Sign-up Sessions 1 - 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, please follow the relevant link to register your attendance for your chosen session via Inkpath. Some sessions have very limited capacities, and spaces are available in all sessions on a first-come-first served basis. 

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

Sign-up 1: Panel: Beyond Words

Three speakers give different perspectives on the failure of words to express lived experience of queerness, shyness and miscarriage.

Content warning: The work of Jessa Fairbrother (speaker 3), deals explicitly with miscarriage, also known as spontaneous abortion, pregnancy loss or reproductive loss. Students are invited to attend this panel and, if they wish, to slip out of the room at any time.

Speaker 1: Eve Archer - Speaking into Silence

Whilst evidence of queerness has and still is used to persecute and penalise, safe practice for many is to remove or hide any material/written proof. We instead rely on the gestural, the unspoken, the illegible, “the cool look of a street cruise, a lingering handshake between recent acquaintances, or the mannish strut of a particularly confident woman” (Muñoz, 2009, p.65). A fluidity of meaning-making that allows for ‘am not’ to the wrong person and ‘am too’ to the right.

This research proposes a styling of 'queer intuition', an adaptive, perceptual sense that exists within and is ignited by the unsaid, to examine the queering of evidence, the act of reading between the lines. Whether it is our choice or is forced upon us, silence has context and meaning. And that meaning, that lingering question, invites intuition: there is more to be known.

For queer communities, silence has a knotty history, but as J. Logan Smilges (2022) proposes, there is a difference between effacement and silence, and it is within the latter that this research proposes a ripe ground for queer potentiality. In understanding and expanding notions of queer silence, we can begin to question what circumstances engender queer intuition and, in turn, inspire the draw to non-verbal forms of covert expression, where verbal silence is answered with visual sound.

This talk will draw on the hanky code, the ‘Silence=Death’ project and the zines of Lisa Ben; where no words will do or there is only chance for a few. Works of art that speak into silence.

References:

Muñoz, J.E. (2009) Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press.

Smilges, J.L. (2022) ‘To Speak of Silence’, in Queer Silence: On Disability and Rhetorical Absence. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 35–68.

Speaker 2: Sylvie Jane Lewis - An Archive of Fairies: Modernism, Shyness, and the Wordless Encounter

This research explores the presences of fairies in literary modernism alongside fantasy film and trick photography, and utilises the fairy to reimagine archival practice. Fairies are ephemeral, inhabiting unexplored paths on the map and gaps in rationality. As with archival materials, fairies are also, in the sense of tales passed down across eras, enduring. Moreover, people have historically searched for evidence of fairies, notably documented by Arthur Conan Doyle, who made known his belief in the existence of fairies following the Cottingley photographic hoax. Uniting discourses on the search for fairies and that of archived media, this presentation addresses the fairy's pertinence to the often-wordless affective structure of shyness. This presentation delves into an encounter with the Cottingley fairy archives in Leeds, and brings these materials into a dialogue with modernist novelist Virginia Woolf. Woolf's fiction grapples with the task of finding the right words to give shape to visual and affective encounters. Characters in her fiction often struggle to communicate with each other on an emotional level, while their internal monologues prove rich with fleeting visuality. Identifying the presences of the fairy in these monologues, this research posits the fairy as an embodiment of shyness, an affect reimagined as an anticipatory creative force (a reading influenced by the work of queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz). Read as a photographic and/or cinematic projection, the fairy gives shape to the flickering potentiality of the shy childhood imagination where spoken words falter.

Speaker 3: Jessa Fairbrother - Missing-ness Words

Content warning: This work deals explicitly with miscarriage, also known as spontaneous abortion, pregnancy loss or reproductive loss.

My practice-based research explores embodiment as material. Working often with photographic paper, I use needle-made puncture marks as method, developing counterpoint narratives speaking to the missing-ness of miscarriage.

The term is structurally under-represented in medical archives; descriptive terms can, instead, obscure feelings. My work offers an entry-point, using the sewing needle as linguistic tool. Puncture marks on photographic paper create holes: a mark, a glyph, a letter - a form of inscription inviting touch through the surface which appears embossed.

Audiences frequently lean in to touch my artwork as if to read Braille, amplified sometimes by wanting to touch me, the artist as origin of the story. Haptic gestures imply reading beyond written language; artworks activate ephemeral terrains, translating lived experience into embodied encounter. By wounding the surface of my artwork, I draw attention to a felt “hole” within the body. Affect becomes the relational field between me, the artwork and other body across multiple temporalities.

In this presentation I share my artwork Role Play (woman with cushion) alongside recent experiments of astrological constellations as perforated “eggs” on photographic material. These articulate counterpoint narratives: using needle inscription, creating non-indexical texts. This method expands words to address the elasticity of a maternal experience, addressing possibilities of missing words in the archive for the non-birthing body. Holes behave as words where language does not articulate the expanse of what might have happened, or the missing-ness of what is yearned for.

Hybrid 

Sign-up 2: It Takes a Village... to Make a PhD

Carmen Andall Woodroofe, Kamal Badhey, Khadijah Na'eem, Mandeep Sidhu

Content Warning: This session includes discussion of race and racism, including experiences of discrimination. Panellists will be available after the session if you want to talk further.

