My 50th birthday! I requested a cake – victoria sponge cake was duly drummed up. Very very tasty. Reminded myself of where we are and what we need to do to move our book series forward, by checking on the reviewers comments, and considering what I could do next to move it forward. Wrote the introduction to the digital storytelling & higher education journal article.
Tuesday 22 Nov
Great catch up on a book series proposal with MMU colleague. Really excited about where it’s headed. I am going to figure out the key topics and the backgrounds and relevance of our advisory editorial committee. A bit more writing on the digital storytelling paper, before getting it over to co-authors. Birthday dinner celebrations at the super tasty 1251. I knew it was the right place for a birthday when I was looking at the sparkling wine and it just arrived. Tah dah! The chef is James Cochran and oh my it was tasty. I would go back for sure.
Wednesday 23 Nov
My sister’s birthday! Had a catch up on the storytelling element of an environmental justice project and planned what I wanted to cover in a check in on our anti-oppression training on the same project. Had a writing check in with my old teaching team at MMU – we’re on the last strait of drafting an article together on our approach to teaching digital storytelling during the pandemic. Did a scurry of actions to connect with our student interns who are co-authors on the paper. In the afternoon I met up with a friend at Barbican for lunch, checked out the new curve exhibition, then headed to the gym and did another writing sprint. Wednesday evening had a therapy session, reflecting on how far I’ve come since I started and what next.
Thursday 24 Nov
Checked in with the anti-oppression trainers and prepped a writing tutorial group for my MA final project students a bit later in the day, which I really enjoyed. I ran it as a practice sharing session, which I found quite enjoyable as I love hearing about and discussing writing practices and what it takes to prepare to get writing. Briefly caught up on the Arts and AI Patterns in Practice research project, to see who else we might interview on the commissioner side of the fence. Our postdoc is just keeping it moving which is wonderful. We have a workshop coming up soon, up in Sheffield. I booked my ticket.
Friday 25 Nov
Mainly an admin day. Tied up a bunch of loose ends on grant contracts, finances and responding to meeting requests. My siblings arrived from Edinburgh and Athens and we went to Winter Wonderland before dinner at Morito in Hackney.
What I learned…
I like writing with other people – its so much easier to get stuff written knowing someone is going to read it and feedback and you are moving forward
Writing with colleagues is a great way to stay connected, especially when you move on from a job.
It was great to spend a day working away from home and to fit in the gym not too late in the day, gave a boost for a second writing sprint
It’s great to have time with friends and family to look forward to, especially going out and getting dressed up twice in one week.
Scheduling in writing times has worked out pretty well this week. And meant I said no to lots meetings. I learned this from Prof Rachel Oliver. It works.
Sketch of bell hooks book, ‘all about love, new visions’ with my black rimmed glasses lying folded on top.
This past couple of weeks have brought me great joy and personal satisfaction in my job as researcher and academic. It’s the culmination really, of being blessed to be in several constellations that are crafted from creative practice, community building and care.
First up, my very first PhD student, Holly Broadhurst (stripey jumper in picture below), is no longer a PhD student, she passed her viva, recently submitted this citizen science paper, and is now Dr Holly Broadhurst. Holly studied environmental DNA in the conservation of small mammals, and begins a post doctoral position in Jan 2024, with my old line manager at Salford Uni, Richard Birtles, and is on her own path to doing independent research, that is interdisciplinary and community engaged in nature.
9 smiling folks including students, researchers, project team and community partners around a dinner table, celebrating in a christmassy restaurant, drinks held aloft.
The team that I hired whilst at Reading Uni, Joyce and Matt, came together to organise and deliver a workshop with our partners, Earthwatch Europe and BlastFest, on ‘Storytelling for ecological justice across planetary boundaries‘ at the British Ecological Society Annual Conference. Our community partner, Anita Shervington of BlastFest gave the keynote for our session, celebrating her team’s work on ‘Birago Day’, which this year celebrated the science & storytelling of birds and plants within different environments and culture, and also gave a tribute to poet, Benjamin Zephaniah.
Early career researchers, Holly Broadhurst and Emmanuel Junior Zuza (who is now a lecturer) shared the story of their community engaged research practice in Essex and Malawi respectively, linked to being alumni of Earthwatch Europe’s Science Camp, run by Sarah Staunton Lamb. Emmanuel recently wrote a paper validating the role of indigenous knowledge of farmers in Malawi improving accuracy in climate suitability modelling.
The camp is open for folk to register interest to become part of the next cohort in May 2024. I am grateful to Hilary Geoghegan for bringing us all together.
Emmanuel Zuza pointing out our storytelling workshop in the British Ecological Society programme line up.
The workshop was attended by over 50+ ecologists who listened to stories, and then learned to craft their own, drawn from my experience of developing stories, from way back when I interned on the Royal Institution Xmas lectures, with my PhD supervisor Nancy Rothwell and exec producer, Caroline van den Brul, who wrote a book, Crack and Fizz, on the subject of getting scientists to craft and share their stories.
Immersive exhibit of invitingly tactile body organs, from Marcin Gawin’s ‘Hermaphrogenesis’, displayed before a screen of new configurations of body organs.
