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

CAMC has a lot to celebrate this month: Carolina Rito was awarded an AHRC Networking Grant; Dr Sally Pezaro has been shortlisted for a ‘Partnership Working’ Award from the Royal College of Midwives; Alice Leonard has been awarded Trailblazers funding; and Sarah Lahlouhi won 1st Prize in the Visualise Your Thesis Competition 2021.

Congratulations all! 

Dr Sally Pezaro - RCM Awards

Image reads: RCM Awards 2021 Shortlisted

Dr Sally Pezaro has been shortlisted for a ‘Partnership Working’ Award from the Royal College of Midwives for her work demonstrating success in Co-Creating Educational Tools to Support Those Birthing with Hypermobile Ehlers Danlos Syndrome (hEDS) and Hypermobility Spectrum Disorders (HSD).

In partnership with a wider team including Dr Gemma Pearce, a psychologist from the School of Psychological, Social and Behavioural Sciences and Paul Magee, a senior designer from the Research Institute for Health and Wellbeing, Dr Pezaro has co-created an educational infomercial, maternity toolkit and massive open online course (MOOC) to support those providing perinatal care and those childbearing with hEDS/HSD.

Other co-creators include partners from The Ehlers-Danlos Society,
The Ehlers-Danlos Support UK, The HMSA Charity, The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG) and the Make Birth Better Network.

Carolina Rito - AHRC Networking Grant

Carolina Rito was awarded an AHRC Networking Grant with the project “The Role of Visual Arts Organisations in the British Black Arts Movement in the Midlands”. Rito (PI) will work with Prof. Paul Goodwin (co-I) at University of the Arts London, and four contemporary art institutions in the Midlands: the Herbert Museum and Gallery, Nottingham Contemporary, New Art Exchange, and Wolverhampton Gallery from November 2021 to June 2023.

The project explores the legacy of the Black Arts Movement (BAM) in the Midlands and the understudied role of the visual arts institutions in supporting the movement in the 1980s and today. In the historicizing process of the role of visual arts institutions, this network also aims to actualise the 1980s movement's motivations in light of today's response of the sector in supporting, promoting and showing curators and artists of colour. By celebrating the unique legacy of this region and its institutions, this project aims to draw inspiration on the successes of the 1980s movement and identify current challenges and opportunities to tackle the prevailing inequalities in the sector and promote a more diverse cultural offer.

Alice Leonard - Trailblazers funding

Image: Photograph of the old oak desks (c. 1342), copyright Alice Leonard.

Alice Leonard has been awarded the ‘Trailblazers’ funding, which provides full scholarships for exceptional PhD candidates to undertake trailblazing, transformative research alongside our outstanding early-career researchers. The Trailblazer PhD studentships have been devised and developed by leading early-career researchers at Coventry University. The scheme provides successfully appointed doctoral researchers with an innovative and dynamic intellectual space in which to undertake transformative research, whilst being fully supported by a team of experienced supervisors.

Leonard's project is entitled ‘Reconstructing Coventry Early Modern Grammar School’. This interdisciplinary project reveals the lost history of Coventry’s early modern Grammar School and uses digital tools to secure its place in the public understanding of Coventry’s unique cultural heritage. Founded by Henry VIII, the original building still stands at the heart of the city centre, on Hales Street. The School housed an exceptional library that also survives. Yet the site has never been systematically studied. 

This timely project contributes to the international focus on Coventry heritage as part of City of Culture 2021. It forges new partnerships with Coventry Archives, the Grammar School, and Cambridge University Library. The virtual reconstruction reveals the School’s rich past and secures its heritage, situating Coventry as a site of nationally significant history.

The supervisory team includes: Dr Victoria Leonard, Victoria Northridge (Coventry Archives), Professor Patricia Phillippy (CAMC), Professor Jacqueline Cawston (Postdigital Cultures), and Professor Paul Botley (Warwick University).

For more information, click here.

Sara Lahlouhi - Visualize Your Thesis

Image: An Investigation of UK Architecture Students' and Practitioners' Writing: A Corpus Linguistics case study

Sara Lahlouhi is a PhD student in Applied Linguistics at CAMC. She has been awarded 1st Prize in the Visualise Your Thesis Competition 2021 with her research entitled: "An Investigation of UK Architecture Students' and Practitioners' Writing: A Corpus Linguistics case study". She will represent Coventry in the international competition hosted by the University of Melbourne, Australia later this year.

