ENGAGEMENT
22nd June - 14.00 to 15.15
Tour of Royal Holloway's Picture Gallery
Meet by the reception desk in the foyer
In 1881, Thomas Holloway broke the auction house price records buying his first five paintings for the Royal Holloway Picture Gallery. In two years, he had spent £84,000 and bought 77 pictures. This collection was the first publicly exhibited group of British paintings, and the first collection formed for a female audience in Britain. This session will explore the Gallery highlights and some lesser-known treasures.
Introduction to Royal Holloway's Archives
Meet by the reception desk in the foyer
This session will give attendees the chance to delve into the archives, special collections and rare books held at Royal Holloway and find out how they can aid your research. Our collections include theatrical ephemera, archives from radical theatres of the twentieth century, our own institutional records focusing on women’s education and our rare book collections which houses gems such as a Shakespeare second folio, Hooke’s Micrographia and Dickens’ serialised editions. There will also be a behind the scenes tour of the Archives and Rare Books store in the Davison Building.
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Anne-Marie Purcell is the archives and special collections curator recently appointed as part of the newly created Culture Team in the library department. She has worked in archives for 16 years and has worked for a variety of archival institutions including county and local authority; and higher education. She studied history at Royal Holloway so is enjoying being back at the College.
Enhancing Engagement Through Creative Practice: Who Are We Connecting With and How?
Room 0-03
How do creative researchers engage audiences beyond the academy? In what ways can creative modes and methods expand our research communities and give rise to relevant and refreshing research?
Creative practice offers myriad opportunities to enhance engagement. This session brings together practice-led researchers working in poetry, fiction, music, carnival arts and the archive to explore how creative research methods connect us with new audiences. A creative showcase will spotlight emerging work and illuminate how creative praxis and performance can shape transformative critical enquiry by engaging fresh perspectives and approaches.
In a collective workshop, participants will have the chance to discuss ideas for enhancing engagement opportunities for their own research and expanding its reach.
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Joanna Brown is a writer, research and teacher in the first year of a Techne-funded PhD. She writes for adults and children to find a way into the Black British past. Her PhD project, The Listening, is concerned with the challenges of working in the slavery archive to write life stories of Black British women in early nineteenth century London. The novel explores the spaces in between history, biography and fiction and seeks to create a chorus of stories of resistance, fugitivity and self-determination. Joanna runs creative writing workshops for children and young people and produces teaching resources for organisations such as the British Library and the Museum of London. The first book in her middle-grade mystery series, The Lizzie and Belle Mysteries: Drama and Danger is published by Farshore Books in June 2022 under the name J.T. Williams. Joanna is currently a British Library Eccles Centre Fellow.
Victoria Adukwei Bulley is a poet, writer and artist. She is the winner of an Eric Gregory Award, and has held residencies in the US, Brazil, and the V&A Museum. In 2017 she directed MOTHER TONGUES, an intergenerational poetry translation and film project exploring the indigenous language heritages of black poets. She is currently a Techne-funded doctoral student at Royal Holloway, University of London, and her debut poetry collection, Quiet, is forthcoming from Faber in June 2022. Victoria’s thesis explores how a poetics of ‘black interiority’ can be seen to inhabit the work of contemporary poets Kayo Chingonyi, Jay Bernard and Harmony Holiday. The critical component examines what shapes and defines black interiority or, what Kevin Quashie describes as poetics of ‘quiet’. Employing a critical race theory framework, this work examines the role of an interior poetic praxis through each poet’s use of form and composition, as well as their attention to subject matters such as the body and gender, race, representation and identity, and the wider cultural landscape within the poets’ speakers reside. ​To be presented in tandem with the critical component is a body of creative work – a collection of poems which present a practice-based exploration of a poetics of black interiority.
Yvonne Canham-Spence is in the 3rd year of a Techne funded PhD. My research investigates how Santiagueros make sense of their everyday lived experiences through storytelling in relation to the Santiago de Cuba Carnival (SdCC). After Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism (Bakhtin and Holquist, 1981), I explore texts (the stories, the congas, the food, the emotions) that in the moment of encounter between them meaning is created and negotiated in the signifying space of the SdCC, in its imaginary and its material performance. Taking an autoethnographic approach (Holman Jones et al., 2013, Nataka et al., 2015), I interrogate my positionality in relation to the SdCC and the meaning that I assign it as a diasporic, African-Caribbean space (Boyce Davies, 2013). Using poetry as method and creative practice I explore notions of joy making and silence(s) as modes of resistance. (MacLure et al., 2010, Currans, 2015)
Hodan Omar Elmi is a multidisciplinary artist and researcher exploring migration, gender, sound, music and culture. Currently in her first year of her PhD with Kingston School of Art and the ICA, her doctoral research aims to trace the Somali diaspora through Sound and music.
Ice: Art, Writing and Policy in the time of Climate Crisis
Windsor Auditorium
Ice and the landscape of the Antarctic and Arctic feature prominently in the science and evidence based discussions of climate change but are also a familiar trope in literature and art associated with the sublime and at once a symbol of both our (Euro-American) Romantic Imaginary and contemporary environmental crisis. Ice is at once object of science and of art, its various elemental transformations are rich territories for poetic, historical, geographical, and artistic speculation. How do artists, writers and social scientists engage differently with its transforming matter? How might a cross disciplinary engagement with ice provide a model for alternative approaches to policy shaping through the arts and advance public engagement with the issues of climate change including glacial retreat, ice loss and permafrost thawing?
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Wayne Binitie is a final year PhD student at the Royal College of Art, where his contemporary fine art research explores hidden histories written in polar ice. In collaboration with the British Antarctic Survey and Arup engineers, Binitie has developed three bodies of written and practical work: Solid Series (glass sculpture) Liquid Series (painting) and Vapour Series (sound installation). Binitie has exhibited at the V&A museum and Arup. His most recent show Polar Zero exhibited at COP 26 in Glasgow. http://waynebinitie.com/
Prof. Redell Olsen is Professor of Poetry and Poetics in the Department of English. With Prof. Klaus Dodds, she is the co-director of the Living Sustainably Catalyst and convenes BA Creative Writing and practice-based writing courses at Royal Holloway. In 2020 she was awarded the DARE Arts Prize.
Prof. Klaus Dodds is Professor of Geopolitics in the Department of Geography. He is an Hon Fellow of the British Antarctic Survey and the UK representative for the IASC Human and Social Working Group. His books include Ice: Nature and Culture (2018) and a coedited volume, Ice Humanities (2021).
Creating Engaging CVs, Job Applications & Funding Proposals
Room 0-04
This session will explore how to identify the context and the readership for your application writing, how to summarise and target your message, and how to edit and polish your text for maximum impact.
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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.
The Pleasure Patchwork
Room 0-05
The Pleasure Patchwork is an interactive soft sculpture, a growing blanket made of reversable cocks and invaginated forms. We invite you to contribute by crocheting your own pleasure piece; to make your part of the blanket. Through the process of making, you will be asked to consider what pleasure you know, experience and can imagine, so that we can engage together in conversation and craft. And if you don't know how to crochet, don't worry, we will teach you.
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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