Just before I left for Belfast, students on the MA Virtual and Extended Realities course that I teach on had their final exhibition show. Curated and directed by programme lead, and amazing sound artist, Duncan Speakman, working with artist scholars, Tessa Ratuszynska and Naomi Smyth, this brought an amazing spectrum of XR, MR and AR experiences into the public realm. The works on show included machine learning installations, a motion tracked dance performance that produced creatures, and animated Nigerian folktales in VR and AR, augmented reality urban AI architecture and silicone organs exploring the possibility of rearranging even the most fixed systems, indicating that biology is all up for play and reconfiguration.
Tosin experiencing her African Folklore VR piece, Tales by Moonlight, dressed in a tortoise suit.
Seeing ideas, take shape, through several iterations, to the final show, was really joyful, and testament to the hard work of the teaching team and students. I love the innovations that have come from creative practice and community building on this programme. It often goes beyond giving students an education, and unlocks the possibilities of creative practice for developing individual identities within a pluriversal cultural context. It was truly beautiful and enjoyable to experience the show.
Augmented Liminality piece by Gareth Freathy exploring liminal space and the future of our cities via a handheld smartphone showing automatically generated images
I made a leap in 2016, to cross disciplinary divides, weaving my way from science and engineering, via geography and environmental science, to immersive experiences in arts and humanities, and I now get the joy of supervising PhD students with interests that span the arts, creative technology and the sciences. I leapt with a safety net of mentors who steered me in the right direction.
Ave, my PhD student in health has completed a series of virtual nature based explorations with older people living in care homes, and Lena and Cairi, my students that I supervise with the fabulous Mandy Rose, who brought me into UWE Bristol by hiring me, are considering indigenous knowledge and more than human aspects to non-economic loss and damage and enchanted nature connections, respectively. Two of my PhD students have released albums this year, including Iyun, my MMU PhD student who I saw recently on a visit to Manchester. Iyun is in his final year. Time flies! An ambition of mine is to bring all my PhD students across institutions and disciplines into constellation with one another. Planting that seed!
Me and Maria Angela Ferrario at the Sunflower pub in Belfast.
It was lovely to catch up with my ex-colleague and peer, Maria Angela Ferrario, who is now based in Belfast at Queens University and is one of the people who inspired me to get back onto a research path, during my time as knowledge exchange manager on a multidisciplinary research project, Catalyst. MAF planned a lovely evening in Belfast, going from pub to pub, encountering street art and architecture en route and a delicious wood fired pizza in the Sunflower pub. All the joys.
Finally, the worlds I am invested in are very, very close to meeting one another. I submitted a research bid to try and bridge that gap, the week before, with cultural partner, Pervasive Media Studios, with the backing of the Digital Cultures Research Centre and the Critical Race and Culture group at UWE of which I am a member. All of this has lent on the back of past partnership work with the Studio, and prior racial justice work, both prior to me starting to work at UWE, and during my time there. I had two magical days during bid writing, at the Studio, where I literally ran into everyone – Jo, Furaha, Martin, Amy, Melissa, Tony, Jon, Clare, who gave me words of encouragement, wisdom and practical advise to get the bid finished and magnificent, amazing support from Nick Triggs, who is a bid wizard, that meant it all made sense, across the university and to the wider world. And I, was blessed to catch up with Shawn Sobers, director of the Critical Race and Culture group, and a network of people, who I messaged who just said ‘yes’ we’re there for you, ‘we’ll get involved’. It is beautiful to see that Benjamin Z was a doctor of letters, from UWE, and Shawn wrote a tribute to him here.
Hopefully all of this is the beginning of a new path into exploring how collective consciousness materialises within subcultures of science and creative technology practice, but also an opportunity to rethink my writing practice, which is also I guess a re-think of who I am in the world. So, yes, I am a step closer to the research independence that I dreamed of, stepping away from tenure, as lecturer, to pursue research, how I want to do it, then stepping back into tenure, as Senior Lecturer and Associate Professor, and moving a step closer to uncovering an unknown creative desire, which feels really quite exciting, tangible and scary, as it perhaps should feel. When you write authentically, it changes you.
‘a hunger for truth and the dissenting voice and thinking freely’
– bell hooks
On Patterns in Practice, my research associate, Samborne is planning our next series of cross-sector dialogues for early next year, after delivering our first one in partner with the AI Fringe. Vic at PM Studio is gearing up to share the work of Craig Scott, our artist in residence in mid-January and his investigation into Improvised Human Machine Conversations – Instrumental Extensions and Amputations. Samborne is planning a podcast to accompany this work and a bunch of papers, and insight reports from the whole team, across the research are being published as I write this. It was lovely that Craig asked to see something of ‘the University’, and I invited him to come and interact with the students’ MA exhibit.
Last week Craig had a group of guitar players, trying out his autonomous guitar, and that was seriously joyous to witness. I really have Jo Lansdowne to thank for all of this kind of work materialising, out of an initial chat, early on and her seeing the resonances with the Studio’s work. There is magic that happens when your values resonate, through conversation, and, someone says ‘yes, let’s do it‘. It’s these kinds of conversations that gave me a lot of hope, authenticity and possibility, coming out of the pandemic, when rebuilding everything or delivering what was promised on grants felt impossible.
