Sign Up Sessions 2 - Day 1 - 15:00 - 16:15

Sessions Available:

There are four options to choose from for the second 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 run from 15:00 - 16:15.

PechaKucha Session

Session Details: 

Following on from the very popular session at the Westminster Congress, this session gives you a chance to learn about the research being undertaken by other members of the Techne community via a series of PechaKucha style presentations. 

Spaces are available for both those who want to present and those who just want to sit and listen.

Speakers / Facilitators: 

To be confirmed - If you would like to be involved in this session as a presenter, please do let us know as soon as possible! 

The Course of Empire: Music and Emergent Narrative with Generative AI 

Session Details: 

Following a brief introductory talk, participants will be invited to improvise a story together with a generative system that also provides adaptive musical accompaniment. This way, they will experience firsthand the balance between structure and spontaneity that defines the “Course of Empire” project, and to gain a sense of how such a hybrid, collaborative, and interdisciplinary performance might unfold in practice. The session will then continue with another brief talk about the project’s creative and technical aspects and conclude with an open discussion about the process, the challenges, and the broader implications of designing and performing with such a system.

Content Warning:

The inspiration for the improvised emergent narrative, Thomas Cole’s The Course of Empire series of paintings, involves themes of expansionism, civil war, and enslavement in an antiquity-inspired setting. This includes, in particular:

•    Expansionism framed through a colonialist lens, particularly visible in the third painting’s victory parade, which includes explicitly enslaved, likely foreign captives in chains.
•    Civil war and pervasive armed violence, which dominate the fourth painting.
•    Cyclical violence and early desensitisation, reflected in the two young brothers imitating war in the third painting. This is an image later echoed when the same brothers appear on opposing sides of the civil conflict in the fourth paitning, ultimately killing one another."

Due to the low capacity of this session, it is being run twice, once in this slot and then again in the next block. The sessions are identical so you will only need to attend one or the other. 

Speakers / Facilitators: 

Thomas Boulousis holds a BMus with First-Class Honours and an MA in Music by Research with Distinction from City, University of London, where he received a Performance Scholarship, the Music Department Prize, and the highly competitive Worshipful Company of Musicians Prize. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Music at Kingston University London with a Technē AHRC studentship, researching narrative music composition using generative AI. He also holds Diplomas of LTCL in Music Composition, LMusTCL in Music Theory, and ARSM in Piano Performance. His experience spans composition, teaching, and violin performance with MOYSA Youth Symphony Orchestra of Thessaloniki Concert Hall.

Performing Re-Markings and the Performance Lecture format:
Cleaving Non-Conforming Aesthetics as an Arts “ / ” Academia Method

Session Details: 

This performance lecture invites attendees into the dynamic space of Cleaving—a methodological tool and theoretical conceptualization—for reimagining the boundaries between the arts, culture, and humanities academia. Drawing from the Performing Re-Markings Performance Studies International Constellate series, the session interrogates the lecture “/” performance as a mode to explore how theoretical inquiry and artistic practice can co-produce knowledge. Through foregrounding embodied and multimedia offerings from the six-part series, attendees will encounter how the lecture/performance format as an aesthetic re-entry to knowledge production—via dance, performance, visual art, theatre and text—fracture and reassemble disciplinary methodological conventions. Attendees will gain insight into how the forward-slash as a mode of Cleaving operates as both fracture and holding, demonstrating new possibilities for collaborative, performative, and creative inter-disciplinary research.

Speakers / Facilitators: 

Supraja Ramesh is a Techne (2025) scholar in Theatre Research at Brunel University of London. As a pedagogue and curator, they mindfully bridge arts-academic worlds, facilitating inter/trans/disciplinary engagements. Their ongoing Performing Re-Markings online program, funded by the Performance Studies International (PSi) Constellate 2025, highlights Indian artists and thinkers whose queer and/or non-conforming aesthetic practices resonate across g-local contexts. You can find their scholarly and artistic work in the Contemporary Theatre Review (2023), Critical Stages/Scènes critiques (2021), Alternative South Asia Photography (ASAP) | Art (2023) and Shared Ecologies: Insubordinate Vitalities (forthcoming 2025/6).

Careers Workshop: Narrative CVs – what they are, why the exist and how to use them in your career development.

Session Details: 

A Narrative CV, unlike a traditional academic CV, gives you the opportunity to talk about of your contributions and achievements as a researcher.  The focus on skills, qualities, and impact encourages you to tell the story of how (rather than what or how many) you do things and the wider skills and qualities you’ve developed along the way. In this session we will have a brief introduction to the Narrative CV format and the focus on how you can use the CV to plan your development during your PhD – a useful strategic approach even if you are already considering careers beyond academia. There will be some limited discussion in pairs.

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.