January 2024

Welcome to the January 2024 edition of CAMC Curates, the newsletter for the Centre for Arts, Memory and Communities. CAMC Curates provides monthly updates from our postgraduate and staff researchers about recent news, events and publications. 

Carolina Rito has won the highly acclaimed Fulbright Fellowship. Starting this January, Rito will spend six months at the School of Visual Arts, New York, supported by Dr Steven Henry Madoff, researching the epistemic capacities of the curatorial with a focus on NYC-based case studies to answer the question "How Does Curating Produce Knowledge? A Framework for Curatorial Research". 

CAMC is delighted that long-term collaborator NIHR Devices for Dignity MIC, hosted by Sheffield Teaching Hospitals has received £3m from the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) to establish a new national HealthTech Research Centre to develop innovative health technologies for people with long-term conditions.

Louise Moody will co-lead the Centre's Methodological Innovation theme informing new approaches to technology development that reflect an in-depth understanding of the lived experience and priorities of those living with long-term conditions. Louise has worked closely with Devices for Dignity since 2008, with collaborative research including the development of technology that supports therapy after a stroke and CAMC PhD Student Rachael Hughson-Gill's research facilitating the design of clothing for young women with Type 1 diabetes.

The funding will support the development of technologies for patients with conditions such as diabetes, neurological conditions and chronic kidney disease, and bring a focus on improving women’s health and addressing the mental health aspects that can accompany long-term health conditions.

Samantha Clarke was recently welcomed as a Women in Games WIGJ ambassador, joining an international community of industry experts to champion gender and diversity equality in the games, esports and creative industries. WIGJ's global mission is to establish a gaming industry, culture and community that promotes equity of opportunity and treatment, and conditions that are free from discrimination to empower everyone to achieve their full potential.

Anthony Luvera's photograph, Assisted Self-Portrait of Mauvette Reynolds, won the prestigious Portrait of Britain award by the British Journal of Photography in partnership with JCDecaux UK.

The winning image is taken from the larger body of work, Construct, which was created between 2018 and 2022 with over 50 people experiencing homelessness in Birmingham, commissioned by Grain Projects in partnership with SIFA Fireside. In the first year, the artist spent time getting to know the staff and individuals associated with SIFA Fireside, a charity that supports homeless people in leading healthier and happier lives, by working in the kitchen and serving meals. He then invited people to take cameras away to capture their experiences, meeting with participants regularly to discuss their images and to record conversations. During the Covid-19 pandemic and associated lockdowns, workshops and conversations were continued online. Anthony also invited participants to learn how to use digital medium format equipment, to create an assisted self-portrait. To make an assisted self-portrait, the artist meets regularly with the participant in locations that are significant to them. The final images for use in exhibition and publication are selected by the participant. Construct was first exhibited in Snow Hill Square and Snow Hill train station in central Birmingham in 2022. A full publication of Construct is coming out in February 2024.

Anthony's winning image is featured across the United Kingdom throughout January 2024 on digital screens in bus shelters, rail stations, shopping centres, beside roads, and at Heathrow Airport. Additionally, the work is featured in Portrait of Britain Vol. 6 published by Bluecoat Press.

Jose Dias's work listed as best Portuguese jazz record of 2023. Dias is part of the ensemble that recorded Cadavre Exquis (Robalo, 2023). In the midst of the 2021 lockdown, Gonçalo Prazeres (saxophones), José Dias (guitar), Adam Fairhall (piano), John Pope (double bass), and Johnny Hunter (drums) exchanged free improvisations over the internet, developing a set of improvised themes. Each musician freely improvised over the contribution they received and presented a new solo improvisation, which served as the starting point for a new theme. The final result aligns with the surrealist game, evolving into an organic, spontaneous record with a distinctive group language.

The album is now listed as one of the best Portuguese jazz records of 2023 by jazz.pt magazine.

You can listen to the album here.

Melissa Tanti hosted a screening during 16 Days of Activism to End Violence Against Women. Attendees were immersed in a powerful screening of 5 short films, each created by survivors of gender-based violence (GBV) sharing their unfiltered perspectives on the challenges they faced while seeking crucial support during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. The stories were created in collaboration with the Woman Abuse Council of Toronto and University of Guelph as part of a CIHR-funded research project on which Melissa is co-investigator. A dynamic panel discussion following the screening featured representatives from Women's Habitat of Etobicoke and North York Women's Centre, alongside survivor filmmakers. This thought-provoking session offered insights into a collaborative process for designing systems that centre survivor experiences and considers chronic underfunding and other systemic challenges that community organizations face in providing comprehensive support to GBV survivors.