Craig Scott’s Improvised Human Machine Conversations – Instrumental Extensions and Amputations – an autonomous guitar, being played in Pervasive Media Studio.
I am super, super lucky to have landed on my feet, surrounded by great students, colleagues, artists, community and cultural partners. And of course blessed by my amazing life partner of 15 years+, for all her support, and art, culture and travel adventures we’ve had together. I don’t think the crossing from science into the arts world would have worked if not for our ongoing discussions and shared interests. It was fab also to make a dash together to manchester for my birthday, and to catch up with friends, Maya, Nancy, and Karen, and to embrace wearing a tiara to celebrate it.
My fabulous, partner, Caroline, dressed all in black, hands in pockets, smiling, at a gallery exhibit we went to last week.
Just recently I had the chance to catch up with my older sibling, Nnena who came down to London to see Madonna, and the next day we hung out and made an ice bear, and drank mulled wine, and chilled by a fire, which was a lot of fun. All this did not happen at once, as the bear would have melted. We really wanted to take the bear home, but anyway we have a picture. We made a good team.
A bear figure, in chipped ice, alongside the bear head made of ice that we carved out. We (me and my sibling, Nnena) are wearing white aprons and red gloves to protect us from the chisel.
I was lucky earlier in the year, to catch up with my mum and siblings at different points in the year, where we literally had a day together. Below, is me with my brother and mum in Copenhagen.
I also loved this moment (below) with my younger sibling, Ellen (Thomas’ twin) and her family and friends in London at David Hockney’s exhibition. David Hockney’s paintings were a big part of our household culture growing up (and my photography and drawing practices) so it was fun to see Ellen’s kids introduced to his work. The rest of the day was spent walking around King’s Cross’ nature park, watching cartoons on a big screen by the canal and my nephews getting soaking wet running through the water fountains.
And during the summer, my niece, Ama, came to stay with us when she worked at Wimbledon. She’s twenty this year and it’s her last year at uni studying law.
Ama and Caroline heads together, in a local woodland.
There are folks behind the scenes that I am grateful to – my mentor, Simon, who did something, truly remarkable this year for me, that allows my path to research independence to continue, and overturned a systemic barrier of equity. I will work hard to bring this generous gesture into play for others.
And also my coach, Anne-Marie, and my therapist, Sophie, who have all stretched me to learn from everything that’s happened and to carve out a path that works for me within the existing hegemony. To be kind and caring towards myself and not too judgmental, but also to set clear boundaries, so that I can keep going, rest and move on. There has been a lot I have had to say no to this past year, and they taught me that saying ‘no’ is self-care. I am grateful for being taught that. I am also grateful for the admin support of our research coordinator, Amy, I have never had that support before and it makes research a lot easier and more enjoyable.
Looking forward to winding down now, and learning everything I can from the past year. It began with thinking what I am grateful for, ie all of the above. Between now and new year, I’ll be considering what my coach, Anne Marie Crowthers, has encouraged me to consider, to learn, from the year that’s passed, in addition to what I am grateful for: –
Lessons learned, what went well, and less so
Anything I’d like to apologise for. Anything I’d like to forgive.
Anything I’d have liked to have said to someone that I didn’t. Perhaps also anything I’d like to have done that I didn’t.
Anything I’d like to leave behind as 2023 passes.
One thing I can share…
One of the things that I’d really like to transform, to compost into joy, love and appreciation is the deep loss I felt at the death of bell hooks. She died in 2021 and I am still not over it – she gave me, the world, so much. Her book on ‘teaching to transgress: education as the practice of freedom‘ saw me through the pandemic, and navigating tough moments of intercultural conflict post-pandemic. I felt a sense of joy, working on and publishing a paper on ‘Digital Storytelling and Community Building in a Crisis‘ from the teaching team that I was part of during the pandemic. One of the joys of transformative academic work is that it can carry you beyond institutional borders and disciplinary boundaries.
One joy in that regard was to finally meet my colleague, Lisa, in person in Manchester this year (we had to postpone an earlier meeting). We weathered the pandemic online, and rocked designing and teaching two modules together. It involved making a conversational podcast every week, sharing music, and laughing a lot.
On the bell hooks front, I look forward to what this new readings of her work will transform into. And of course, I know from her work, that there is ‘no love without justice‘, so to love and to justice \o/.
Thank you bell, thank you. I never got to say that, I somehow imagined you’d be here forever. And, in a way, I guess, you are, but I took that for granted. I love how you talked about yourself in the third person, I am thinking about that. And your distinction between care and love, and the genius of bell hooks when writing about love and diverse ways of knowing.
Bell hooks TV interview
Laverne Cox, actor, talking to bell hooks on stage.
Wishing everyone seasons greetings and a very happy new year.
Love is a revolutionary act that calls for another way of living.
A picture of two giant yellow sunflowers, sunning themselves in a blue sky.
