CAMC Curates is the newsletter for the Centre for Arts, Memory and Communities with updates, news and events from our expert and engaged researchers.

News

Coventry University is now welcoming applications for the Midlands4Cities AHRC funded Doctoral Training Partnership. We at CAMC are wishing all those who apply good luck!

Our warmest congratulations to Sally Pezaro on winning the Royal College of Midwives' Partnership Working Award for services to midwifery and to CAMC's Visiting Scholar Maria Golovteeva on her success in receiving the British Academy Global Talent Visa.

Find out more below!

PhD Opportunity: Midlands4Cities & AHRC funded Doctoral Training Programme

Image: Midlands4Cities logo

Would you like to do a fully-funded PhD with international experts in a diverse and exciting research environment? CAMC is seeking expressions of interest for fully funded PhD studentships awarded through the M4C consortium.

M4C studentships offer a fee waiver and a maintenance grant for 3.5 years (full time) or 7 years (part time), as well as access to training, additional funding, and networking opportunities. PhD study would start September 2022. Based on the promise of your Expression of Interest (EoI) and its alignment with our research interests, CAMC experts will support the development of your application.

The deadline is Monday, 8 November. For further details, follow this link.

Sally Pezaro RCM Partnership Working Award

Image reads: 2021 RCM Awards Partnership Working Award winner Dr Sally Pezaro Coventry University

The Royal College of Midwives have awarded CAMC’s Sally Pezaro with their Partnership Working Award for services to midwifery in the context of those childbearing with hypermobile Ehlers Danlos Syndromes (hEDS) and Hypermobility Spectrum Disorders (HSD).

This award recognises the importance of midwives working collaboratively in multidisciplinary teams to enhance the care provided to women and their babies. The RCM were particularly interested in the roles clinical leaders play in bringing teams and collaborative working together. This entry was seen as one which demonstrated active involvement and collaboration with the multidisciplinary team to develop models of care built on principles of partnership, accountability and professional excellence.

Maria Golovteeva Global Talent Visa

Image: Poster for the Berlin Secession Exhibition (1900). Wilhelm Schulz, 1900. Colour lithograph. © German Historical Museum, Berlin.

Our congratulations to Dr Maria Golovteeva, CAMC's inaugural Cultural Memory Visiting Scholar for autumn-winter 2021-22, who has received news of her successful application for prestigious British Academy Global Talent Visa.

Awarded to ‘talented and promising’ individuals by peer-review, the Global Talent Visa will enable Maria to develop her new research project on spaces of artistic creation-design, interrogating cultures of display and colonialism, linked to CAMC and to a new UK-international network led by Prof. Juliet Simpson.

We are delighted and proud that this Visa acknowledges Maria’s talent and success as a scholar, and its association with CAMC and the Institute in opening opportunities for new-generation innovators in the UK and internationally.

Events

The CAMC Work in Progress Seminars have begun again for 2021/2021, starting with Elizabeth Benjamin on contested memory through the monuments of Paris.

Anthony Luvera will give a keynote lecture at the Instituto Português de Fotografia in Porto, Portugal and has been featured in a group exhibition for the Brighton Digital Festival curated by the Socially Engaged Art Salon (SEAS), to celebrate the opening of The Ledward Centre - Brighton's new LGBTQAI+ safe space.

Graham Chorlton will be part of the exhibition ‘Fully Awake’ at the Holden Gallery, Manchester Metropolitan University, which opens on November 4th. Rachel Matthews presented a paper and chaired a panel at the annual conference of the European Communication Research and Education Association in the first week of September.

Carolina Rito will be giving a paper at the PARSE Conference, moderating a conversation at the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum as part of BLK Art Day, and speaking at URDI – Cape Verdean Crafts and Design Fair. Her Life Futures exhibition is now live.

Sheena Gardner and Hilary Nesi delivered two lectures on English Language Teaching and their BAWE corpus research at Jiangxi University of Finance and Economics in October. Louise Moody presented and joined an expert panel discussion at the ‘Sustainability meets Innovation’ engagement and networking event in September.

