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

Thanks again to all of you who recently participated in our CAMC Glossary survey. The ten most frequently named have been compiled into a Glossary of representative terms.​ 

CAMC PGRs have recently founded The Coventry COVID-19 Network, which aims to connect researcher’s whose work specialises in or relates to COVID-19. They invite you to join. 

Our warmest congratulations to John Devane who has been longlisted for the Contemporary British Painting Prize 2021. Congratulations also to Jennifer Dudley and Molly Browne, who had their doctorates conferred on them at graduation, and to Susie Cowley-Haselden who passed her PhD viva with minor corrections.

CAMC Glossary

Image: CAMC Glossary

Thanks again to all of you who recently participated in our CAMC Glossary survey. We received a significant number of words that you associated with CAMC, many of them held in common across many responses.

The ten most frequently named have been compiled into the CAMC Glossary. These are: participatory; intersectional; transdisciplinary; social justice; healthy communities and places; languages and discourses; curiosity-led; visual cultures; transformative technologies; and heritage and textual histories. 

We hope that you will be able to make some use of the Glossary, and particularly that you take the opportunity in any communications that you send forward about CAMC to employ some of these representative terms to describe our unique approach to research. 

John Devane Contemporary British Painting Prize 2021

Image: John Devane, Yellow Gloves and Yellow birds

John Devane was longlisted for the Contemporary British Painting Prize 2021 and his work can be seen on a show reel at the Huddersfield Art Gallery Space. 

Contemporary British Painting is an artist led group which explores & promotes current trends in painting and runs the Contemporary British Painting Prize. This year’s prize attracted entries from 1,067 artists. A longlist of 60 painters was chosen, of which John was one, and finally a shortlist of 15 artists were invited to exhibit in the current exhibition. Susan Absolon won first prize.

One of John's entries (above) entitled ‘Yellow gloves and yellow birds’ was featured as ‘Painting of the day on the #PaintBritain Instagram page a couple of days ago. Follow the #PaintBritain hashtag for updates.

The Coventry COVID-19 Network

Image reads: The Coventry Covid-19 Network

The Coventry COVID-19 Network aims to connect researcher’s whose work specialises in or relates to COVID-19. The network will act as a forum to share research and resources as well as being a working group which aims to create platforms to disseminate COVID related research and to develop collaborations to potentially create future transdisciplinary COVID-19 related projects.  

The network founders, David Beauchamp, Hannah Honeywill and Stacey Moon-Tracy are all post graduate researchers within the Centre for Arts Memory and Communities, and they will be presenting an introduction to their own research and to the network at the Hootenanny.  

If you would like to join the Coventry COVID-19 Network, please send a 100 word profile which outlines your research to: honeywillh@uni.coventry.ac.uk

This will be uploaded to the network webpage here and the group will keep you updated about future meetings and events. 

PGR Successes

imagie: Photograph of Jennifer Dudley, Molly Browne and Darren Berkland.

Congratulations to Jennifer Dudley (left) and Molly Browne (right) who are shown here accompanied by Darren Berkland. They had their doctorates conferred on them at graduation on the 15th of November. Jennifer is now Curator: Art Collections Management and Access at Amgueddfa Cymru, National Museum Wales. Molly is Lecturer in Health and Social Care at Newman University in Birmingham.

Congratulations also to Susie Cowley-Haselden who passed her PhD viva with minor corrections on 23rd November 2021.

Her thesis title is ‘Knowledge building via Academic Reading Circles on an English for General Academic Purposes pre-sessional course’ and her examiners were Professor Sioux McKenna from Rhodes University and Dr Sarah Turner from CU. Susie, who is now an assistant professor at Warwick University, has already published three papers from her PhD research and has plans for more! 

Susie’s supervisory team, Sheena Gardner and Marina Orsini-Jones, are delighted at the outcome!

Events

This month, Louise Moody will present work-in-progress on the SHAPES project, John Devane's work is being displayed in the RBSA Members and Associates Exhibition, and the ‘Cultural Memory’ research series continues with Illuminatio: Memoryscapes, Art and Creating Spaces.

In November, the CAMC autumn Visiting Researcher series was rounded off with a mini-symposium on Women Artists and Designers. Objects in Context. The H2020 TInnGO project ran its final online conference with over 200 European delegates. 'Talking Cultures,’ a CAMC and cross-Institute seminar series led by Prof. Juliet Simpson was launched. Jill Journeaux was invited to present a paper entitled Place Setting at the ‘Home and COVID-19: Dwelling and belonging in pandemic times’ symposium, held at the Museum of the Home, London. Rachel Matthews presented a paper and chaired a panel at the annual conference of the European Communication Research and Education Association in September. Hilary Nesi gave a keynote presentation about digital learning using corpus tools at the 1st International Symposium on Educational Research and was invited to the Kazan International Linguistic Summit to talk about pathways to research publication.