I have lost track of week notes, but here’s some good news. The world, mine and UWE Bristol at least, officially has an Associate Professor in Immersive Media and that person is me.
Probation review meetings can make people very nervous, including me. Here’s how I approached mine.
I blocked out and scheduled in time 2 weeks in advance of the meeting to work on the paperwork – this includes filling out all your actions progress against objectives. Ideally one would have been filling these out as you go along, but well I have this blog which helped!
I took a short break before the probation meeting so I would be relaxed.
This was a very good idea because on my return I realised that I don’t like talking about myself and bigging myself up, so I had the idea to reach out to colleagues I have worked with in some capacity to provide feedback – keep doing, stop doing, improve – for research, teaching and knowledge exchange.
It was nerve wracking to do that, but the feedback that came back was really heartening and better than anything I would have come up with. People noticed things I would not have thought to say. If I were to do this again, I would give people a bit more notice. They had 3 days.
This meant I went into the meeting with the voices of people who made me feel my work was meaningful, and this really mattered a lot to me. More perhaps than I had realised.
After the probation review I went to a cafe and cried a bit. I think there is something about academic performance that is deeply wrapped up in being able to economically survive in the world.
Anyway I survived, and then celebrated with my partner, and our two cats who are really nonplussed, and wondering where their dinner is, thanks very much.
This week we publicised this great artist residency opportunity for an artist to respond to the findings of the Patterns in Practice research project. It is being hosted by the fabulous Pervasive Media Studios in Watershed, and I am pretty chuffed about that.
Here are some highlights, that popped out around sitting in the garden, chilling with the cats and looking out into the grass, wild flowers and bee watching as they came out to drink all the nectar. I also put some more food out for the birds and enjoyed two sessions of Chi Kung, one online and one at a local park, with the new meadow behind us, and sky above us. I love these sessions as they are a way to exercise, that requires to your body. And we often do the Thursday session with feet nestled in the grass and above us, slow moving clouds and the occasional swift circling and screeching. We went for a couple of walks one in a nearby cemetery that doubles as a woodland. One spot that had a barrier up, had now completely overgrown it. Just shows what can happen when the humans are kept at bay.
Monday
Great discussions with EarthWatch science camps and thinking about the programme and the touchpoints we can bring from storytelling linked to developing values, research leadership and interdisciplinary cohort identity. It’s great to see we are attracting third sector participants which will shift the programme into a transdisciplinary space. It’s pretty exciting that a couple of alumni are publishing papers with methodological and epistemological innovations to environmental research culture. Am currently reviewing them pre-submission to journals.
Tuesday
A day of supervisions on our city campus – first PhD and then MA as part of the storylab week where students are working in groups on client briefs for Watershed and MShed which sit on the Harbourside. I really love this part of my job, to see where our students are coming from and listening to them 1 to 1, asking questions and offering perspectives to enable them to transgress borders and boundaries, suspend beliefs. One of my students, Cairi Jacks shared the album she recently released, Moss Music. I feel so lucky to work with creative and talented people, getting to grips with the challenges we face as a society, and addressing them on a personal, cultural level. It’s why I moved from science into art, to pay attention to forms of expression that embrace the energies and dichotomies and to find common ground.
Wednesday
Exploration began on a new commission – spent the afternoon engaging with bat recordings brought into human hearing range with machine learning applications. Our bat researcher, Martha is from Mexico and we learned that that bats in Spanish is ‘murcielago’.
Thursday
An email dropped into my inbox to say the Digital storytelling paper is accepted with minor revisions for an online HE journal. The full title is:
‘Digital storytelling: a relational pedagogic approach to rebuilding places for creativity, equity and community building in a crisis’.
I am thrilled about it, as so much work went into it, including two undergraduate student placements and represents a kind of integration of knowledge from across various aspects of research, teaching and community engagement. There is a quote they wanted taken out, a reference to consider that expands on the main premise, consistency around the quotes and enlarging the figure text. I can see a couple of style things too but apart from that its all good. I also reviewed and gave feedback on the digital storytelling film sharing the science camp cohorts experience of the March camp.
Friday
I focused on reviewing my PhD students’ paper and preparing to write a paper coming out of the arts case on Patterns in practice. News came of an unsuccessful bid, which is always hard, as so much effort and energy has gone into it. It was a big collaborative bid. Somewhere else in other parts of the country champagne will be popping. And that’s the nature of the funding game. These days I like to think it will come back around eventually. Before the day was out I made a list of reading, events and related content to check out so it doesn’t drift into the ether.
I notice that weeknotes have quickly become month notes! I think that’s okay. There have been several bank holidays this month. I think I arrived back just after one following a week in Madrid. Just as one bid had gone in, another two swirled into action. If you are not careful, the swirling knocks you and your routine off your feet. The swirling is a kind of jostling through different parts of an organisation and also an ecosystem as it aligns around which organisation will lead a bid, and who will partner. For me, it is important to think beyond the swirling, towards values and complimentarity around current rhythms and cycles of my own research, and from there, different and appropriate ways in which to contribute. There are more ways to contribute to a bid, than being the lead, as perhaps research support staff, who are never named on bids, can attest.