See here for more information.

Events

There is much to look forward to in the coming months. We would first like to warmly invite you to join us for CAMC's very first symposium, entitled House, Home and the Domestic, this October. Tickets are free and the event will be online. Register here. 

This month, Carolina Rito is presenting a paper at the Modern Revolutions and the Idea of Europe Conference in Athens. Aspire Fellow Sarah Turner is organising a dialogue day entitled 'Talking Taboos', Yan Yan Yeung (PGR) will be presenting her research at the EURALEX XIX International Congress, and Sara Lahlouhi (PGR) will be giving two talks: at the ALAPP Conference and the Power, Production and Perception Symposium. Additionally, the new Critical Practices Talks is now live.

Research Fellow Dr Esme Wood will be presenting at the World Federation of Occupational Therapists Congress in Paris 2022, and the ‘Practice Research: Interdisciplinary Methodologies in Cultural and Higher Education Institutions’ event, organised by Carolina Rito, was a great success. 

CAMC Symposium: House, Home and the Domestic

Image: Graham Chorlton, Headlights, 2019.

CAMC is delighted to invite you to our first symposium: House, Home and the Domestic. 

Our ideas of and relationships with the home continue to evolve, particularly now in the era of COVID 19. This instability, and the range of experiences felt by diverse groups in different contexts provide significant challenges for theoreticians, researchers and arts practitioners seeking to understand the complexities of the contemporary experience of home, identity and belonging. 

Focusing on the home as an enclosed space with its surrounding parameters, this international symposium aims to encourage dialogues between different areas of expertise and highlight how these new meanings have been experienced within different countries. It is hoped that these conversations will help to extend understandings of this fundamental aspect of being human.

Friday 22 October, 9am-5:30pm. Free and online.

For more information and tickets, click here.

Modern Revolutions and the Idea of Europe Conference

Carolina Rito is presenting a paper entitled “Unfinished Revolutions – Contested Histories of the Portuguese Revolution” at the Modern Revolutions and the Idea of Europe Conference, in Athens, from the 9th to the 12th of September. The conference focuses on modern revolutions as social, political, cultural and intellectual events, and as transformative processes. It turns a critical eye on the conceptualization of the term “revolution”. It investigates the evolving ideas, perceptions and images about Europe in the context of revolutionary politics. It explores how modern revolutions have affected discourses about Europe. 

See the full programme here.

Sarah Turner - Talking Taboos

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

Sarah Turner (CAMC ASPIRE Fellow), in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Birmingham, is organising an M4C-funded dialogue day ‘Talking Taboos’. The aim of the symposium is to open up discussion and provide training and networking opportunities for PhD students and early career researchers who are undertaking language-based research into sensitive subjects and taboo topics. It will be held on Zoom on Friday 10th September 2021.

More details and registration here.  

Sara Lahlouhi - BCAW

Image reads: The British Corpus of Architecture Writing

CAMC PGR Sara Lahlouhi will give two talks to national and international audiences in September.

The first will be at the Applied Linguistics and Professional Practice (ALAPP) Conference, which will run from the 15-17 September 2021. This will be hosted by the Ohio State University, USA, and will be held online (). Her presentation will be entitled “A Linguistic Study of Architecture Writing in the UK” and will present her initial findings on the attitudinal and evaluative language of Architecture across two groups (students and practitioners). Click here for more information. 

Her second talk will be at the Power, Production and Perception: Reconsidering Space and the Built Environment Symposium held as a partnership between eight Midlands universities. The theme of this presentation is how she created the first British Corpus of Architecture Writing (BCAW), and how it can be used to study the writing of people in this field. Tickets here.

Dr Esme Wood - The World Federation of Occupational Therapists Congress 

Image: Photograph of Stacey Moon-Tracy

Dr Esme Wood, Occupational Therapist and CAMC Research Fellow will be attending the World Federation of Occupational Therapists Congress in Paris 2022. With two different abstracts selected for presentation, Esme will be sharing her recent research findings on the use of GPS technologies by people with dementia and their potential to support meaningful engagement with the outdoors.

Esme says, “It’s a great opportunity to share these findings with the international OT community, and I can’t wait to see all the other presentations, to meet with international colleagues and learn from the fantastic work being undertaken by occupational therapists around the world. I hope to bring back many new ideas and opportunities to share within my research and teaching here at Coventry University".

Click here for more information. 