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. Seminars will be on Wednesdays from November to June, with items for discussion to be circulated a week before each seminar convenes.

Please join us on Teams for the next seminar on 8th December, 2-3 pm, when Louise Moody will present work-in-progress on the SHAPES project: progressing NHS-based research during COVID. 

We look forward to seeing you there!

John Devane RBSA Exhibition

Image: John Devane, On the verge, oil on canvas 122cm x 92cm

CAMC's John Devane is Professor of Painting at the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists (RBSA). His painting ‘On the verge’  (above) is included in the RBSA Members and Associates Exhibition, running from the 18th of November until the 8th of January 2022.

More information on the RBSA website here. 

Jill Journeaux Place Setting

    Journeaux, J. 2021 The Family Table, work in progress.

Jill Journeaux was invited to present a paper entitled Place Setting at the ‘Home and COVID-19: Dwelling and belonging in pandemic times’ symposium, held at the Museum of the Home, London, 24 & 25 November.

Jill presented her recent art practice which is autobiographical and asks questions about the dynamics of place settings and family meals. The symposium was part of the Stay Home Stories project (@stayhomestories), funded by the AHRC as part of the UKRI rapid response to COVID-19.

H2020 TInnGO Conference

Image: TInnGO Conference

The H2020 TInnGO project ran its final online conference on 17th – 19th November, with over 200 European delegates. This was organised in conjunction with the Travel Demand Symposium 2021 and sister project, DIAMOND. The conference focused on gender and transport and the steps the projects have taken reduce gender and diversity gaps in transport employment, education and usage.

A full record of the conference will be available, in the meantime conference proceedings are available here https://www.tdmsymposium2021.org/

Talking Cultures

'Talking Cultures’ – a Big Ideas CAMC and cross-Institute seminar series led by Prof. Juliet Simpson launched on 17 November with lively debates exploring Cultural Temporalities from the Acropolis to early 1900s cultures of time travel led by Prof. Juliet Simpson, Dr Daniel Anderson, Dr Maria Golovteeva, Prof. Pat Kirkham, Dr Thomas Knowles, Colleagues and PGRs.

For your ‘Talking Cultures’ events/workshops, debates, please send outline proposals (100 words) to juliet.simpson@coventry.ac.uk

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.

ILLUMINATIO: MEMORYSCAPES, ART, AND CREATING SPACES

Image: Courtesy of Juliet Simpson

CAMC ‘Cultural Memory’ research events series continues on 9th December with a special artist and creative residencies showcasing cross-Centre seminar with Dr Marie-Louise Crawley (C.-Dare) and Carole Griffiths (CAMC), chaired by Prof. Juliet Simpson on Thursday 9th December 2021, 2.-3.30pm, ICE G17 in person/online.

Themed as ‘Illuminations’, the seminar will showcase the creative journeys in memory, myth, object, place and practice of Dr Marie-Louise Crawley and Carole Griffiths, our two 2021-22 Hosking Houses Trust Fellow-Residents, exploring their pathways of Residency ‘illuminations’ in memory, object, place and practice.

Inviting Fellow-Residency applications for our annual CAMC-Hosking Houses Trust residencies Call, applications deadline: 9th December at midnight GMT. Enquiries and applications to juliet.simpson@coventry.ac.uk

Hilary Nesi, 2nd Kazan International Linguistic Summit

Image: KILS Kazan International Linguistic Summit

On November 16th Hilary Nesi gave a presentation at the 2nd Kazan International Linguistic Summit "Language Diversity in the Global World" (KILS-2021), organized under the auspices of Kazan (Volga) Federal University, the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation, the Institute of Language of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and the Institute of Linguistic Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Kazan is the capital of the Republic of Tatarstan.

Hilary was one of several editors of high-profile international linguistics journals invited to the Summit to talk about pathways to research publication, with specific reference to the journals they edi. The summit was a forerunner to the International Congress of Linguists (ICL 21), the main world scientific linguistic forum for linguistics, which takes place once every five years and will also be held in Kazan, in 2023.

For more information, click here. 

Juliet Simpson, Gothic Modern

Edvard Munch, Metabolism, 1898.  Munch Museum, Oslo. To feature in ‘Gothic Modern’ (2024-25)

Prof Juliet Simpson met with key partners in Helsinki in mid-November to lead the next phase of the international ‘Gothic Modern' exhibition, spanning Helsinki, Berlin and Oslo, and numerous loans from world-leading museums. ‘Gothic Modern’ launches the scientific research publications and symposia plans from 2022, together with phase 2 of the curatorial concept design (led by Prof. Simpson) which will includes news of four world star loans from the flagship Edvard Munch Museum’s world-leading collection of modern art.