CAMC WIP SEMINARS 2021/22

Image: WIP Seminar Schedule

Back by popular demand, the CAMC Work in Progress Seminars will recommence for 2021/22, with contributions by colleagues across CAMC.

This is an opportunity for staff and PGR students in all disciplines to learn more about current research being undertaken within CAMC, and to offer comments, questions and support for work in progress. The connections these seminars reveal between different research fields, topics and methodologies are always surprising. Hybrid seminars will be on Wednesdays from November to June, with items for discussion to be circulated a week before each seminar convenes.

See the schedule above or the Events calendar on CAMC Teams for presenters, dates and times. We look forward to seeing you there!

Anthony Luvera: Photography and Social Activism

Assisted Self-Portrait of Bengy S from Agency by Anthony Luvera

On the 18th of November 2021, Anthony Luvera will give a keynote lecture at the Instituto Português de Fotografia in Porto Portugal for the Encontros do Olhar 2021-2022 Fragility and Transiency programme. Anthony’s presentation, ‘Photography and Social Activism’, will focus on issues of social justice, representation, visibility, collaboration, and community activism which have driven the long-term collaborative projects he has undertaken for almost twenty years.

Further information and tickets can be found here.

Carolina Rito at PARSE Conference Online

Image: I can hear the barbarians, Maryam Monalisa Gharavi, 2017, Performance at Nottingham Contemporary. Photo Sam Kirby.

PARSE Conference will reflect on divergent figurations of violence—as utterance from elided histories and subaltern lives; as limit or logic of representation; as materiality—shape different enquiries. The semiotic function of translation has been the site of tensions between the thrive for clarity and its key role in the establishment of Western epistemic superiority. A number of postcolonial theorists, including Martinican philosopher Édouard Glissant and Mexican sociologist Rolando Vázquez, have reasoned about the epistemic violence in translation and how the imperative of clarity and transparency preserves one world view to which others would have to make themselves translatable, if they are to resist erasure (Glissant, 2010; Vázquez, 2011).

Carolina Rito’s paper “On Translations and Epistemic Violences” focuses on the conceptualization of the in-between spaces of translation as a site of semiotic struggle and transaction. This paper is part of a curatorial enquiry on the aesthetics and political affordances of translation beyond the ontological binary and equivalence of linguistic translation—as such, it is a project on the epistemic violences of erasure. By conceptualizing translation without the original and the copy, this project stages translation’s epistemic function in confusion and hesitation.

17-19 November 2021

Register here.

Graham Chorlton 'Fully Awake'

Image reads: Talking Taboos Dialogue day, 10th September 10am -4:30pm

Graham Chorlton will be part of the exhibition ‘Fully Awake’ at the Holden Gallery, Manchester Metropolitan University, which opens on November 4th.

The exhibition is the sixth and final exhibition in the research project ‘Teaching Painting’ run by Ian Hartshorne and Sean Kaye.

In the exhibitions painters who also teach in art schools are asked to show a painting, alongside a piece of work by one of their students and a piece from someone who taught them. Graham's choices are Coventry MA Painting  alumnus Jack Foster and the late Michael Brick. The project looks at continuities and changes through time in painting and its teaching.

4th November - 17th December.

More information here.

Rachel Matthews at European Communication Research and Education Association

Image: Rachel Matthews

Rachel Matthews presented a paper and chaired a panel at the annual conference of the European Communication Research and Education Association in the first week of September.

The paper, “What is there left to  Sell? Using oral history to contextualise newspaper practice”,  draws on oral history recordings with newspaper workers in Coventry to contextualise the removal of quality control from the production process of local newspapers over more than 50 years. It was included as part of the Communication History strand of this international conference.

