Monday 20th of June, 1pm - 1.45pm (Online via Zoom)

Excavating the War on Culture

It's not a "Culture War", it's a War on Culture. It's being waged against our arts, culture and heritage organisations, and against our universities under the banner of a "war on woke". This talk digs into some of the historical roots of this weaponisation of culture, and looks at where it might go next. It shows how important art, architecture, archaeology, anthropology, museums and education always were to the late Victorian project of cultural whiteness, a corporate-militarist-colonial project that included displaying looted artworks in the museums and erecting statues of colonisers in the streets. British public discourse on this question therefore has a specific history. Using Frantz Fanon's essay on Racism and Culture and Christina Sharpe's book In the Wake as guides, the talk asks what an anti-racist, anti-war movement for culture could look like today, as we resist ongoing assaults against education, equality and the arts.

Biography

Dan Hicks FSA, MCIfA is Professor of Contemporary Archaeology at the University of Oxford, Curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum, and a Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford. Dan works on the material and visual culture of the human past, up to and including the modern, colonial, contemporary and digital world, and on the history of Archaeology, Anthropology Art, and Architecture. His curatorial work has ranged widely, and most recently included the co-curated exhibition and book Lande: the Calais “Jungle” and Beyond in 2019. His most recent book is The Brutish Museums: the Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence, and Cultural Restitution (2020).

Dan has published eight authored and edited books, and has written articles, essays and op-eds for a variety of journals, magazines and newspapers, for a wide range of audiences: from the Times Literary Supplement to Apollo Magazine, Art Review, Artnet, The Guardian, The Telegraph, and The Independent. Dan has regularly appeared on Radio and TV, including Radio 4’s In Our Time, Today Programme, Making History, and many radio and TV documentaries and news broadcasts.

Twitter: @profdanhicks 

SGSAH Publics, Platforms and Performances: A Plenary Roundtable showcasing the work of SGSAH PhD Alumni who are taking their research out into the world

Auditorium C, University of Strathclyde, TIC Building, 99 George St, Glasgow G1 1RD

Thursday 23rd of June, 4.30pm - 5.30pm 

This plenary roundtable welcomes back three SGSAH alumni, who during their PhDs and beyond have developed particular expertise in showcasing their research, in taking it out into wider communities, and creating platforms for discussion connecting academia to the various audiences. In this session, our three speakers will talk about how they are developing their careers and their research through various forms of engagement and interactions: in ways that can be challenging, surprising and fun. 

Speakers 

Dr Mona Bozdog is a Lecturer in Immersive Experience Design at Abertay University, following a SGSAH ARCS PhD at Abertay in collaboration with the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and the National Theatre of Scotland. Mona takes every opportunity to engage with the wider community and has showcased her practice research at various national and international festivals, events and venues: BBC Click Live, Edinburgh Fringe Festival, V&A Dundee, Arcadia, Games are for Everyone and the Scottish Parliament. She is currently working with different academic, heritage and game design practitioners on a series of projects that investigate the potential of games for capturing, preserving and sharing herstories with new audiences and local communities. Visit her website: https://www.performingplay.co.uk/ and find her on Twitter: @MonaBozdog. 

Dr Louise Creechan is a Lecturer in Literary Medical Humanities at the University of Durham, following a SGSAH/AHRC-funded PhD at the University of Glasgow; she was named as one of the 2022 AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinkers and the co-host of the academic comedy podcast ‘LOL My Praxis’. Louise has developed a diverse research engagement portfolio that includes: broadcasting, stand-up comedy, staging musicals, and podcasting. She is a neurodivergent academic and is deeply invested in finding alternative, unexpected, and accessible modes of dissemination. Find her on Twitter: @LouiseCreechan @lolmypraxis.

Dr Aaron McGregor is a Lecturer in Music Performance at the University of Aberdeen, following a SGSAH/AHRC-funded PhD at the University of Glasgow. As a performer on modern and historical violins, he regularly combines his research and practice in concerts, recordings and workshops. Since 2017, he has led a series of 18th-century ceilidh nights with Concerto Caledonia (performing variously in Glasgow, Limerick, Helsinki and Sydney) combining historical research into the 18th-century Scottish dance band with the familiar format of the modern ceilidh night. Visit his website: www.aaronmcgregor.com and find him on Twitter: @aaronmarkmcg. 

The roundtable will be followed by the Research Showcase at 5.30pm. 

Auditorium C, University of Strathclyde, TIC Building, 99 George St, Glasgow G1 1RD

Friday 24th of June, 9.15am - 10am

How to change the world stitch by stitch? Inventive clothing research, speculative sewing & experiments in the archives

This keynote draws on a decade of sociological sewing projects that examine citizenship and inventive socio-political practices to better understand how individuals, often in small and mundane ways, have over time collectively attempted to change the world stitch by stitch. I will show & tell two projects that focus on the study of inventive wearable technologies – the ESRC funded Bikes & Bloomers research about 1890s English women inventors of convertible cycle wear and the ERC Council funded Politics of Patents project exploring 200 years of global clothing inventions. Both use archival research, interviews, ethnography, and speculative sewing to get up close to lesser-known historic inventors who have attempted through radical new forms of clothing to disrupt, subvert, or resist conventional norms and beliefs of the time and in the process bring into bring new expressions of citizenship. I discuss the possibilities and pitfalls of making your research into three-dimensional arguments and reflect on the intimacy of making and wearing the clothes of others. 

Biography

Kat Jungnickel (Goldsmiths, University of London) is a Reader in Sociology, Director of Methods Lab and PI on the European Research Council–funded project Politics of Patents: Reimagining Citizenship via Clothing Inventions 1820-2020 (www.PoliticsofPatents.org). Together with a team of sewing social scientists she is exploring citizenship and changing socio-political issues by researching, reconstructing, and re-imagining lesser-known clothing inventions from patent archives. Recent publications include: (ed) Transmissions: critical tactics for making and communicating research (MIT Press 2020), Creative Practice Ethnographies (with Hjorth, Harris and Coombs, Rowman & Littlefield 2020) and Bikes and Bloomers: Victorian Women Inventors and their Extraordinary Cycle Wear (Goldsmiths Press 2018). 

Twitter: @KatJungnickel @POPInvention #BikesandBloomers #POliticsOfPatents

www.PoliticsofPatents.org
www.BikesandBloomers.com
www.KatJungnickel.com