Sign Up Sessions - Day 1 - 12:15 - 13:30

Sessions Available:  

There are four options to choose from for the first block of sign-up sessions. The details of all four sessions are below, and you must use the relevant link to register your attendance for your chosen session via Inkpath.

Please be aware that some sessions have very limited capacities, and that spaces are available in all sessions on a first-come-first served basis. 

All four sessions will run from 12:15 - 13:30. 

How Does What we hear Translate into What we Imagine?

Session Details: 

In this interactive session you are invited to experience two approaches to Audio description – the standard and so-called extended (or paused) AD. You will listen to samples audio described using each method and give feedback along with suggestions for enhancing user experience. There are currently both the advocates of the extended method who believe the value of the information outweighs the necessity to pause and the sceptics who insist that pausing disrupts the flow of the film. We often forget that films are a sequence of still images played at a fast enough rate that we can trick our eyes into perceiving them as a continuous flow.  Join the discussion whether we can trick our ears.

Speakers / Facilitators: 

Olga Davis is a Techne Researcher at the University of Surrey. Her research project is entitled: 'Modular Audio Description: Using the extended track to enable personalisation for different audiences'. 

Loss and movement - A Re-performance workshop

Session Details: 

The workshop explores ways of knowing through the negative space of loss, of emptying, of unbecoming. It explores the embodied responses to movement and how witnessing is remembered and reconciled in actions of re-performance.

Participants will be invited to watch a short performance and then collectively engage in a creative task in relation to the performance.

This is a participatory workshop, but dance and movement are not required. Whilst the session is concerned with loss it is not about sharing or discussing personal experiences of loss, and no one will be required to speak about loss in this way. 

Speakers / Facilitators: 

Amy Sheppard is a dance artist, producer and researcher. Her research practice is concerned with loss as an experiential phenomenon of dance, choreography, and performance. Her critical enquiry is led by an attentiveness to the qualities of loss, and how it is experienced temporally and corporeally more specifically as a dancer, and how loss concepts may provide alternate methodological approaches to making and moving. 

Careers Workshop: Job interviews – Learning how to Interview and be Interviewed.

Session Details:

Back again for 2026! Interviewing can be a stressful experience – for both the interviewer and the interviewee. This interactive workshop will introduce basic techniques for becoming an effective interviewer – planning and preparation, building rapport, guiding the conversation, using silence, listening and seeing, and giving feedback.  Since understanding the employer’s perspective is key to effective job interview preparation, this workshop is also useful for those anticipating upcoming job interviews. Please note: This workshop is heavily interactive.  

Speakers / Facilitators: 

Darcey Gillie has 15 years’ experience supporting the careers of PGRs, research staff, and senior academic colleagues. She was pedagogical lead on the FutureLearn MOOC “Career Management for Early Career Academic Researchers”, which won a national award for impact and was used by researchers all over the world.  Her portfolio career in career includes being professional development manager at the University of Sheffield where she taught on the PG Cert in Academic Practice, Careers Consultant for Postgraduates and Technology at the University of Manchester, managing a team of employability advisers at Sheffield Hallam. She combines her freelance career as The Career Doctor Online with being Careers Consultant for Research Staff at the University of Edinburgh. 

Mbira & Improvisation - A Music Workshop

Session Details:

A Workshop- Lecture that will engage in Southern African – improvisational and rhythm practice. John will lead the participants in an active sessions of communal musicking, improvisation, and further understanding into orature & orality and how they can be used across disciplines.

Speakers / Facilitators: 

John Pfumojena FRSA is an accomplished Zimbabwean composer, actor trainer, theatre director, practitioner researcher, and Founder/Artistic Director of Meet My Ancestors Theatre Company, specialising in African Indigenous Performance Practice for the Modern Stage. His innovative practice integrates the rich oral and ensemble traditions of Southern Africa with contemporary performance methods, pushing the boundaries of decolonised music and theatre practice. John is a recent Visiting Fellow at Exeter College and a former Visiting Fellow at TORCH – The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities, University of Oxford, where he initiated and collaborated on landmark musical and cultural dialogue projects. His music composition work has received critical acclaim for productions such as Tangle Theatre’s Richard the Second, National Theatre of Scotland’s Enough of Him, and Good Chance Theatre’s The Jungle for which he has been awarded the prestigious OBIE Special Citation Award – NYC. His discography features the collaborative album Sounds Of Refuge with Mohamed Sarrar, and Phoenix Rise with Sunny Jain. John Pfumojena is a Visiting Practitioner at LAMDA – London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art.