Women Artists and Designers. Objects in Context

Teresa Reis, The Witch, 1895 (restored), Belvedere, Vienna

Professor Pat Kirkham and Dr Maria Golovteeva rounded off the CAMC autumn Visiting Researcher series with a mini-symposium on Women Artists and Designers. Objects in Context, exploring objects and interiors, artists’ houses, spaces of memory/creation and gendered interiors from the long 19th to 21st centuries. With highlights, Teresa Reis’s bold sculpture of ‘The Witch’ (1895) and Eva Heizel’s brilliantly inventive porcelain designs of the 1930s, papers and panel with Profs John Devane.

Juliet Simpson, Joanna Meredith, Eleanor Cook) opened insights into hidden artist actors, new spaces for women as creators and networks, spanning 1900s Vienna and St Petersburg to 1990s New York.   

Hilary Nesi, 1st International Symposium on Educational Research

Image: poster for the 1st International Symposium on Educational Research

On November 20th Hilary Nesi gave a keynote presentation about digital learning using corpus tools, at the 1st International Symposium on Educational Research “Innovative Approaches in Teaching and Learning Strategies within the Digital Revolution” (ERL2021), organised by the Educational Research lab in the College of Humanities at Prince Sultan University, Saudi Arabia. The objective of the Symposium was to develop an ongoing program for educators in the region, and to establish communication among educators and education professionals at the local, regional, and international levels.

Life Futures

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

The newly published Critical Practices Talks include the Practice Research event on the 11th of July 2021, with practitioners and researchers in the field of practice research exploring the challenges and opportunities in developing new methodologies in research-led practices and in collaborations with the cultural sector. The event fostered a conversation between academics, arts professionals and PhD researchers to collectively consider how academic research can evolve from “research about” to “research through practice” and “research with” cultural organisations. The conference was organised by Carolina Rito and Anthony Downey and speakers included: Michael Schwab, Emily Pringle, Mel Jordan, Gavin Wade, and more.

Watch here.

The new Talks include Life Futures Talk, held on the 3rd of November 2021, the final talk of the Life Futures project 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. To visit the exhibition see here.

Watch here.

Publications

Anthony Luvera has co-authored a chapter with Julian Stallabrass, which has been published in Representing Homelessness, edited by Owen Clayton. A formative evaluation of URApp, a smartphone app for supporting the self-management of urinary incontinence in adolescence developed in collaboration with Louise Moody, has been published in JMIR Pediatrics and Parenting. Rachel Matthews' "Reappraising Local and Community News in the UK” has been published in the prestigious Routledge “Disruptions” series, and Damian Sutton has an article published in the Portuguese journal Revista de História de Arte. Sheena Gardner's paper, "Theme Development in Discursive and Experimental Undergraduate Student Writing," has been accepted for publication in Register Studies. Carolina Rito has edited a new publication with Bill Balaskas, Fabricating Publics: The Dissemination of Culture in the Post-truth Era and published an essay on the political capacities of the curatorial and the exhibitionary.

Rachel Matthews

Image: Reappraising Local and Community News in the UK

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. 

Anthony Luvera: ‘Framing the Crime: Anthony Luvera in conversation with Julian Stallabrass’

Image: Anthony Luvera, Representing Homelessness

Anthony Luvera has a chapter, co-authored with Julian Stallabrass (Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Courtauld), in Representing Homelessness, edited by Owen Clayton (Lincoln University), a Proceedings of the British Academy, published by Oxford University Press. Luvera’s work is also featured on the cover of the publication.

This multidisciplinary volume combines academic research with first-hand accounts of homelessness. It describes how people affected by homelessness are perceived as objects through the process of Othering. It also provides examples of how such Othering can be overcome through collaboration, and by providing a platform for people affected by homelessness. The volume argues that stereotypical representations of homelessness, while useful for charity fundraising, do more harm than good. It concludes that organisations tasked with dealing with homelessness must include greater representation from people with direct ‘lived experience’ of homelessness.

Luvera and Stallabrass take two of Luvera’s recent projects - Assembly, created in Brighton between 2013 and 2014, and Frequently Asked Questions, an ongoing project created with Gerald Mclaverty since 2014 - as a starting point to unpack issues related to the production and consumption of imagery and other representational texts that depict homelessness in the context of contemporary art. Topics addressed include the politics of aesthetics, the ethics of collaboration, the problems of representation, the intersection of art and activism, the agency of and power relations between the artist and participant, the potential and limits of socially engaged art practice in relation to cultural democracy, and the history of tropes of representation that have dominated visual discourse in relation to housing precarity and homelessness.