At the moment I am in the legacy phase of several funded bids, which requires publications, and telling stories about the research through conference presentations, panels and so on, in order to learn and share learning from the research. It can also mean developing new ways of working or integrating learning into practice through training or developing training. It often means report writing. I see this phase as a kind of composting, stewing over old and new stuff to see what compositions might emerge. It’s quite good to do this in conjunction with writing a private research journal, alongside evaluation materials, which can be returned to.
I have enjoyed documenting my partner journey with Tekiu, on a research project, alongside coaching and mentoring. It has helped remind me of where the learning is, and some of the brave decisions I made along the way, what I would do differently in future and what my contributions were as a research leader.
I have been enjoying mentoring postgraduates looking for their next jobs, and thinking about what a supportive PhD experience can be. It’s a lot easier to do this kind of work, as Associate Professor, than as Senior Lecturer. We have begun recruiting editors to our new book series, a couple of papers got submitted, presentations got edited, the next round of EarthWatch’s Science camp has been recruiting for a new intake of early career researchers.
I think my biggest learning this month has been the power of respectfully saying no, so that I can stay on track, and the possibilities that then open up as a result.
Image from Mickey Mouse was a Scorpio (2016) by Arthur Jafa.
It’s been a week where most of the things that are meant to happen in my job have been happening…
Supervising PhD students. Excitingly I have a new PhD student, Lena Dobrowolska – I am co-supervising with Prof Mandy Rose. Her project is ‘Capturing “NELD” together – co-creating an anticolonial documentary toolkit for reflecting non-economic loss and damage resulting from the climate crisis.‘
Writing a few paragraphs for a book chapter
Moving our book series closer to the outside world
Attending a seminar on the social benefits of embodiment
Prepping for a grant opportunity
Waiting on news about a grant submission
Securing funding for hosting a cohort of fellows
Diving into the beginnings of a new art piece
Organising a sharing event from two previous research projects
I managed to get to a QiJong online session first thing Monday, which set me up for the week, in terms of not wanting to be sat down all day. It was on Zoom. Not quite the same experience as QiJong in the park, but I really enjoyed the session. Gradually waking up and opening up the whole body before slowly, steadily, purposefully walking. It’s a lot more complex than that of course.
A highlight was finding out where psychology experiments, embodiment and VR are crossing over, and the opportunity for culture studies and black studies to make critical interventions within that space. And also to meet a couple of people who had been involved in a community-university partnership for 19 years!
I didn’t make it to the gym, but had a few walks in the sunshine this week and scattered sunflower seeds around the garden in the hope they might grow.
Image from movie, 5 devils: 5 year old kid, with afro hair, dressed in red dungerees, a pink shirt and pink glasses.
I was preparing to start marking this week. I think I learned some good practices at MMU, around preparation for marking, and the marking team getting on the same page. I am always open to learning from and aligning with the programme lead’s approach, as they have to do the hard work of compiling all of the marks together. A meeting is always useful before beginning to mark, to be clear about the approach, structure, marking criteria and where to place the feedback. We agreed that the feedback needs to be encouraging and motivating, as well as offering specific tips on how to improve if the learning outcomes are not met. I always think the structure of the marking is important, as it can align students to the learning outcomes they are aiming for across a submitted piece of work (and can make it easier to get into the flow of marking). When you organise your marking, and have plenty of time to do it, then I find I enjoy reading and reviewing students work. I enjoy encountering different kinds of assignment brief. This one asks students to write up a concept for a project, mocking it up, writing a funding proposal and then doing a critical essay to review what they presented. It’s a clever brief as it helps to see where students will need more support to choose their potential direction of travel on the MA, which splits into a practical pathway or a theoretical path.
This year, I have gotten pretty good at allocating time to get specific tasks done, like reviewing grants or doing grant admin, as it can drag on otherwise, but also those kinds of tasks take you into a different kind of headspace, than required for writing. I am also providing lots of space between meetings, so I am not sat down all day. Now the sun is out, its great to go for a walk everyday.
On the Patterns in Practice project I am preparing to programme some dialogues. This is something I have a lot of experience of facilitating in practice, although it has been a while. I am looking at how I can partner with other projects, to bring different networks of practitioners together, to enhance the impact of the work, which will also make it enjoyable and although initially hard work as you have to really plan ahead for it. It has been useful external examining a course that has assignment briefs that include students planning a dialogue, this kind of brief helps to bring theory and practice into conversation with one another. So this week I had a brief chat with Professor Helen Kennedy leads on the Digital Good Network to see what synergies there might be for collaboration in the future, and what plans they have for public engagement and impact. These research network projects, are really good for early career researchers to get a funded project under their belt and to build interdisciplinary teams around a problem, that might have multiple solutions as well as to network between institutions. When I was on a fellowship, I worked on two of these projects, Everyday Growing Cultures, and IT as a Utility and they were the opportunity for me to weave storytelling into and between research projects, to enhance impact, by weaving between people, locations and public participation. The project websites are long disappeared, but the films we made about the projects, like Everyday Growing Futures, and The Social Life of IT, are still available and tell the story of the research and at the same time, are good memories of spending time in allotments, going for walks, and climbing a mountain with rescue dogs! Filmmaking and research can offer opportunities to enter different everyday worlds. You have to enter and leave them with care.
