Thursday 22nd of June

5.30pm - 7pm

The Studio

SGSAH is hosting its annual Doctoral Research Showcase to illustrate the innovative research being undertaken by arts & humanities doctoral researchers across Scotland. All are welcome to attend.

The exhibitors are Adam Nasser Benmakhlouf, Jenny Elliott, Storm Greenwood, Yujia Jin, Mhari McMullan and Sonali Misra. Find out more below.

Meet the Exhibitors 

Adam Nasser Benmakhlouf (University of Dundee)

Communal Words: How can the art institution support non-normative art writing?

Adam Nasser Benmakhlouf (they/them) is an artist and writer based in Glasgow and Dundee. At the basis of Benmakhlouf's showcase is a play developed during their PhD, titled Magenta Velour Glove. This writing develops Benmakhlouf's primary research thematics, which consider the productive possibilities and the challenges of informalised work practices within environments of cultural production. This research spans both the institutional and the para-institutional settings. Benmakhlouf looks in particular to the traditions and lineages of queer collectivity, seeing the intersectional relevance of these methods to decolonial and class struggles.

Benmakhlouf uses the play format to draw out the interpersonal, psychic and social dynamics of working together within lateral power structures and using anarchic methods. We meet two queer art workers, who are the sole attendees of a meeting of S.A.W.S. (Scottish Art Worker Solidarity). The one act play follows in real time their interactions, and particularly the pernicious power dynamics that can occur in nonhierarchical working structures. Ultimately, the tyranny of structurelesness causes a series of ruptures. The meeting crumbles. However, the experimental format of the play's presentation presents an alternative optimistic choreography of collaboration, as the actor and musicians sensitively negotiate a delicate improvisation together.

Jenny Elliott (University of Edinburgh)

Policy, process, practice: Practitioner-reported barriers and opportunities for realising greener, healthier UK public spaces at greater speed, scale and quality

Jenny Elliott (she/her) is an award-winning Chartered Landscape Architect and Urban Designer. Jenny is a strong advocate for design-led, collaborative and data-driven place-based approaches to reimagine and improve our cities for health, well-being, user experience and environmental sustainability. Her expertise sits at the intersection of urban design, placemaking, public space and user research, and visual communication (graphic design, illustration, photography).

Jenny’s PhD research explores the design, planning and decision-making experiences of built environment professionals that ultimately lead to the reality of public realm places we see when we look out our windows or move around the city. The research uses design thinking and systems thinking approaches to identify key barriers to realising public spaces that maximise public health and environmental outcomes in practice and how these challenges might be addressed.

Jenny Elliott’s PhD research at the University of Edinburgh is funded by the Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities, in collaboration with industry partner Connected Places Catapult.

Storm Greenwood (The Glasgow School of Art)

Botanical Art / Citation / Gifting: Sites of Irresolvable Complexity

Storm Greenwood (she/her) is a queer artist-scholar and AHRC-funded doctoral candidate pursuing her PhD at the intersection of Fine Art, Plant Humanities and Queer Decolonial Feminist Studies at Glasgow School of Art. Her research praxis includes writing, painting and embroidery. She is currently working on a series of illuminated manuscripts featuring botanical paintings entangled with citations from queer (and) decolonial (and) feminist texts. Through an accumulation of scholarly and artistic work, Storm's thesis proposes flowers as ideal companions in asking complex questions about how to live with the capitalist heteropatriarchal colonial legacy of the British Empire. One strand of Storm's work is her 'devotional citation' praxis in which she gifts artworks featuring citations from scholarly texts back to the scholars who wrote them. Storm has made gift artworks for scholars such as Jennifer C. Nash, Sarah Jane Cervenak, Amber Jamilla Musser, Ashon T. Crawley and Emma Dabiri.