Further information can be found here.

Louise Moody: URApp

Image: A smartphone App for Supporting the Self-management of Daytime Urinary Incontinence in Adolescents: Development and Formative Evaluation Study of URApp

A recently published paper in the open access journal JMIR Pediatrics and Parenting (JPP) outlines research undertaken by CAMC as part of a project led by University of Bristol, and in collaboration with Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, University of Southampton, The Open University.

The paper describes the development of a smartphone app (URApp) that aims to improve bladder training in young people aged 11 to 19 year with daytime urinary incontinence.

URApp was developed through co-design workshops with young people that were designed and co-facilitated by Louise Moody. The core app functions were based on clinical guidance and included setting a daily drinking goal that records fluid intake and toilet visits, setting reminders to drink fluids and go to the toilet, and recording progress toward drinking goals. Young people who tested URApp found it a helpful way of supporting their timed schedule for toilet visits and drinking and reported high levels of acceptability and engagement.

Download the full paper here. 

Sheena Gardner Register Studies

Image: Register Studies

Sheena Gardner is pleased to report that her paper, 'Theme Development in Discursive and Experimental Undergraduate Student Writing', has been accepted for publication in Register Studies.

The research that underpins this paper is based on the BAWE corpus and began at Coventry University when Dr Sylvia Xiao Chen of South China Normal University was a visiting scholar with us for one year. They have since presented the research at conferences in Hong Kong and in Spain, but this is the first full length publication to appear. It is part of a special issue on corpus research and second language development.

Carolina Rito Fabricating Publics: The Dissemination of Culture in the Post-truth Era

Image: Front cover of Fabricating Publics: The Dissemination of Culture in the Post-truth Era

Carolina Rito and Bill Balaskas have edited a new publication Fabricating Publics: The Dissemination of Culture in the Post-truth Era published by Open Humanities Press DATA BROWSER series. The publication explores how cultural practitioners and institutions perceive their role in the post-truth era, by repositioning their work in relation to the notion of the “public”. The book addresses the multiple challenges posed for artists, curators and cultural activists by the conditions of post-factuality: Do cultural institutions have the practical means and the ethical authority to fight against the proliferation of “alternative facts” in politics, as well as within all aspects of our lives? What narratives of dissent are cultural practitioners developing, and how do they choose to communicate them? Could new media technologies still be considered as instruments of democratizing culture, or have they been irrevocably associated with ‘empty’ populism? Do “counter-publics” exist and, if yes, how are they formed? In the end, is “truth” a notion that could be reclaimed through contemporary culture? With contributions by Charlie Gere, Christine Ross, David M. Berry, Emily Rosamond, Forensic Architecture, Gregory Sholette, Mieke Bal, Nat Muller, Ferry Biedermann, Natalie Bookchin, Alexandra Juhasz, Ramon Bloomberg, Santiago Zabala, Steven Henry Madoff, Terry Smith, Bill Balaskas, Carolina Rito and UBERMORGEN.

Download a copy here.

Carolina Rito 'Infrastructures of the Exhibitionary'

Image: Register Studies

“Infrastructures of the Exhibitionary” is Carolina Rito’s new essay on the political capacities of the curatorial and the exhibitionary. For Rito, the exhibitionary has a role to play in shaping the forms of our future imagination. For that to become a reality, we need to render available the current infrastructures for cultural production and their institutions, and expansively reimagine them beyond displaying objects and counting attendees to comply with metrics and performance indicators. As Tom Holert wrote in his latest publication, the expanded field of contemporary art and its institutions are “potential sites of responding in new and necessary ways to the constant and inescapable crises inflicted upon the earth and its human and nonhuman inhabitants.”

This contribution is part of the edited volume Exhibitionary Acts of Political Imagination edited by Cătălin Gheorghe and Mick Wilson and published by PARSE, University of Gothenburg, Sweden, and Vector, “George Enescu” National University of the Arts in Iasi, Romania. With contributions by Galit Eilat, Vasif Kortum and Merve Elveren, Cosmin Costinas, Marco Scotini, Nick Aikens, Carolina Rito, Simon Sheikh, Maria Lactans, and Basam El Baroni.

Damian Sutton: "Photography and the Thin Present"

Image: Front cover of Photography,CInema, Memory

Damian Sutton has an article out in the new year: a publication of “Photography and the Thin Present: Barthes, Deleuze and the Time of Portrayal” in the Portuguese journal Revista de História de Arte - Série W.

Image: Yellow House, by John Devane