10.00 to 11.15

Wellbeing When Writing - Dr Emma Filtness, Dr Sally-Shakti Willow, Jo-Anne Sunderland Bowe

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The Wellbeing When Writing project run by the University of Westminster from 2018-2020 was funded by Research England/Office for Students (OfS) through the Catalyst fund for PGR Mental Health and Wellbeing, with match funding from the University of Westminster. The University of Westminster had evidence to suggest that doctoral candidates experienced high levels of stress and anxiety at certain points in the year when required to submit work for annual progress reviews. In response, a series of interactive workshops were held to address particular demands in terms of writing, and which were adapted across subjects and disciplines. Emma Filtness and Sally-Shaki Willow as experienced Creative Writing teachers with expertise in writing for wellbeing led the workshops, exploring how techniques from creative writing pedagogy and practice could be shared with those from other disciplines to ease some of the anxiety associated with doctoral writing. Topics covered included thinking through writing, overcoming writer’s block, and writing for different audiences. Emma Filtness will discuss this process of sharing creative writing practices with PhD candidates from a range of disciplines and Sally-Shaki Willow will discuss her ongoing work supporting doctoral researchers through her Writing & Thriving programme. Jo-Anne Sunderland Bowe, a current Techne PhD student will reflect on her own experiences of managing the demands of the written components of PhD study.  

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10.00 to 11.15

Research Speed Dating

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Ever wondered what some of your fellow Techne students are researching, or wanted to meet more Techne students from across our cohorts and universities? Come along to our research 'speed dating' session - using Zoom breakout rooms, you'll have chance to briefly introduce yourself and your research to small groups of students, before moving onto another group.

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11.45 to 13.00

Biography, Auto-Biography and History - Dr Anne Chappell, Dr Claire Lynch, Prof. Thomas Betteridge

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Dr Anne Chappell - Auto/Biography as Methodology

Auto/Biography as an academic field emphasises the links between biography and history, and the private and public. Auto/Biography offers researchers the opportunity to use methods to explore individual lives that are “replete with the posted biographies of significant others in the subject’s life” (Stanley and Morgan, 1993: 2). Therefore these methods, and the associated analysis, offer varied and exciting ways to look at social lives. I will share some examples of auto/biography and consider the implications and benefits of using such approaches.

 

Dr Claire Lynch  - All theory and no practice? 

Or, all the things you might learn from breaking the rules.

I started writing memoir in the spaces in between. The first draft was written wedged between two incubators.  At night, when the babies slept and we didn’t, I wrote about our new family. As the babies grew, so did the memoir, and I found space to write between the things I know as a theorist and the things I’m learning as a writer. Learning how to write memoir (as opposed to writing about memoir) taught me how much I didn’t know about it. When I sit at my desk to write I hear the siren call of library catalogues and bibliographies, I am happy there, but I can’t find what I need. When I write autobiographically, I am, in many ways, deliberately breaking the ‘rules’ of academic writing. There are no footnotes to hide behind, no conventions of rhetoric to distance me from the language. Personal essays are ethically challenging; the people I represent are not symbolic or fictive, they are real people, many of whom live in my house.  The form is, by definition, exposing, compromising even. How can an academic maintain a position of intellectual objectivity if she also publishes stories in which she makes jokes about her ovaries? How can an academic stick to the old rules once she learns the value of breaking them?

Professor Thomas Betteridge

 

Prof. Thomas Betteridge - The Role of Experience in Researching Performance: A Satire of Three Estates in 1540, 1552 and 2013.

Staging a play like A Satire of Three Estates raises the question raises a set of questions about experience – whose experience? What experiences count? Where does experience sit within the research hierarchy? The historical records of the performances in 1540 and 1552 are very different but they both constitute experiences of the drama reified in text. What relationship is there, if any, between the experience of the performance of 2013 and 1552 – and what experience seem never to form part of the historical record?

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11.45 to 13.00

Experience in Research/Researching Experience (2) - Dr Emma Wainwright, Dr Meredith Jones, Dr Josephine Coleman

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Dr Emma Wainwright - Research(ed) on bodies: experiences of participant observation

This talk heeds calls for reflections on how the research field is defined through embodied socio‐spatial presence and immediacy. Focusing on classroom “body‐training” observations that were part of a larger qualitative research project, and on the field notes and reflections of three researchers, we explore the transition from observer‐researchers to participant‐researchers. That is, we explore how, by researching others, we unexpectedly became researched on as our own bodies became instruments in the research process and were used to elicit knowledge on embodied learning, body‐mapping and corporeal trace. As a methodological intervention, conducting research through the body, the positioning of bodies and body‐to‐body interaction, can tell us much about the often ignored embodied and emotional dimensions of the research field. But, in addition, it can elucidate the power relations between, and the fluidity of, researcher and researched positions in the jolting of secured researcher identity.