Often projects are funded, and then they come to and end, and begin to think about impact, where actually, building in impact activities that bridge projects can be a really impactful way to ensure the legacy of research lives on. These kinds of legacies, can include values and friendships that endure beyond the research itself. I tried to write about this some time ago. I first saw this introduced in the Catalyst project in Lancaster, where we’d have a celebration event, inviting new project teams to connect with projects that were finishing. The looseness around a new project forming and one ending is the key to opening up a space for dialogue. You have to pick the right moment to bring them together.
I was running another project part-time alongside this Catalyst, and as a consequence the networks and assets of the two projects and began criss-crossing. Festivals or public programmes at museums, can be a great way to bring the criss-crossing of people, disciplines, sectors, and public audiences together to contribute to or become immersed in creative research outputs, but also it can be an opportunity for researchers to culturally transform their thinking outside of academia, without the constraints of academic language, and spaces, and to take their research in new directions.
Back to the week in hand, and I had two enjoyable days at a conference, the New Futures for Creative Economies conference at The Watershed. A highlight for me was having a cup of tea and chat with Professor Angela McRobbie, after her keynote speech on the second day, which gave us a succinct historical trip through how universities have ended up where we are, linked and complicit in the neoliberal agenda, and the role of the professionalisation of creativity as part of that. It was a bold and much welcomed critique. New labour and Tony Blair, did not get off lightly, as a remixed version of Thatcherism. I got a real sense of these key moments when you can choose to invest and align your power. You cannot sit on the fence.
I also invited a team member from the Engaging Environments project to come along to the conference, as they will be thinking through ways to bring people together to learn, but also for them to get a sense of where and how my work is situated, within a cultural centre. I also met another colleague for lunch on day two of the conference, and also got to catch up with our project manager, via phone, who has returned from maternity leave. We pretty much led Engaging Environments together through the pandemic.
In between conference days I went to the movies. I saw the film ‘5 devils‘, a psychodrama/ science fiction movie from French director, Léa Mysius. It’s an intriguing and intense movie, that feels like it is trying to get closer to the considering how different versions of the future, co-exist in the present, if only we choose to notice. Cleverly constructed, it plays with time, queering reality, and notions of family and love not fully realised, which is a powerful force for societal change.
I had a great chat with a research team from Oxford including researchers at Oxford Brookes, who have set up ways in which local communities come and teach on their arts and humanities programmes, mobilising students to get involved in the black communities dream of finding a cultural home and community space in Oxford. We heard a very different story about Oxford. 29% of Oxford’s residents are from a black or ethnic minority, which is higher than you might imagine. The panel told a story of social apartheid, that went beyond who gets to go to Oxford University, and instead, who gets to live where, and who gets access to social spaces. It was eye opening to learn about these disparities, and of course this team, where not shy, in articulating the Universities role in upholding the status quo.
It was all good food for thought in how I need to practice research and set things up to work orientated from the values of equity and social justice. Sometimes, the best place for this to happen is outside of the university. Research is really about how you walk different futures into being. It requires careful foundations to break and re-articulate the status quo. I have a quiet sense of what is possible and how to bring it about but recognise it can go in multiple directions.
My weeknotes are crumbling into a blur, both structure and time wise (I am writing this, in the middle of the following week) and I am thinking that is okay.
As strikes continued in France, solidarities are forming, with young people joining the protest. President Macron, cancelled King Charles III first state visit as Monarch. A friend noticed a new poster for new Uk government alert system, through which people will receive a message to their mobile phone. It will be tested nationwide on the 23rd April. Strikes continued in the UK for the first couple of days.
This week I taught storytelling techniques to environmental scientists, spanning MSc, PhD and post doctoral study, at a science camp in Oxford. The Sciencecamp is run by NGO, EarthWatch, and originally supported as part of a research project, Engaging Environments. There is something tangibly transformative with this generation of early career environmental scientists. Their stories, cross-disciplines and geographic boundaries, and their desire for community building is palpable. last year’s cohort, including one of my PhD students, came back to share their stories and journeys to doing community-engaged research.
I checked in with the new programme lead on the MA in VR and XR, as I am second marker on a module, and its always good to get one’s head around the process, as every institution does things differently, the key is consistency. The week ended with a workshop focused on ‘netzero and values’ on a project scoping how the UK research community can achieve netzero. I like this community, they are working across disciplines, inviting in non-science disciplines, which then, like the science camp, becomes a refreshing collective endeavour.
The week ended exquisitely, seeing composer, vocalist and performer, Holland Andrews open the show for and perform in Christina Vantzou’s ensemble. Their work is enthused with more-than-human themes, building a sonic landscape gradually. My partner booked the tickets. It was my partner’s birthday this week, so I arranged a surprise visit to do ‘axeing’ on the weekend with a group of friends. Bullseye!
