ENGAGEMENT
22nd June - 11.45 to 13.00
White Out
Room 0-05
This workshop will introduce Victoria Burgher’s practice-based research using porcelain to interrogate ideas of whiteness. Participants will be given some porcelain to engage with physically while learning about the material’s significance in imperial trade history and its contribution to the global spread of symbolic whiteness. The session aims to encourage consideration of this concept; what does being white mean and what are its implications, in terms of privilege and power, now? Perhaps a greater understanding of this ‘identity’ and its history makes it easier to either own it or disown it – engage or disengage. And can the work of engaging with this concept, as an actively antiracist strategy, help to dismantle oppressive whiteness?
​
Victoria Burgher is an artist whose practice-based research at the University of Westminster uses porcelain to reveal and challenge hegemonic whiteness in relation to the legacy of empire. Porcelain, cherished for its ‘purity’, becomes an apt material and concept to embody, expose and critique notions of white supremacy. How can the properties of porcelain – its fractiousness and vulnerability when raw, its strength, whiteness and translucency when fired – challenge terms such as white fragility and innocence? Key to her project is interrogating how and in what spaces an artistic practice can be affective as anti-racist activism.
Re-imagining the Research Poster through Embodied Practice
Room 0-03
We invite you to “make” an alternative academic research poster that has no predetermined form and will unfold throughout congress. The "poster" is a collaborative practice piece that calls you to drop in and create a response to the conference or your research. Multimodal in form, participants can build on what others have started, respond to the congress themes, bring your own practice or develop something completely new. We will supply a set of mixed materials, however we welcome you to bring also your own materials.
A work in progress will be displayed in the interactive room.
​
Viveca Mellegård is a researcher and filmmaker. She is curious about ways to transform human-nature relationships both in the head and the heart and explores embodied, creative practices and approaches. Her current research investigates the tacit knowledge and skills embedded in dyeing with natural indigo in West Bengal. Viveca has worked at the Stockholm Resilience Centre and on international development projects in East Africa. She was previously a producer-director at the BBC.
Daisy Bow du Toit is a crafter and social media content creator whose research is focussed on online craft communities who used web 2.0 (specifically Instagram) to connect over the totem of craft. The medium of web 2.0 has enabled a craft renaissance with amateurs, influencers and craftivists: shaping what is made, how it is mediated and who is making. While traditional gatekeepers have been removed, new ones have been introduced in the form of the algorithm.
Rosalind Holgate Smith is a Dancer, Artist and Educator. She creates performances, installations and visual artwork that investigates intimate experiences between people, place and the environment. She holds a Masters in Dance Creative practice, a BA (hons) in Fine Art & Choreography and is currently a techne PhD scholarship student, based at Kingston University, where she is investigating touch as an encounter with Otherness and the vocabulary of touch in Contact Improvisation. https://rosalindholgate-smith.com
​
Victoria Burgher is an artist whose practice-based research at the University of Westminster uses porcelain to reveal and challenge hegemonic whiteness in relation to the legacy of empire. Porcelain, cherished for its ‘purity’, becomes an apt material and concept to embody, expose and critique notions of white supremacy. How can the properties of porcelain – its fractiousness and vulnerability when raw, its strength, whiteness and translucency when fired – challenge terms such as white fragility and innocence? Key to her project is interrogating how and in what spaces an artistic practice can be affective as anti-racist activism.
​
Nicola Dillon is a design researcher and material anthropologist. Her research practice uses studio practice, collaborative methods and the study of everyday contexts to consider how the entanglements of people, materials, and design can help to understand, critique and challenge socio-cultural issues. She is currently undertaking a PhD funded by the Arts Humanities Research Council and supported by the UK Crafts Council where she draws on the concept of material imaginaries to explore approaches to diversity and difference as they relate to the politics of making and experiences of African diasporas in the UK.
Why Are We Still Bothering With Archives?
Room 0-04
It is a pleasure to welcome Techne alumna and artist filmmaker Dr Onyeka Igwe back into conversation with our Techne research community. In an interactive round-table seminar, Dr Igwe's extensive and successful outward-facing research journey underpins our conversation about her research methodology 'critical proximity'. On this occasion, we look forward to open and inclusive discussion across intersections of engagement, research practice and research methodology.
The seminar opens with a screening of Dr Igwe's film, The names have changed including my own and truths have been altered (26', UK, 2019). This work premiered in Jerwood Staging Series: 2019 – Onyeka Igwe, There were Two Brothers (2019), won The Berwick New Cinema Award in 2019 and had its International Premiere at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2020. An open invitation follows the screening in response to Dr Igwe's construction of 'critical proximity'. The invitation is in the form of an introductory conversation between Igwe and University of the Arts PhD candidate Judah Attille who is currently developing a praxis of hospitality based on a reading of Derridean Hostipitality. Attille first encountered Igwe's filmmaking at the event New Work: Onyeka Igwe No Dance No Palaver at Lux Moving Image (2018), which included a post-screening Q&A with Rabz Lansiquot and Imani Robinson, formerly members of the collective Sorryyoufeeluncomfortable, and now in the artistic and curatorial collaboration, Languid Hands. This event introduced Attille to Igwe's agency as a public intellectual across broad communities of intellectual production and to generational thinking about cultural producers whose leadership in the arts and humanities continually contributes to an expansion of excellence in thought.
