Sign-Up Sessions 3 - Day 1 - 16:45 - 18:00

Sessions Available:  

There are four options to choose from for the third block of sign-up sessions. The details of each session are below, please use the relevant link to register your attendance for the session via Inkpath.  Some sessions have limited capacities, and spaces are available in all sessions on a first-come-first served basis. 

All four sessions run 16:45 - 18:00.

Sign-up 1: Operation Bogeyman: The Folk Horror Landscape of 1970s Northern Ireland

Simon Aeppli - Film Screening

Content Warning: This film includes references to murder, child abduction, paramilitary violence, and adult film contexts. It also contains discussion of 1970s Satanic panic, state‑led disinformation, alongside archival footage and material that some viewers may find disturbing.

Aeppli’s essay film navigates the intersections of folklore, psyops and black propaganda during the Troubles. Beginning in the filmmaker’s childhood home of Carrickfergus, he embarks on a personal journey through haunting landscapes and archival discoveries to reveal a past steeped in strangeness and horror. 

The film examines a bizarre propaganda operation in which the British army staged fake black magic rituals to smear the IRA as ‘Satanists’. This unique blend of video essay and desktop documentary explores the spectres of Northern Ireland’s history through landscape and archival footage, audio interviews, and personal reflections. The film grapples with themes of buried histories, social control, and the haunting legacy of psyops and black propaganda.

Simon, born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, is a documentary and essay filmmaker. His films have screened at festivals and galleries across the UK and internationally. Alongside film, his practice includes immersive audio projects such as F for Farnham ghost trails, and The Aldershot Mixtape. He is a Senior Lecturer in BA Film Production at UCA Farnham.

Sign-up 2: “They Despise Everything You Find Important and Seek to Humiliate You”: Experiencing and Preparing for Hostile Backlash Against Your Publicly-funded Research

Dr Helen A. Hopkins

Content Warning: This session discusses targeted media and social media attacks on researchers, including harassment and its emotional impact. It involves reflection on distressing experiences and may be challenging for those who have faced similar situations. 

In light of the recent series of troubling mainstream and social media attacks on research and researchers, this 75-minute session focuses on the experience of a hostile media backlash and includes activities designed to help you feel prepared and, should it happen to you, more in control of the situation.

You will hear from Hopkins about an attack on her research by The Telegraph in March 2025 that led to the retweet of the quotation in this session's title by Elon Musk and the sharing of her thesis and her photo across X as part of the attack. After brief discussion on the general media/socio-political climate we will: 

·       consider advice from other scholars who have experienced hostility;

·       hear from colleagues in HE public relation departments on what to expect from institutional protocols;

·       explore the range of implications of an attack, from the emotional to the logistics of continuing to work to pre-set deadlines, and discuss what further support you and your peers anticipate you might need.

To enhance your sense of preparedness, we will workshop how far your current project title and abstract might be adjusted to avoid an attack without jeopardising the integrity of your research and craft a pre-emptive statement to respond to an attack. 

We will end with a Q&A/open discussion.

Dr Helen A Hopkins is a Visiting Research Fellow at Birmingham City University. After completing her AHRC Midlands4Cities-funded collaborative PhD with the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Helen has published essays on Shakespeare and heritage, diplomacy, and appropriation. Forthcoming publications focus on representations of Shakespeare in visual art in terms of soft power and biographical tradition.

Hybrid

Sign-up 3: Performing the Past

Peter Sharples - Workshop

Content Warning: This workshop invites participants to draw on personal experiences, which may include traumatic events. Sharing is encouraged but entirely voluntary. 

Drawing on the Transformation Through Writing Model (TTWM) and Benign Violation Theory, the workshop will introduce participants to meaning-making through comedy writing. Using personal experience, students will create a piece of comedy writing and regain agency through the guided TTWM process. The TTWM, developed by Lengelle & Meijers, is a four-step process resulting in 'Meaning Making': Boundary Experience (situation), First Story (fight, flight, or freeze), Understanding (focusing), Second Story (found meaning/constructed understanding). This workshop will adapt that model by using Benign Violation Theory, which explains why we find violations funny, to analyse whether participants can use humour to construct meaning and create a piece of comedy writing by regaining agency over a past experience in a supportive and empowering workshop environment. The host will give an example of the combined theories through a performance. And if time allows, and participants are willing, they will be encouraged to share their stories. Participants are asked to bring a notebook, laptop, or any other means of writing to the session.

Peter is in his first year as a practice-as-research PhD student. He has practical comedy experience, enabling him to theorise about disability and comedy from a personal perspective.

Requirements: Participants will need a notepad and a pen, or some tech on which to write.

Sign-up 4: Telling Stories Differently/ Telling Different Stories: CCoLAB as a Holding Space for Healing and Resistance

Gabriel Hoosain Khan - Presentation and Exhibition

Content Warning: This session includes discussion of queerphobia, transphobia, racism, gendered violence, military violence and occupation, and state surveillance. Participants may encounter distressing personal narratives shared through artistic work. 

The Creative Change Laboratory (CCoLAB) is an arts‑based healing and activism praxis that first emerged in South Africa during struggles against apartheid. As part of my PhD, I brought this practice to Brighton to explore how a methodology shaped in the Global South might translate into the UK context, and what new narrative possibilities might surface in that translation.

This presentation foregrounds how QTBIPOC collaborators use stories, spoken, embodied, sketched, mapped, and performed, to resist and remake the worlds they navigate. CCoLAB relies on collaborative narrative analysis, where storytelling and sense‑making unfold together. This practice opens space for “telling difference” and “telling differently”: troubling linear time, disrupting dominant meaning‑making, and refusing colonial dialectics.

Across 18 weeks of long‑form participatory artmaking, QTBIPOC collaborators in Brighton negotiated belonging in a city celebrated as queer‑friendly yet shaped by racism. Their artworks and reflections reveal strategies for resisting oppression, claiming humanity, and imagining otherwise. In this way, art becomes both an extension of language and a refusal of its limits, especially when words cannot adequately hold pain, memory, or desire.

This work‑in‑progress reflects on the methodological, ethical and political tensions involved in co‑producing stories as knowledge, and considers how creative practice can enact healing, resistance, and narrative possibility

Gabriel is a researcher, facilitator and arts‑based practitioner whose work centres creative methods, healing, and resistance among Queer and Trans Black, Indigenous and People of Colour. With roots in southern African art-activism, Gabriel uses visual art, drama and writing to support community storytelling, collective sense‑making and social justice.