 

Dr Meredith Jones - When fieldwork turns to horror: writing about the unexpected.

I will share an experience that I had whilst doing fieldwork in Bangkok. An unexpected invitation to spend a day in a cut-price cosmetic surgery clinic led me to rethink my own position as a researcher and a witness. Watching a transgender surgical procedure done without general anaesthetic was the most confronting thing I've ever faced as a researcher. l will talk about the methodology and theories used to deal with the aftermath of what was a traumatic day, and about how I 'translated' what I saw into part of my book Beautyscapes: Mapping Cosmetic Surgery Tourism (2019). 

 

Dr Jo Coleman - Reflexive research on social sites of practice: How experience informs research

This paper describes the methodological approach I devised for my practice-focused doctoral research into the production of content for local community radio stations. I will outline how my dual identity as an academic scholar and radio producer/presenter influenced how I designed and implemented the investigations into creative practice in the field and also informed how I intellectualized the findings. Inspired by Theodore Schatzki’s ‘social site’ concept of practice theory, Pierre Bourdieu’s call for self-reflexivity in social science, and Donald Schön's reflection-in-action, I applied a reflexive, practice theory mindset. This enabled me to explore the situated yet spatially complex contexts where I was able to identify the embodied doings and sayings that constituted the practice of others. It also helped me reflect objectively and critically upon my own media production practice as an auto-ethnographic exercise. I recommend this strategic mindset for fieldwork as a means of enhancing researcher integrity.

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14.00 to 15.15

Researching Urban Experiences - Dr Magali Peyrefitte, Dr Daniele Rugo, Dr Monica Degen

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Dr Magali Peyrefitte - The Intricacies of Researching and Translating Urban Lived Experiences Through Different Methods of Data Collection and Data Dissemination. 

My research on urban experience, housing and social inequality has over the years taken me down various paths of enquiry but always with the intention to shine light on the more invisible or less spoken about aspects of city life and on the more marginalised voices and stories. The theoretical and epistemological motivations of my sociological endeavour have consistently worked hand in hand with related questions of representations, engagement, dissemination and ultimately impact. In this presentation, I shall discuss the intricacies of researching and translating lived experiences through different methods of data collection and data dissemination as they work in dialogue in the production of knowledge. 

 

Dr Daniele Rugo - Framing the urban experience of political violence

The feature-length documentary About a War (Rugo, Weaver 2018) emerged out of 3 years of filming and research in Beirut. The research revolved around the experience of former combatants of the Lebanese Civil War and their relation with a weaponized urban landscape. Through a series of reflections on filming in Tal el Zaatar, Shatila refugee camp and gathering testimonies of the Israeli siege of Beirut (1982), this talk will discuss filmmaking as a methodology to mobilize memories of war and will address more broadly the arts' ability to mediate and give form to political violence.  See: https://www.iterationsfilm.com/about-a-war-doc

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Dr Monica Degen - Mapping ‘the feel of place’ digitally

Why is it important to research urban experiences? What does it tell us about power relations in the city and how different actors frame, produce, consume or resist urban life? Drawing on a recent project of the changing place identities of the Smithfield Market area, a neighbourhood undergoing processes of cultural regeneration I will discuss the use of digital visualizations as a method for mapping place identities in relation to sensory and temporal dynamics and feelings. In particular I will reflect on how we can capture and translate sensory and temporal experiences of place for a diversity of audiences. See: www.sensorysmithfield.com

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14.00 to 15.15

Effective Job Hunting Online & Virtual Interviews - Liz Wilkinson

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As with most things at the moment, job recruitment is all taking place online. Where is the best place to look for jobs and funding opportunities online? How can you craft an engaging online profile or application form? How can you perform well in virtual interviews and other selection methods? Techne Careers advisor Liz Wilkinson shares her thoughts on these topics.

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16.00 to 17.00

Keynote Lecture: Sense Experience - Prof. David Howes (Centre for Sensory Studies, Concordia University, Montreal)

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Sensory ethnography is a methodology that grew out of the sensory turn in the social sciences and humanities. This turn superseded such other paradigm shifts as the linguistic turn, the pictorial turn and the material turn, and overlaps to a significant degree with the affective turn. Sensory ethnography attaches a premium to experience, or what François Laplantine calls the “sharing of the sensible” (partage du sensible) between ethnographer and research subject. The accent is on “participant sensation” in contrast to the conventional methodology of participant observation. This presentation offers a survey of breaking research in this vibrant new domain of anthropological knowledge production, where the senses are treated as both object of study and means of inquiry. Featured case studies include: body modification, agoraphobia, the experience economy of the casino, and multi-species ethnography. This presentation also addresses the virtualization of life itself in the wake of the digital revolution and onslaught of the novel coronavirus (which cancels the senses of smell and taste), and explores various experiential techniques for (re)animating the sensorium.

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