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.
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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
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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).
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.
CHASE Essentials training is available to all Arts and Humanities PhD students at Birkbeck, regardless of whether you they are funded by CHASE or not.
About this training
CHASE Essentials is a year-round programme of training and development workshops and residential programmes and is part of the training opportunities available to all arts and humanities doctoral researchers at CHASE institutions.
Arts and Humanities
PhD students at CHASE member institutions can apply for expenses using the form here (Word
document, best viewed on a laptop or desktop). Approval for the travel claim
must be sought in advance.
Mining Back: Data Skills for Researching Corporations and Governments
Saturday 14 September | 12:15-13:25 Goldsmiths, University of London | RHB 307
Dr. Anna Feigenbaum, Principal Academic in Digital Storytelling, Bournemouth University (designed with Tom Sanderson, The Centre for Investigative Journalism)
While corporations and governments gain more and more access to our data, ‘researching up’ or investigating governments and corporations is often riddled with obstacles. While the move in recent years toward open data has brought with it increased transparency and information access, not all information is equally available. Critical documents remain hidden behind paywalls, blocked by confidentiality agreements, or deemed too sensitive to be brought into public view. Even when Freedom of Information requests return results, they can come back worded in generalisations or dressed up in retractions.
These challenges prompt researchers and campaigners to employ creative methods for legally obtaining data from governments and corporations. In this workshop we bring together key strategies for investigative research, showcasing a range of data sources, as well as freely available and easy to access tools that can be used to ‘mine back’ or obtain and analyse data of government and corporate elites. Geared toward non-coders, qualitative researchers and those with limited budgets and resources, these strategies for ‘mining back’ include advanced searching techniques, data scraping from a webpage, liberating PDF tables, and creating visual power-maps.
This workshop will focus on the reproductive technologies industry in the UK, but most of the skills and resources we will introduce are adaptable across any research project engaged in investigating corporations or governments.
CHASE Latin for Medieval and Early Modernists 2019/20
Monday 4 – Friday 8 November 2019 & Monday 10 – Friday 14 June 2020 (plus two single day workshops – TBC)
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.
Residential week 1 will be held from Monday 4th to Friday 8th November 2019 and residential week 2 will be held from Monday 10th to Friday 14th June 2020, both at UEA. Two single-day workshops will take place in London between the residential weeks with dates TBC. Please note that accommodation for the residential weeks is booked in advance, and so if you subscribe to a residential week and are subsequently unable to attend it is important to notify us as soon as possible.
The skills developed in this course over the past two years have enabled CHASE researchers to pursue previously unavailable avenues of research, and besides structured language tuition we include classes on palaeography and archival research to ground our linguistic work in practice.
Although this course primarily teaches on classical Latin it will feature texts from a wide range of historical periods and is suitable for medievalists, early modernists, and scholars from any background whose research engages with the language.
The AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership working group will host a BAME Doctoral Researchers Event on 8th July at the British Library to showcase and celebrate the work being done by our BAME researchers.
This event is open to all Arts and Humanities PhD students at Birkbeck, regardless of whether they are funded by CHASE.
Encounters is the chance for CHASE-funded doctoral researchers to meet up to share experiences and ideas. This programme offers opportunities to expand your perspectives, explore new skills, and learn more about how CHASE can support your research.
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.
Legal research entails the evaluation of legal phenomena in their political, social, cultural, doctrinal or other contexts. Contemporary modes of inquiry into legal phenomena increasingly use more than one discipline in the production of interdisciplinary research and writing. Even subjects that were traditionally taught by way of the doctrinal method have opened up to socio-legal approaches. There is a much greater emphasis on the sociology of law, and the social and political forces that shape legal doctrine and institutions. Law as a social phenomenon can be understood empirically through a range of different methods. Thus, contemporary postgraduate researchers need to expand beyond the black letter law training of practitioners and be aware of major trends in the social sciences of relevance to their own research and future careers. The key idea behind the multidisciplinary workshop for law postgraduate research students is to introduce candidates to a broad range of theoretical and practical approaches to legal research.
This three day workshop will consist of workshops, and informal networking.
May 10, 2019 | Professor Stuart Hall Building, Goldsmiths
Following the success of her photography series inspired by the Berlin Childhood texts (Berlin Childhood, published by Steidl in 2001), artist and photographer Aura Rosenberg embarked on a collaborative project with filmmaker Frances Scholz, featuring Walter Benjamin’s granddaughter, Chantal Benjamin, and her daughter, Lais Benjamin Campos. The project, which is still in progress today, consists of disparate film segments based on the original textual vignettes. The short films revisit the sites of Walter Benjamin’s childhood in contemporary Berlin, resulting in an uncanny continuity of experience as they depict his great-granddaughter in the different phases of her own urban childhood.