CAMC Researchers create impact in their fields with exciting new publications. In collaboration with Deakin University, University of Leeds, and Coventry University colleagues from the Centre for Future Transport and Cities, Louise Moody recently published the article “Braking bad” in the journal Applied Ergonomics. Trams often operate in shared or mixed-traffic environments, which raise unique human factor and safety challenges. This research collaboration explored the role of Virtual Reality in improving tram driver braking performance and perceptions in hazardous situations. Read the article here A new chapter by Elizabeth Benjamin assesses the evolution of the discussion of the First World War in the French context, from the viewpoint of its recent centenary. Read  'The Memory Politics of the First World War at Its Centenary' in The Routledge Handbook of French History. Chao Han and Sheen Gardner published their third article on transition markers in the Han CH-EN corpus in the Journal of English for Academic Purposes. As a subset of the BAWE corpus, each text by a Chinese-speaking Chinese-educated student is closely matched by genre, discipline and level of study to a text by an English-speaking UK-educated student. Read the article: “How can I add an argument appropriately in English?” Addition markers in Chinese L1 and English L1 university student writing - ScienceDirect. Han completed his PhD at Coventry in 2018 under the supervision of Sheena Gardner and Hilary Nesi and is now a lecturer in English at Lanzhou University in China.

CAMC Researchers in the spotlight at international conferences in Venice and Cairo.

Professor Juliet Simpson was invited to present at the international art and cultural heritage conference on 'Re-use, Adaptation and Revision: Modes and Legacies of Ruskin's work'. Held in December at Ca' Foscari University and the Centre for Cultural Heritage, Venice, Juliet's paper on 'Ruskin's Restless Medieval – Embodying Pasts and Legacies,’ featured in a line-up of international experts to open fresh perspectives on Ruskin’s engagement with art, heritage, social progress and climate for the 21^st century.  Her paper will go forward to be included in a major publication developed from the conference findings on Ruskin, Art and the Future of Cultural Heritage. The ambition? To develop new thinking about the contemporary global significance of one of the most significant proselytizers of the role of art in imagining how we might create and design societies of the future.

Melissa Tanti co-presented work in progress with researcher and filmmaker Cathy Soreny from Sheffield Hallam University's  Art, Design, and Media Research Centre at the conference Transnational Feminism: Explorations, Communications, Challenges and Horizons, hosted by Badr University, Cairo, Egypt. This paper, 'Reframing Disfluency Through Multilingual Poetics: the positive disruptions of translational poetics and non-normative voices' is part of a unique transdisciplinary collaboration that brings together Melissa's scholarship on translational poetics with Cathy Soreny’s exploration of disability justice within applied arts practice. We consider what happens when theories of multilingual writing as a site that engenders hospitality for voices that are minoritized within Anglohegemony are put in dialogue with discourses around communication diversity and ‘dysfluency pride’ that challenge what disabled sound artist Gemma Nash calls the “vocal supremacy” of non-disabled voices.

PhD student Olivia Garro (IHR HistoryLab chair) is organizing the workshop “Demonology through the ages: beliefs, ideas, visual and material culture” with independent art curator Viola Moschettini. It is aimed at PGRs and ECRs and will take place at the Institute of Historical Research on March 8th. The CFPs deadline is February 9th. Abstracts and bios to garroo@uni.coventry.ac.uk

Hearty congratulations to Dr. Abdi Syam and Dr. Sara Lahlouhi for being awarded their PhDs in the winter term 2023. Abdi graduates with a PhD entitled "An Investigation of Intelligibility and Lingua Franca Core features in Indonesian Accented English." He was supervised by Sheena Gardner and Michael Cribb, and was the first to graduate among a cohort of Indonesian PhD students at Coventry University. Sara was supervised by Hilary Nesi and Sheena Gardner. She undertook a linguistic  analysis comparing the writing of architecture students and practising architects. She has since taken up the post of Course Coordinator at ICON College of Management and Technology, partnered with Bishop Grosseteste University to deliver some of their undergraduate courses in London.

Congratulations also to Yanyan Yeung who has just taken up a post at the Global Banking School in Birmingham, working with international students preparing for postgraduate degrees at Oxford Brookes University. Yanyan submitted her doctoral thesis in November, which investigates online dictionary use by Chinese students in the UK. Yanyan is supervised by Hilary Nesi.