The panel was “Local Media: Creating Communities”, which was convened by the Local and Community Media Network of MeCCSA, for which Rachel is the chair. It included contributions from a range of a international scholars who reflected on the political, policy and economic focus of the ways in which legacy and resurgent local media are seeking to relate to and respond to the local information needs of communities.

Anthony Luvera featured in Queer Photography: a non-definitive survey

Image: Zhi from In Conversation by Anthony Luvera, 2019

To celebrate the opening of The Ledward Centre - Brighton's LGBTQAI+ new safe space, the Socially Engaged Art Salon (SEAS) has curated a group exhibition featuring work by Anthony Luvera for the Brighton Digital Festival. This exhibition includes works by pioneer international queer photographers working during the 70's and 80's, and contemporary socially engaged photographers working through collaborative practices with community groups in the UK and abroad.

29 October 2021 to 15 January 2022 

For more information, click here for the SEAS website and here for the Brighton Digital Festival event.

Carolina Rito Life Futures Exhibition

Photo: Patricia Dominguez and Antonia Taulis, Tierra Cuantica, 2021

On the 3rd of November, Life Futures hosted the final talk with commissioned artists Hannah Honeywill, melissandre varin, Patricia Domínguez and Antonia Taulis, and postcoronialism (Abhijan Toto and Jessika), moderated by Daniele Lorenzini, Carolina Rito and Federico Testa. This event was an opportunity to hear from the participating artists about their new works exploring the conditions of life during the pandemic, and imagining new possibilities for a post-Covid future.

Life Future is led by Daniele Lorenzini, Carolina Rito and Federico Testa, and supported by Coventry University, Warwick University and the Herbert Gallery and Museum as part of the city-wide initiatives of the City of Culture programme. Life Futures is part of the Biopolitics & Democracy. Together with local and international artists, cultural stakeholders, and philosophers, Biopolitics and Democracy aims to foster public and collective reflection on the challenges democracies and democratic rights face in a time of pandemic. Is striving to protect the biological security of the population compatible with the full exercise of democratic participation? Focusing on the notion of democracy broadly construed, we aim to raise awareness about ideas and practices of democratic agency and participation, asking how they could face the challenges presented by the pandemic.

To visit the exhibition click here.

To read more about the Biopolitics & Democracy project click here.

Sheena Gardner and Hilary Nesi English Language Teaching and Research Lectures for JUFE

Image: Confucius Institute Logo

Coventry University and Jiangxi University of Finance and Economics (JUFE) have been engaged in international cooperation for well over a decade. In 2016 this developed formally into the Coventry University Confucius Institute, located on the first floor of the George Eliot building.

Building on previous summer schools and visiting scholar exchanges, notably in the areas of academic English for Business, Accounting, Humanities and the Arts, Professor Sheena Gardner and Professor Hilary Nesi were invited to talk about their research at JUFE. They delivered two lectures on English Language Teaching and their BAWE corpus  Research on Saturday 23rd October 2021. The event was organised by George Haughie, Chief Operations Officer, and Youfa Liu (刘有发), Co-director of the Confucius Institute at Coventry. Youfa Liu is also Professor in Applied Linguistics at the School of Foreign Languages in JUFE. They were joined by Professor Du as local host in China.  The online event was well attended at JUFE (particularly so since it was Saturday evening there), with each lecture being followed by stimulating discussion. A recording was made available to those unable to attend.

More information on the Coventry University Confucius Institute here. 

Carolina Rito at Coventry Biennial

Image: © Eddie Chambers, ‘Destruction of the National Front’, 1979-80. Image: © Garry Jones, Thirteen Ways of Looking (2 October – 13 December 2020), Herbert Art Gallery & Museum.

As part of BLK Art Day, Carolina Rito moderates a conversation with artists Keith Piper, Claudette Jonshon and Marlene Smith about the Pan-Afrikan Connection exhibition at the Herbert in 1983. This is part of a one-day public event about the BLK Art Group and their legacy, curated by Ian Sergeant, Coventry Biennial’s Curatorial Resident.