This Training and Research Workshop at the University of Essex aims to bring together historians from different stages of their careers: Masters Level students, PhD researchers, post doctoral researchers, Lecturers, Readers and Professors, together with historians who work outside of academia, to share and reflect upon experiences, develop collaborative strategies and build networks which will act to support historians facing gender bias and inequality in their chosen profession. The workshop will be non-hierarchical, with panels being made up of historians from different stages in their career, and will focus upon small group discussion. Participants will produce a ‘zine at the end of the workshop, and plenty of time for informal networking will be built into the day’s timetable.
Room GOR 124, Birkbeck, 43 Gordon Square, London, WC1H 0PD
This workshop offers training for students in ways of researching, teaching and engaging the public in histories of gender nonconformity, non-binary and transgender experiences. The workshop will be relevant to historians of all periods and students working on gender and/or sexuality in literature and art history.
Working with leading historians, archivists and museum professionals, participants will address issues such as:
Working with documentary and oral sources to research gender nonconformity in the past
Developing techniques to recognise diverse and marginalised histories and work with sources sensitively
The importance of developing diverse historical narratives around gender and communicating them to the public
Advantages and challenges of co-production with marginalised communities
Complexity of teaching non-binary and transgender histories to students who identify as cis, trans and non-binary
Navigating historical research into trans and non-binary lives in the context of a divisive and fraught contemporary political terrain
Wivenhoe House, Colchester Campus, University of Essex
In this two-part workshop, Professor Helen Sword and Dr Will Pooley make an evidence-based case for recuperating pleasure as a legitimate (and indeed crucial) academic emotion. Via practical exercises, they show how you can enjoy writing, and in this way become a more engaging communicator, skilful wordsmith and productive researcher.
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.
In an age when researchers can access materials from around the globe from the comfort of their own homes and offices, why should we still travel to archives? How can we shed light both on the ‘text’ itself – written, drawn, or otherwise – and on the culture in which it was embedded by studying archival, material texts not only as vessels for words, but as objects created and put to use in everyday life? The ‘Early Modern Matters’ conference will bring together scholars of all disciplines whose research engages with the material textual culture of the early modern period (c. 1500-1700).
Call for papers
Proposals are invited from doctoral students whose universities are affiliated with CHASE (Consortium for the Humanities and Arts South-East England) for 20-minute papers, which have firm foundations in the study of material texts or, whether literary, artistic, historical, scientific, etc.
Deadline
If you are interested in contributing to the conference, please submit an abstract of up to 300 words together with a short biography to: a.wyatt@uea.ac.uk by February 25 2019.
“And where the words of women are crying to be heard, we must each of us recognise our responsibility to seek those words out, to read them and share them and examine them in their pertinence to our lives. That we not hide behind the mockeries of separation that have been imposed on us and which so often we accept as our own.”
Audre Lorde
Sharing Feminist Research, Methods and Practice Event
The CHASE Feminist Network was borne of discussions wishing to provide spaces of resistance in what continues to be a patriarchal higher education sector, with ongoing and intersectional discrimination happening at all levels. We seek to create a community of inspirational people inside and outside of CHASE who are challenging this environment, provide spaces for discussion, and offer support for innovative projects and events. The network is transpositive and intersectional, and places a strong emphasis on the importance of interdisciplinary commitments to feminist research and practice and welcomes a wide variety of creative, artistic, historical, literary, theoretical, and experimental contributions.
We would like to invite proposals for contributions to our two-day event from staff and students at CHASE funded institutions. We hope to receive proposals for a variety of formats, including individual or collaborative papers (20 minutes), workshop suggestions, themed topic roundtables, creative workshops, and performances, which aim to demonstrate the plurality and the breadth of feminist expression across CHASE.
This event wishes to address how discrimination within the academy, the unequal distribution of emotional labour, and imbedded cultures of privilege, can be troubled, disrupted and overturned through feminist approaches in academia. Taking feminist methodologies and pedagogies as its central focus, the event aims to address the complexities and nuances of working in a feminist way whether feminism is a focus of the research or not.
We welcome submissions that consider queer and feminist ways doing of research, cultural analysis, teaching, and artistic practice. How can this operate through activism? How can a feminist approach become an act of resistance in itself in spaces of intersectional oppression? How can feminism be an everyday practice of resistance to hierarchies in the academy and beyond, as a way of creating and recreating our own academic identities in a hostile system? We are particularly interested in submissions that address, but are not limited to:
Trans rights and visibility
Race, legacies of empire and decolonising the curriculum
Motherhood, childcare and caring responsibilities
Feminism and (dis)ability
Precarious employment and the pay gap
Gender and austerity
Gender and age(ism)
The event will include a workshop on identifying the relevance of feminism in your research.
Please complete the form below with an abstract no more than 300 outlining your submission idea with a short bio by 30th November. We are also pleased to announce that we have a childcare fund available for this event.
