrights and a Fringe First Award. She also writes for children and her play Zeraffa Giraffa won a 2018 Off West End Award.
Sabrina is the editor of The Things I Would Tell You: British Muslim Women Write, a 2017 Guardian Book of the Year and currently nominated for The People’s Book Prize. She is an essay contributor to the multi-award-winning The Good Immigrant and is currently writing a biopic of the legendary ‘Godfather of Grime’, rapper and producer Wiley, for Pulse Films.
CHASE brings together 9 leading institutions engaged in collaborative research activities including an AHRC doctoral training partnership, supporting discipline-based projects, specialising in interdisciplinary research, and research in emerging fields of study and creative practice.
It is central to the ethos at CHASE that serious disciplinary research is interdisciplinary. The following training opportunities are available to research students:
The Future of Arts Research
This programme of innovative skills training is geared toward those involved in practice research, generally, and arts research, specifically. The nature of the training is inherently interdisciplinary, devised and developed by researchers across Fine Art, Performance and Poetry. The training will be suitable and beneficial to researchers at any stage of their project’s development and, while specifically relevant to artist researchers, will be open to researchers in any field.
There are four skills workshops, each dedicated to a key element of practice research. The workshops are scheduled on the following two days:
Peer Coaching taster session (collaborative with WRoCAH DTP)
25 January 2019 | 11:00 – 16:00
London Venue TBC
Would you benefit from being part of a supportive peer group of WRoCAH doctoral researchers for a whole academic year and beyond?
Peer coaching groups that meet regularly are known as ‘action learning sets’. Groups are intended to offer mutual support and coaching. For each meeting group members are invited bring their current challenges and the group works with them to coach them towards potential solutions.
Taking part in this workshop will give you the chance to work with a group of peers to develop your coaching skills to improve collaborative working, communication and professional relationships. The skills of coaching can be applied to help you get the best out of yourself and the best out of others. This can be in your research, in your teaching or in working with or supervising of others.
MARs Session: Radiological Deep Time (by Mountain of Art Research – Goldsmiths)
Various dates, please see below
MARs Research Hub, Seminar Space (Room 5), 43 Lewisham Way London SE14 6NP
This MARs Session will investigate theoretical ideas and artistic practices concerned with radiological deep time. From nuclear landscapes of mining, test sites, and waste storage sites. The session will focus on the problems of decolonising the nuclear, through feminist and forensic analysis, rethinking nuclear landscapes at home, and the mythologies of distant test and mining sites.
Research Student Prep Session Two – 2 Nov, 3-5pm
Research Student Prep Session Three – 23 Nov, 3-5pm
MAIN SESSION / Nuclear Culture Research Symposium: 30 Nov, 10.30am – 6pm & 1 Dec, 10.30am – 2.30pm
Early Modern Matters: Materiality and the Archive & Call for papers
11-12 May 2019
University of East Anglia
From the creation of almanacs, gazettes, and paperbooks – whose ephemeral life span led to their repurposing in manifold ways – to the circulation of sermon collections, commonplace books, and annotated printed volumes, the materiality of the early modern world is unavoidable. By studying archival material texts, not only as vessels for words, but as objects created and put to use in everyday life, we can shed light both on the ‘text’ itself – written, drawn, or otherwise – and on the culture in which it was embedded.
The ‘Early Modern Matters: Materiality and the Archive’ conference will bring together scholars of all whose research intersects with the material textual culture of the early modern period (c. 1500-1700). These disciplines include, but are not limited to: the history of the book, art history, literature, the history of medicine, the history of science, and the history of law. By drawing together these strands of early modern scholarship we hope to expand our understanding of how early modern people interacted with texts as physical objects.
City Maps – few places left on the Tuesday 21 November session
Birkbeck, Bloomsbury campus
Researching screen media and global cities.
