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, 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 16:45 - 18:00.

Bridging Disciplines: Experiences from the Technē Community

Session Details: 

In this panel, PhD students from the Technē community will share their experiences as researchers working across diverse technical and artistic fields. They will discuss the opportunities for collaboration, learning, and exchange that Technē offers, as well as the challenges of integrating these varied approaches within academia.

Speakers / Facilitators: 

Marcela Rada is a PhD student in the Institute of Sound Recording at the University of Surrey. Her research focuses on workflows and guidelines for immersive music production. Known for making complex music production and immersive audio concepts accessible and practical, she specializes in bridging the worlds of academia and industry. Marcela leads educational initiatives and teaches internationally, empowering the next generation of music professionals. Her work is grounded in a commitment to creativity, knowledge-sharing, and shaping a more inclusive and forward-thinking music industry.

Pratibha Joshi is a Year 2, Techne-funded PhD researcher studying translation in the Centre for Translation Studies at the University of Surrey. Her PhD project examines the practice of museum audio description—from planning to launching the service—in an Indian art museum community. Besides the museum and heritage sector, Pratibha is interested in exploring the process of producing audio description in niche creative industries, such as comics and games, across different user platforms. 

San Pham is a Vietnamese-American Doctoral Researcher in Creative Writing at the University of Surrey . Her research examines how postcolonial Asian diasporic multimodal literature re-imagines an archive for Asian stories that have been lost, destroyed, or unwritten. Her work delves into multiple forms, genres, and languages as necessary acts of imagination against diasporic disconnection.

Exposing Methods: Ethics and Emotion in Creative-Critical Inquiry

Content Warning:

The session will include discussion of self-harm, surgery, suicide, sexual assault, mental illness, eating disorders and death which some attendees may find upsetting. You are strongly advised to speak to the session leader in advance if you have concerns about the presence of any particular triggers.

Session Details: 

This session brings together work that confronts the affective, ethical, and methodological tensions that arise when research is rooted in personal, traumatic, or contested histories. Across the session, speakers ask how creative-critical practice can navigate the risks of harm — to oneself, to others, and to the subjects of research — while still pursuing forms of knowledge that matter. The papers collectively probe what it means to write from wounds, to revisit painful archives, and to engage with communities or families who may resist or be distressed by the narratives scholars seek to construct. They raise urgent questions about consent, positionality, epistemic authority, and the responsibilities researchers hold when their work touches on grief, violence, identity, or stigma. The session invites reflection on how methodologies might remain ethically responsive, emotionally attuned, and open to uncertainty when working in these fraught terrains.

Speakers / Facilitators: 

Tabby Carless-Frost (they/them) is a writer, filmmaker, and AHRC-funded PhD researcher in Creative Writing at Brunel University London, supervised by Bernardine Evaristo. Their research and creative practice explore haunting, illness, trauma, and the ethics of life writing. They are also the writer-director of the BFI-funded film Out of the Peat and are working on their debut novel. 

Amy Austin is an artist and writer. She holds an MA in Fine Art and studied with the Royal Drawing School. Her work has been exhibited across the UK. Amy is currently undertaking a practice-based PhD at Kingston University, where her research takes an autoethnographic approach to exploring the medicalised body, trauma, and identity through visual and textual practices.

Tim Jerrome is a writer, historian and archivist who has a passion for uncovering rural LGBTQ+ stories amongst archive and museum collections. Having previously worked for the Museum of English Rural Life, he is now undertaking a PhD on this topic with the University of Brighton, with particular emphasis on the Victorian and early 20th century periods. 

Mirror of everything: examining heritage narratives through the medium of football

Session Details: 

Combining academic discussion an collaborative workshop, this session will examine the ways in which football can help us understand different modes of expressions of collective identity and collaboration, and to illustrate how collective language flourishes as part of shared experience. Discussion will centre on museum studies, functional linguistics and translation studies, examining how heritage institutions construct textual identities, and what portrayals of place tell us about institutional attitudes and values. Discussion will be followed by collaborative group exercises where attendees work together to design a football club, discuss its link to place and invent a fictional history, before implementing ideas from the discussion to construct heritage texts reflecting their shared understanding of their club.

Speakers / Facilitators: 

Felix Clutson is in the final year of a PhD at the Centre for Translation Studies at Surrey. His research concerns the construction of identity in football museums with a focus on place and globalisation. He likes long-sleeved shirts, defensive midfielders wearing the number 4, and Reading.

Lindsay Virgilio is doing a PhD at Kingston University involving memoir, and is a coach in London with Dulwich Hamlets FC.

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 the second block and then again in this 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.