This session will centre the experience of alumni that identify as BIPOC/Global Majority scholars. Each Techne alumnus/a will share their journey doing the PhD, delving into learnings and challenges. Though the PhD thesis is a single-authored text, this session will emphasise the role that friendship and community played to help them reach finish line. They will share how different informal systems of support were better able to address some of the specific needs of their projects. Attendees will be able to ask questions and will be given a couple of reflection questions to think through their support systems, as well as how their scholarship is made and lives in the world. 

Carmen Andall Woodroofe graduated from Royal Holloway with a PhD on the ways in which roots reggae mediates African-Caribbean diasporic listeners' practices and attitudes towards the environment. She is currently a postdoctoral visiting fellow in Environment and Sustainability at the British Library.

Kamal Badhey is a photographer and educator interested in dispersal, diaspora, and origin pilgrimages. She uses photography and oral storytelling to stitch together stories. Kamal’s PhD research was on the Apna Heritage Archive created by Anand Chhabra where she used interviews and visual methods to articulate the diasporic family album.

Khadijah Na'eem recently completed her thesis on the Grenfell Tower fire as a state-corporate crime, focusing specifically on the role of neoliberal policies and discourses. She has recently published two papers arising from her thesis and is working on further publications and her next steps. 

Mandeep Sidhu has recently submitted their thesis on race, refusal and prefiguration in social movement struggles in/against the Indian state. They are also a teacher and community organiser, grounded in abolitionist and antiracist struggle.

Sign-up 3. Other Things with Other Words: A Heterolingual Writing Workshop

Natasha Jane Kennedy 

"Ce croisement des langues assure la croissance des langues” [this crossing of languages ensures the growing of languages] (Derrida, 1998).

This workshop will invite attendees to explore the “gaps” between languages. How is it that the Portuguese “saudade” doesn't quite ring like “melancholy”? Where is the nuance between “frustration” and “απογοητευμένος” in Greek? The latter is more akin to disappointment and doesn't quite convey the same feeling... how frustrating! Can we “kombinować” (a Polish word meaning “to think of a possible solution of the seemingly impossible”) a way to bridge these gaps?

Code-switching occurs frequently in multilingual environments and can be motivated by setting, context, interlocutor, or linguistic preference (Gumperz, 1982). It can also be motivated by the feeling that, say, "saudade actually conveys what I feel more accurately...". Indeed, multilinguals are often prompted to switch languages to talk about their emotions (Pavlenko, 2005).

Heterolingual literature involves using more than one language simultaneously in a single text (Grutman, 1997; Suchet, 2014), and is generative of new forms of writing, prompts an unusual reading experience, and encourages us to rethink the boundaries of our own language(s). 

Through a series of prompts, and equipped with “untranslatable” words, attendees will be encouraged and guided to create a heterolingual collage text exploring emotion, expression, and how using a different language can enable us to communicate our thoughts and feelings in a “richer” way.

Sign-up 4. Text/iles in the Dress History Teaching Collection

Dr Charlotte Nicklas, Dr Suzanne Rowland, Aurore Damoiseaux - Workshop

Content Warning: Participants will be asked to contribute personal reflections during the workshop.

This workshop proposes an introduction to the University of Brighton’s Dress History Teaching Collection. Thinking through the relationship between fashion, dress, textiles, and words, this workshop offers an exploration of dress objects showcasing words in print form, on significant labels, or otherwise present on garments. Through close readings of the objects, we aim to foster conversations around the significance of words and text when paired with textiles, or when worn on the body. 

Leora Auslander (2005) argued for the importance of objects as primary sources, to go beyond the written word when looking for historical evidence. Scholars working in dress and design history have long used objects as key sources in their research as well. As material elements that closely touch the human body when in use, dress objects hold particularly meaningful, sensory evidence of human history. Reading an object is in itself a sensory experience, as the reader must involve sight, touch, but also smell and hearing (for example by listening to the rustle of fabric). What can they tell us that written sources do not provide?

Going beyond the written source, how do we then re-involve words to assess the object in front of us? How can we describe an object? How does terminology shape our understanding of the physical artefact? And what can words printed on the garment tell us about its life and history? How do labels create or alter our reading of the object? 

Dr Charlotte Nicklas is Senior Lecturer in History of Art and Design, Course Leader of the MA History of Design and Material Culture, and co-manager of the Teaching Collection at the University of Brighton. Among other publications, she co-edited Dress History: New Directions in Theory and Practice (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015).

Dr Suzanne Rowland is a Lecturer in Fashion and Design History at the University of Brighton and co-manager of the Teaching Collection. She is a material culture scholar with broad research interests in fashion design, manufacturing, and cross-class consumption from the early nineteenth century to the present day.

Aurore Damoiseaux is a PhD student of dress and fashion history at University of Brighton. Her AHRC-Techne funded research project focuses on the use of clothing and handmade textile objects as protest tools to imagine alternative living at Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp (1981-2000).