In the encounter at the archive, a surfeit of instincts, desires, feelings, or senses can be provoked by the material (151), Unbossed and Unbound: How can critical proximity transfigure British colonial moving images? Onyeka Igwe (2019).
​
Dr Onyeka Igwe is an artist and researcher working between cinema and installation, born and based in London, UK. Through her work, Onyeka is animated by the question — how do we live together? — with particular interest in the ways the sensorial, spatial and non-canonical ways of knowing can provide answers to this question. Her works have been shown in the UK and internationally at film festivals and galleries. She completed her Techne supported PhD, titled Unbossed and Unbound: How can critical proximity transfigure British Colonial Moving Images? in 2020.
Engaging PhD Careers Options Outside the Academy
Windsor Auditorium
This session will explore career options in creative and cultural management, public policy and the not-for-profit sector. How might these options fit your career priorities and values? How you can enhance and market your PhD experience for different careers paths?
​
Liz Wilkinson is a Senior Careers Consultant at The Careers Group, with specialisms in postgraduate and academic careers and digital employability. Formerly Director of Careers and Employability at Royal Holloway for 15 years, Liz Wilkinson led a multidisciplinary team of 18 staff to empower 10,000 students to launch themselves into graduate careers. The quality of the Liz’s professional work has been recognised by an AGR national award for Best Preparation for Work in Higher Education.
Engaging Audiences in Stored Museum Collections
Room 1-02
‘Around 97 per cent of the Science Museum’s collections are in storage at any one time – a statistic which holds true across much of the heritage sector.’ (Barrett, Humphreys, 2019)
In 2024 the Science Museum Group is opening its new National Collections Centre including new state of the art storage facility Building ONE. Engaging audiences in stored collections remains a key challenge for the sector, given the time and resource needed to manage them. In preparation for its opening, the Science Museum Group has assembled a Collections Engagement Team to explore what access and engagement should look like for a storage facility and the collections it houses. In this session we will explore this challenge together, and consider who might want to engage with museum collections (Researchers? Heritage professionals? Families? School groups? Artists?) and how they might want to access them (Object-handling? Volunteering? Specialist tours? Skills training?). We also want to explore what the barriers to engagement might be, and whether there are strategies the Museum might put in place to overcome them. In particular, we would like to draw on the knowledge and experience of the Congress attendees to explore what barriers and opportunities they can identify.
​
Dr Alison Hess, Research Manager for Stored Collections Engagement, Science Museum. Alison is currently on secondment from her permanent role in the Research and Public History team to the One Collection team where she is working on research engagement with the Science Museum Group’s stored collections at the National Collections Centre (opening in 2024). She has been working in research at the Science Museum since the completion of her doctorate with the geography department at Royal Holloway, University of London in 2013.
She has acted as a co-investigator on several funded research projects which have focussed on collections-based research methodologies, participatory practice, emotional geographies, and digital interventions in museum collections. Alison has most recently co-edited the book ‘Exploring Emotion, Care and Enthusiasm in ‘Unloved’ Museum Collections,’ (2020). She is currently working on the role of the museum store in historical and contemporary museum practice.
Alison Faraday, Collections Engagement & Volunteering Manager, National Collections Centre, Science Museum. As Collections Engagement and Volunteering Manager it is her job to recruit and coordinate volunteers who are supporting with the unpacking of 300,000 objects being moved from London. She is also working on how the National Collections Centre will welcome people for public tours, school and research visits from 2024.
Myth and Voice Initiative: Mentoring and/as Co-creation
Room 1-04
This session/workshop will give the participants the opportunity to discuss challenges and best practice around mentoring and co-creation in youth projects of public engagement. My case study will be my Myth and Voice Initiative which uses mythological settings, role-play and story therapy to provide school children and communities safe spaces for engagement with emotions, obstacles and solutions surrounding personal expression in moments of crisis, perhaps even trauma. After a short presentation/evaluation of occasions of mentoring and co-creation that have already occurred in the project, the session will explore in small group conversations the qualities and parameters of successful mentoring and the ways it can intersect organically with the processes and drives of co-creation that is the principal focus of this out-reach project.
​
Dr Efi Spentzou is a Reader in Latin Literature and Classical Reception. She works at the intersection of classics and modern critical thinking. Her interests include feminist receptions and gendered voices and interplay in classical myth and its modern reworkings.
​
Chloe Howard completed an MRes in Classical Reception and is a founding student member of the Myth and Voice Initiative.