In this workshop, Johan Anderson from King’s College London will lead a workshop with Lawrence Webb (University of Sussex), building on themes introduced in their co-edited books Global Cinematic Cities: New Landscapes of Film and Media (2016) and The City in American Cinema: Film and Postindustrial Culture (forthcoming, 2019). This will comprise a film screening and a workshop at the Birkbeck Cinema. In the workshop session, Andersson and Webb will lead a discussion on the challenges of researching cinema/screen media and cities at a time when both have become destabilized as objects of study. Students will be encouraged to draw on their own PhD projects to consider a range of research methodologies and theoretical approaches to screen media and cities. Johan Andersson and Lawrence Webb will present on their own recent research projects and talk about the challenges of interdisciplinary research and publication. Topics will vary depending on the doctoral students participating, but are likely to include: film, media and the digital turn; gentrification; landscape theory; genre; queer studies; urban history; archival research; location shooting; and urban institutions. Doctoral students working on any urban/national context or historical period are welcome to attend.
How to collaborate: an introduction to working with external partners
Monday 19 November, 11.15am-3.30pm Barbican Centre, Silk St, London EC2Y 8DS
Led by Dr Keith M. Johnston, UEA Arts & Humanities Associate Dean for Innovation & Paul Roberts, University of Sussex Head of Business Engagement
Do you want to develop your research beyond the university, but not sure where to start? Do you think your research could help an existing company or sector? Working with organisations – be they commercial, arts funded, third sector, governmental – can be an incredibly rewarding experience, helping you translate your research and/or research skills to a different environment, with different demands and expectations. Working with non-HEIs is also becoming more important across the UK research landscape, with the KEF (Knowledge Exchange Framework) being mooted to start in spring 2019.
This session will offer expert advice and practical tips on identifying, approaching and working with organisations, and on the opportunities available for collaborative work. Topics to be covered will include:
• Why work with partners – what do they add?
• What do partners want?
• How do you get started – who makes the first move?
• What timescales and demands are suitable for these projects?
• What ethical / legal implications might there be?
• What happens if it all goes wrong?
• Will this help me get a job?
This session, part of the CHASE Encounters conference, is open to doctoral and early career researchers from CHASE member institutions.
Call for Papers: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Region Second Biannual Postgraduate Conference
The School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics at SOAS University of London invites proposals for paper presentations at a forthcoming postgraduate conference, to be held at SOAS on the 1st and 2nd of May, 2019.
The conference is designed as a forum that brings together UK-based PhD students working on the MENA region from any perspective. MENA here is defined in the broadest possible terms and includes the countries of the Arab world, Israel, Turkey, Iran and the central Asian states. The School particularly welcomes proposals that
• adopt interdisciplinary approaches
• reflect critically on the process of conducting interdisciplinary research
• engage with a combination of textual, visual, aural and digital sources
However, the School welcomes any proposal that is pertinent to the study of MENA. Presentations will be recorded on video and uploaded to the web.
The conference will be the second on this theme organised and funded through the Consortium of the Humanities and the Arts South-East England (CHASE), the first having been hosted by the Middle East and North Africa Centre at Sussex (MENACS) of the University of Sussex in April 2017. Faculty members from across the CHASE group of universities will participate in the conference as panel chairs and commentators. This will ensure doctoral students receive critical feedback on their work from leading scholars who work on the MENA region from a variety of viewpoints.
Abstracts of 300 words with CHASE CONFERENCE in the subject bar should be sent to Marlé Hammond (mh93@soas.ac.uk) no later than 31 December 2018. Students from CHASE institutions (The Courtauld Institute of Art, Goldsmiths, Open University, University of East Anglia, University of Essex, University of Kent, University of Sussex, Birkbeck, and SOAS) may apply for reimbursement of travel and accommodation expenses through their institutions. See https://www.chase.ac.uk/hb-funding#apply
The conference organisers will be able to offer successful candidates from other UK institutions some funding for these costs. There is no registration fee.