Yujia Jin (University of Glasgow)

Representations of the Italian Renaissance in the 21st Century: the Borgia and Medici Families stories on the small screen

Yujia Jin (she/her) is a PhD candidate in comparative literature at the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Glasgow. Her doctoral research is an interdisciplinary study of the representation of the Italian Renaissance in the twenty-first century. She is interested in the interplay between historical narratives and media characteristics, especially the family saga as a transmedia genre in historical narrative and the ways in which stories of Borgia and Medici history are told on the small screen. This research views the narratives of these two Renaissance families presented on television and in video games as a heteroglossic phenomenon and deconstructs these narratives via a comparative lens of different media and historical families. The research examines how the Italian Renaissance is consumed in contemporary culture and how the representation of this historical period echoes current popular aesthetic values. In addition to her PhD research, Yujia works part-time as a scriptwriter.

Mhari McMullan (The Glasgow School of Art)

Patterning Paisley: Museum retail and strategies for commercialising a historic textile collection through contemporary textile practice

Mhari McMullan (she/her) is a textile designer, researcher and writer whose work stems from a preoccupation with pattern. She works across exhibitions, retail and education in craft and design. Mhari graduated from Central St Martins in 2003 and relocated to Glasgow in 2007, where she opened Welcome Home in 2009. She was co-curator of Early Learning, and she was also a founding director of Collect Scotland CIC.

Mhari is currently in her third year of undertaking a partnership PhD with Paisley Museum at Glasgow School of Art. Her research centres on strategies for recontextualising a historic textile collection through contemporary textile design practice. Using a case study approach, she is investigating commercial, creative and pedagogical practice linked to the archival holdings of textile collections. This research showcase will share her own textile designs recently created in response to Paisley Museum’s Shawl Collection.

Sonali Misra (University of Stirling)

British Trade Publishing and India in the 21^st Century: Cartelisation and its Postcolonial Impact

Sonali Misra (she/her) is a recipient of the University of Stirling’s Faculty of Arts and Humanities studentship. Her research, ‘British Publishing and India in the 21st Century: Cartelisation and its Impact on Sociocultural Identity', was birthed from her experience of working in the Indian publishing industry at Scholastic and Hachette in editorial and product (sales) roles. In her research, Sonali examines the role that Commonwealth rights and multinationalisation play in the cartelisation of English-language trade publishing. Her primary research method is semi-structured interviews with elite participants in British and Indian publishing, such as CEOs/MDs, Sales Directors and Publishers at Big-5 and smaller independent firms, along with literary agents. Sonali is the Co-founder of The Selkie Publications CIC, which promotes and publishes minoritised voices, and led the Society of Young Publishers (SYP) Scotland for two years as its Co-chair. Sonali is the author of a nonfiction book (21 Fantastic Failures, 2020) and short stories and personal essays that have appeared in Scottish, Canadian and Indian anthologies. Her commissioned essay was added to The National Library of Scotland’s archives and shortlisted for the Anne Brown Prize. In 2022, she was chosen for Gothenburg’s UNESCO City of Literature writing residency and scholarship.
www.sonalimisra.com

Verónica Andrea Márquez Moreno (University of Edinburgh)

Your Return was our Exile: 50 years, we still remember

Veronica (she/her) is researching the Chilean bilingual political exiled children discourse: how Spanish, the Chilean language, culture, and dictatorship traumas in the discourse narrative have been inherited intergenerationally. Her research background is in applied linguistics, which is the perspective she brings into the critical analysis of spoken discourse in the memory studies for the program on Hispanic Culture. Veronica has a cross-disciplinary view for a better understanding of her research’s historical density that lies behind the discourse of her subjects. Therefore, one part of her research is to analyse Arpilleras through multimodal discourse. It is a political art that tells the story of the events that happened in the recent past to visualise the brutality of the Chilean civil -military dictatorship (1973-1990). Through the intramodality approach and critical discourse analysis, her research looks at how the exiled daughters’ memories of living in banishment and their return are represented in the Arpilleras. The presentation of this research contributes to a better understanding of the state of political exile from the perspective of the children – adults now- which invites us to reflect on and respect the reality of events experienced by the victims.

Click here to register

First published: 11 May 2023