Critical Practices Talks

Image: Photograph of Stacey Moon-Tracy

The new Critical Practices Talks is out! Contributing to the Black Arts Movement in Coventry strand, Sylvia Theuri joins Carolina Rito and Tanazia Gabriel-Fleary, covering the history and scope of BAM in Coventry. In the talk, Sylvia reflects on the local influence and the activity of the movement in the late 1970’s and the early 1980’s. Whilst exploring the emergence of the movement in the region of Coventry, Sylvia offers a contextual insight of the social political milieu in which the movement existed, reflecting the history of Blackness in Britain. Watch here.

Additionally, the new Critical Practices Talks website has launched, showcasing all the Talks to date. These include conversations with Rolando Vázquez (associate professor of sociology at University College Roosevelt and cluster chair at the University College Utrecht); Wayne Modest (director of content for the National Museum of World Cultures, Rotterdam, and head of the research at the Center of Material Culture); Doreen Mende (curator, writer and associate professor for curatorial/politics, head of the CCC Research-based Master University of Art and Design, HEAD Genève); Beatrice von Bismarck (professor of art history at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig, and the lead of visual culture and cultures of the curatorial); Sepake Angiama (curator, educator and artistic director of INIVA, London); among others. View the new website here. 

Yan Yan Yeung - Euralex

Image reads: Lexicography for inclusion

CAMC PGR Yan Yan Yeung will be presenting her research, entitled Supporting Chinese EFL Learners’ Dictionary Preferences, at the EURALEX XIX International Congress. The presentation is part of her PhD research, with conference attendance funded through the A.S. Hornby Dictionary Research Awards (ASHDRA).

Chinese students make up the largest group of international students around the world, yet university tutors outside China are largely unaware of the affordances of their preferred electronic dictionaries (EDs). In this research, university-level Chinese students studying in an English-speaking country were invited to participate in an observation consisting of two tasks: producing a Chinese summary of a text in English, and vice versa, during which they were allowed to consult Youdao Dictionary. By observing the participants’ consultation strategies, Yeung probes the ‘usefulness’ the ED which is most widely used and trusted by Chinese EFL learners, and how users of the ED can do to enhance success rate of their dictionary consultations.

More details here. 

Practice Research: Interdisciplinary Methodologies in Cultural and Higher Education Insitutions

Image reads: Lexicography for inclusion

Researchers and practitioners across the higher education and creative sectors came together as part of a Coventry University event organised by PI Professor Carolina Rito to discuss opportunities for developing new research methodologies to support the cultural sector. This comes at a time where the challenges posed by the pandemic have had massive impacts on culture and the creative industries, with 60% of UK museums fearing that they will have to close their doors for good.

The event, entitled ‘Practice Research: Interdisciplinary Methodologies in Cultural and Higher Education Institutions’ was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and organised by Carolina Rito, Professor of Creative Practice Research in Coventry University’s Centre for Arts, Memory and Communities (CAMC) and Anthony Downey, Professor of Visual Culture in the Middle East and North Africa at Birmingham City University. Keynote speakers included leading practitioners from national creative institutions, including Michael Schwab, Editor-in-Chief of the Journal for Artistic Research and Emily Pringle, Head of Research at the Tate museums and galleries. The group of scholars are now working on a cross-institutional research grant to continue the exchange and provide new models for the sectors.

Publications

Dr Sally Pezaro - BJM and BCM

Image: Photograph of Stacey Moon-Tracy

CAMC's Dr Sally Pezaro's research, A Clinical Update on Hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome during pregnancy, birth and beyond, in partnership with Dr Gemma Pearce, a psychologist from the School of Psychological, Social and Behavioural Sciences and Dr Emma Reinhold, a General Practitioner has been published in the British Journal of Midwifery. This research provides evidence based care considerations for those childbearing with hypermobile ehlers-danlos syndrome (hEDS) and Hypermobility spectrum disorders (HSD). Their last publication on the same topic has remained the journal's most widely read since 2018, which demonstrates that this is an area of research with the potential for making a real impact. 

Dr Pezaro has also partnered with colleagues from Iran to develop and psychometrically test the ‘barriers to physical activity during pregnancy scale’ (BPAPS), now published in BMC Public Health. This significant piece of work may be usefully applied to identify the barriers to physical activity in pregnancy so that they may in turn be overcome. Future plans for this team include the translation and evaluation of this scale for use in a European/USA/Australian context.

Image: Yellow House, by John Devane