The perception of time is a funny thing. The week seems to have started quickly, slowed down, and then ramped up and disappeared. Most of this week (and part of next week) is a strike week for many, including within Universities. Not everyone can strike, but solidarity can be shown through contributions to the strike fund.
On Monday I was catching up on ‘Patterns in Practice‘, a research project focused on values, beliefs and emotions surrounding different cultures of machine learning practice. My role here is concerned with the arts, and arts practice, and I caught up with the postdoc doing the qualitative interviews with practitioners, who was planning a focus group to discuss in more depth the emerging insights. On Tuesday we had an all team meeting, to catch up on various aspects of the project. It is always great to catch up across the research team – we have had quite a few abstracts and paper accepted, for our work to be presented at various conferences, with different disciplinary perspectives, and we are planning for dialogue events between practitioners and the key public audiences, to share insights from the work.
Monday evening I was invited to see, ‘Finite: The Climate of Change‘, a film focused on activists living in protest camps in Germany and the UK, resisting corporate destruction of an ancient forest, and rural landscapes and wildlife from plans to create an opencast coalmine, respectively. The film articulates the frustrating irony of politicians talking about achieving netzero carbon emissions by transitioning to clean energy sources and protecting wildlife on the one hand at summits like COP, and yet on the other hand protecting the financial interests and profit margins of companies extracting fossil fuels, that pollutes the atmosphere, destroys wildlife and affects the wellbeing of local communities.
The German activists portrayed in the film built an intricate network of treehouses within the forest, from which to intertwine their own lives with the life of the forest, and of course both come under threat, as, spoiler alert, they face violent eviction by the police. One protestor, attached by a rope to the trees, shouts at the incoming police force, ‘are you just going to say in the future that you just followed orders?‘.
To make the film, director Rich Felgate, an activist, as well as a filmmaker, lived in and amongst the protestors to make the film, but also crowdsourced the funding. There was a fleeting reference in the film to the fact that the UK and Germany’s failure to mitigate against and reduce carbon dioxide emissions impacts the lives of communities at the frontline of climate change as a legacy of colonialism and industrialisation. Yet the film failed to make the narrative link (unless I fell asleep in these parts) to the struggles of indigenous communities protecting forests or campaigning against oil discoveries that impact and erase indigenous people, such as the Ogoni people. Those kinds of connections, could not only have opened up the film to non-white audiences, who have been struggling for decades and centuries against brutal imperial forces, but also importantly, could have forged solidarity with international social movements. It was left to the panel to attempt to articulate this, and to be fair, it took up most of the discussion, until we were kicked out to make room for another film screening.
The film gives an insight into the strategies and tactics of both movements in the UK and Germany, and how they make use of environmental laws, to protect endangered species like the great crested newt (see pic above) whose habitats are protected by law. The people in the film were handling the creature, which I am not sure was such a good idea.
Tuesday I was in Bristol for a workshop at Pervasive Media Studios, on Bristol’s Harbourside to create a desire and conjure up imaginings of alternative technologies to the ‘metaverse’, an integrated network of virtual worlds, a concept that has evolved from a dystopian world within a science fiction novel, and co-opted by Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook cum Meta.
I also had a couple of meetings with PhD students, not my own, but who had reached out to get my perspectives on coloniality and intersectionality within higher education. I took the opportunity to revisit Patricia Hill Collins’ Black Feminist Thought on the train to bring these perspectives in conversation with one another, but perhaps from a UK perspective, there are more relevant black British academics for consideration, alongside the lived experiences of politically black academics in the UK. It’s way too long to talk about that here, but scholars like Deborah Gabrielle, Nicola Rollock, Sara Ahmed, Jason Arday, Remi Joseph Salisbury and Azeezat Johnson cover this ground.
The rest of the week was pretty quiet as folks are striking across the UK, including within Universities. It is worth noting the strikes and protests in Paris, as people took to the street and withdrew their labour in light of President Macron pushing a bill through parliament, without a vote, to raise pension age from 62 to 64 in France.
There is a deep connection threading through much that I witnessed last week, linked to the ramping up of economic productivity post-pandemic, and as part of that a failure to engage people in the kinds of futures we might desire to have, in favour of automated protection of certain values and beliefs.
Asad Rehman (War on Want) one of the panellists at the discussion following the screening of ‘Finite’, summed it up best in saying that neoliberalism robs us of the capacity to imagine the futures we need and that we need to ‘increase the opportunity to reimagine‘ outside of the current status quo. The current status quo is a kind of automation in a sense, it represents a structural entrenchment, tying our futures to a deeply undesirable past.
It is in this space of reimagining, but also surfacing and critiquing the status quo, and considering alternatives, that my work sits. Carving out that space is currently steeped in the joys of administration.
Akkkk, I am failing my week notes – with no weeknotes for February and a summary for January, and none for the first week of March. Weeknotes are becoming month notes. Perhaps such is the way.
This week was a teaching week, so Monday I gave a research informed lecture and facilitated group responses from students to my research agenda, Post Carbon Immersive Futures on the MA in VR and XR at UWE Bristol. It was super cool in this same week, that myself and colleagues signed a contract with Emerald Press, for a book series, so I can work on a book proposal of the same title. Grateful for amazing opportunities and collaborations.