The Pan-Afrikan Connection is a public talk, asking why the exhibition at The Herbert Art Gallery remains pertinent today as it did in 1983. The work produced spoke of a “Black aesthetic” as quoted by Claudette Johnson in her artist statement for the exhibition, “[The] work of the black artist involves the expression of her or his life experience”. The discussions will address the aesthetics of the art and the intersectional themes inherent in the art work produced, of race, gender, sexualities, identities, place and belonging. Themes that remain critical in 2021, and as such, creates space for wider discussion of the legacy and impact of the BLK Art Group on artists and art today.

20th of November at the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, 1-4pm.

Reserve tickets here

Louise Moody at 'Sustainability meets Innovation'

Panel discussion with Louise Moody, Luke Tugby, editor of Retail Week and Liam Gibson, Murray Uniforms Ltd.

In September, Professor Louise Moody presented and joined an expert panel discussion at the ‘Sustainability meets Innovation’ engagement and networking event hosted by Murray Uniforms Ltd at the Belfry Hotel and Resort (28th – 29th September 2021). The event was attended by businesses from a range of sectors interested in textile innovation and sustainability.

The event saw the launch of Murray Uniform Ltd’s business report ‘Uniform Impact on Employee Wellbeing and Productivity’.  The report has been informed by a survey of 2560 uniform wearing employees led by Louise. The research builds on the notion of ‘enclothed cognition’ (Adam and Galinsky 2012) which argues that clothing has an effect on the way we think, feel, and function. The survey results provide evidence to support the link between uniform design and employee happiness and productivity.

Carolina Rito at Cape Verdean Crafts and Design Fair

Image: Carolina Rito

Carolina Rito is a guest speaker at the 6th Edition of URDI – Cape Verdean Crafts and Design Fair, organised by the Minister of Culture and the Creative Industries held at the National Centre for Art, Crafts and Design in Mindelo. Form the 24th to the 28th of November, practitioners and scholars will discuss new futures for the sector as part of the Grandes Conversas series under the title Imagining Futures. URDI is an annual initiative focused on the promotion and display of multiple expressions in design and crafts. Carolina Rito’s presentation is part of the panel on Archives as Knowledge.

24-28 November 2021, National Centre for Art, Crafts and Design in Mindelo

Publications

Our warmest congratulations to Jill Journeaux, whose textile Cats in the Tree of Life has been selected to be published in Becoming-Feral. Imogen Peck has a chapter on 'Civilian Memories of the British Civil Wars, 1642-1660' in 'Remembering the English Civil Wars,' published in October. Anthony Luvera was invited by the editors of Visual Studies to contribute to a special issue of the journal entitled The Visual Studies Questionnaire: What is Visual Studies Today. Rachel Matthews' latest work, an edited volume in the prestigious Routledge “Disruptions” series, has been published. Lastly, Emma Waight's article 'Doctoral writing as an assemblage in space and time' has been published in the Journal of Further and Higher Education.

Jill Journeaux in Becoming-Feral

Image: Jill Journeaux, Cats in the Tree of Life, 2018.

Jill Journeaux’s 2018 textile Cats in the Tree of Life has been selected to represent the Felis Catus section of a bestiarum vocabulum entitled Becoming-Feral published by Objet-a Creative Studio in October 2021.

Becoming-Feral is a creative research publication which aims to investigate the complex relationships between human/other-animals and the shifting categories of wild/feral/domestic, set within landscapes constantly being altered by global transformations of climate and capitalism. The large textile was previously on exhibition at Compton Verney Art Gallery from 2018 until 2021.

More information here. 

Rachel Matthews: Routledge Disruptions

Image: Book cover that reads 'Reappraising Local and Community News in the UK: Media, Practice and Policy. Edited by David Harte and Rachel Matthews'

Rachel Matthews' latest work has been published: an edited volume in the prestigious Routledge “Disruptions” series, entitled Reappraising Local and Community News in the UK”.