In the lecture, I loved talking about the needs to consider the intersections within planetary boundaries, the limits of climate modelling and the collective and imaginative shift required for us to shift as a society from linearity to circularity, in terms of media, economies and time. But also the problem of netzero and its decarbonising frame, which needs to shift to consider life thriving in all its possibilities. The students are amazing, they hadn’t for the most part heard of or read about the science of climate change, but understood the anti-colonial stance we needed to take. It makes me feel good to have crossed the disciplinary boundaries from science into the arts to be here to say ‘okay we are going to learn a bit of maths, chemistry, physics and biology today, and you are going to mix it up with your arts practice and collective imaginings‘. That was the dream, when I started a Wellcome Engagement Fellowship in 2013, and I am living it, 10 years later. Amazing.
I was lucky enough the week before to visit Copenhagen, for my siblings birthday celebrations, and in the same visit to experience CopenHill, which arguably is an example of a Post Carbon Future experience, which could be used as an example in my lecture.
Whilst I haven’t done much writing this week, lots of previous writing of conference abstracts has paid off, with abstracts accepted for MeCCSA‘s annual conference which will be in Glasgow in September, to share insights from the arts case of Patterns in Practice research project. We also managed the week before to submit a paper on Generative AI and arts practice for a CHI workshop. Collaborative working works.
I’ve done a lot of research admin this week, and last, to get my grants onto our internal system, Worktribe, which we thankfully also used at MMU. So, soon, I can begin recruiting postdoctoral researchers. I am really feeling what we identified in our paper, that black academics, often don’t get enough money on grants to recruit postdocs, which means less research gets done. So I am glad to have advocated to for budgets to recruit postdocs on my grants. All the EDI research I did with good peeps (for free btw), is paying off. If you want to change the ecosystem, sometimes you have to put that work in to understand what is going on here, and then you try and do better.
I also finished up a piece of work on EDI and PhDs, with the UWE EDI data folk, to look at the gaps for black and minoritised researchers, so I know where the bar is set and how I can raise it.
I woke up this week feeling very thankful, I met up with some friends this week who left academia, so I end the week on a humble note knowing how lucky I am, but also aware of how much more can be done to improve it.
It’s stopped snowing, so Friday ends with a visit to an exhibition on Post Carbon Futures, in another discipline, and a much overdue visit to the gym!
January is a bit of a blur, after catching COVID early in the new year. It was that space in between Christmas and New Year. I’d had a booster in November, in anticipation of this probably happening. I had quite a queer response – I lost my sense of smell gradually, and surprisingly all my perimenopausal aches and pains lifted. My sense of smell has now returned, but not the pains. I am not complaining! I checked the internet, and this seems to be a needle in a haystack case, usually COVID19 increases peri/ menopausal or chronic pains. I had a couple of days of wanting to bottle my blood for medical science to tap it for antibodies or similar, that could provide the backbone for generating ‘natural’ pain killers, that could be of use to drug addicts, and folks with chronic pain. The problem with science, is that it rarely looks at n=1 or n=3, outliers rarely make it into the literature. An n=1 is usually a subpopulation. Until I find others, that’s it I guess.
Long story short – January, I worked super slowly, cautiously and collaboratively. Consequently a grant bid with colleagues was prepared, I prepared for my first external examiner board meeting on a Scottish online MSc, a series of conference abstracts were crafted for the Patterns in Practice project, and I met a new potential PhD student, who recently submitted their proposal.
What I learned:-
I am not an island, folks can and are supportive, if and when you need support.
Sleep and listening to your body is so important.
Meditation has been a constant through the pandemic, long may it continue.
Putting on an out of office to prioritise was a great idea, it meant I could stop worrying about getting back to people.
I have a bit of a bottle neck around this week, and next, having pushed a lot of things into new year.
A little writing happened, but I am behind and need to prioritise it.
The book series proposal got accepted \o/
Prepping for things like probation review, takes 7-10 days to be in the right headspace for it.
Whilst I am still fascinated by the idea that a virus can affect cognition, the senses and felt like menopausal symptoms, no-one else in my circles is very interested such things. What role do oestrogen and progesterone play in protecting folk from COVID19?
Studies show that high oestrogen levels indicate a lower risk of severe symptoms and death
Oestrogen enhances the local immune response in the nose and upper respiratory tract
It triggers a local immune response that reduces the viral load
Progesterone has a combined effect with oestrogen, enhancing oestrogens actions.
Many of the studies consider biological sex rather than gender identity. Medical science has a cucked up long way to go. Studies exist on ‘women’ on HRT and the reduced risk of mortality from COVID19, but some studies considering trans perspectives, are more nuanced, taking into account structural factors – socioeconomic status, job, incarceration, transphobic treatment within hospitals.
It is never as simple as thinking about hormones alone, as public health data collection presents a binary model of biological sex, which erases trans and non-binary folk.
I remember why I am in the arts and humanities and not in biology.
everyoneandeverything 