Rachel is joint editor with Dr Dave Harte from Birmingham City University. The volume draws on expert contributions from around the UK to offer insights into the contemporary local and community news landscape in the UK. 

More information is available here. 

Imogen Peck: 'Civilian Memories of the British Civil Wars, 1642-1660'

Image: Front cover of Remembering the English Civil Wars

Imogen Peck has a chapter on 'Civilian Memories of the British Civil Wars, 1642-1660' in the edition 'Remembering the English Civil Wars', ed. Lloyd Bowen and Mark Stoyle, published in October.

In the British Civil Wars – as with so many domestic conflicts – it was not only combatants who were severely affected, but civilians too: cities were besieged, animals and goods were plundered, and families were forced to quarter soldiers in their own homes. This chapter explores the ways that civilians chose to recount two common wartime experiences: property loss and quartering. In so doing, it provides a rare glimpse of the ways in which ordinary English citizens chose to recall and narrate their experiences of war, as well as the strategies that they deployed in order to fashion themselves as a worthy recipient of relief to partisan political and administrative bodies.

More information here. 

Anthony Luvera: ‘The Experience of Visuality and Socially Engaged Practice’

Image: Front cover of Visual Studies

Anthony Luvera was invited by the editors of Visual Studies to contribute to a special issue of the journal entitled The Visual Studies Questionnaire: What is Visual Studies Today. Undertaken as an exercise in reflexivity and future signalling for the field of visual studies and its affiliated disciplines, the editors of the journal invited a range of researchers to explore and engage with what visual studies is or could be.

In ‘The Experience of Visuality and Socially Engaged Practice,’ Luvera considers how characteristics of visual studies, such as the conception of the objecthood of visuality as experience, the mobility and discursivity enabled by interdisciplinarity, and the qualities of methodological enquiries of a visual studies perspective, correspond to aspects of socially engaged practice. Luvera’s paper is featured alongside contributions by scholars such as Gillian Rose, TJ Demos, Margaret Dikovitskaya, James Elkins, and Nicolas Mirzoeff.

Louise Moody in Ergonomics

Image: VR Lab

Collaborative research with the VR Lab at the School of Engineering at Deakin University has led to a new publication in the journal Ergonomics.

Supported by Helen Cuthill (Associate Dean, Enterprise and Innovation, Faculty of Art and Humanities) and funding from the Enterprise and Innovation group – ‘International Knowledge Transfer and Partnership Secondment scheme’ we developed a long-term collaboration with Deakin University related to Virtual Reality (VR).

The collaboration built upon expertise in Virtual Reality and modelling capability at Deakin; and human factors and design expertise at CAMC and the NTDC at Coventry University and sought to explore the role of simulation and VR in understanding and improving tram safety.

The VR Lab team led by Dr Ben Horan and Michael Mortimer designed and developed a novel tram driving simulation and a haptic device to help enable smooth driving. Whilst Human Factors research led by Dr Tiziana Callari (now at University of Leeds) and Prof Louise Moody informed the design through interview-based research with tram drivers in Coventry and Melbourne, Australia. The novel haptic device and simulator were then tested with drivers in both locations to explore the impact on driving.

The research has been published in Ergonomics with free e-prints are available for download here.

Emma Waight in the Journal of Further and Higher Education

Image: A houseplant sits by a windowsill

Emma Waight's article 'Doctoral writing as an assemblage in space and time' has been published in the Journal of Further and Higher Education.

This article explores academic writing, and specifically PGR experiences of writing, within time and space through the lens of the new materialisms. Whilst existing studies have understood academic writing to be a social and embodied practice, few have considered the material and temporal assemblages that facilitate these everyday experiences. Using ‘affect’ as the unit of analysis, the article explores the capacity of space, materiality and time to affect, and be affected by, experiences of writing. The article concludes with recommendations that attempt to shift our conceptualisation of doctoral writing milestones towards those that are more inclusive.

Read the article here.

Image: Yellow House, by John Devane