Across CHS 2019

Across CHS 2019 College Wide Symposia Week

Monday 4 February, 10.30am – 4pm

Convened by Dr Adam Kaasa, Dr Gareth Polmeer and Dr Matthew Wraith

An afterlife is more than a life after death. The transformations of time in the digital age and of the remediated object, of space and energy in the archive and bio-data, and of consciousness with artificial intelligence and techno-dreams bring with them a shift in the future lives and afterlives of meaning. Afterlives moves from exhumation to politics, from the death of buildings to the comeback, from the transient to the extended future. Together we reflect on futures, pasts, and all the in between: the afterlives we live and the lives after now.

Carnival and Counter-Culture – Trouble and Fun at the Music Festival
Thursday 7 February, 10am – 5pm

Convened by Jo Pickering

The aim of this Across CHS event is to examine UK festival culture through the twin lenses of trouble and fun, pursuing the counter-cultural as it teeters between the boundaries of criminality and creative resistance. There will be a focus in particular on Glastonbury festival and the area originating as an illegal add-on to the main, official festival: Lost Vagueness. To conjure the flavour and spirit of this particular brand of trouble and fun, Sofia Olins will introduce her documentary Lost in Vagueness and The Two Wrongies, who are featured in the film, will appear live on stage to recreate the acts they regularly performed in the area’s cabaret tents. This will be followed in the afternoon by a contextual contribution from George McKay on the historical development of carnival and counter-culture, while Ben Fincham will offer critical insights about the function of the festival in relation to the human quest for fun.

Time Against the Grain
Friday 8 February, 10am – 1pm

Convened by Jonathan Miles and Rebecca Carson
Speaker: Dr Kamini Vellodi
Performance: Clair Le Couteur

Our speakers will seek out the blind spots that constitute the way in which paradigms of thought relate to the way categories such as art, politics and philosophy are defined. This has in turn lead both thinkers to both look forward through also looking back, in order to reconfigure their respective disciplines.

Kamini Vellodi will ask questions about the limits of art history in order to examine the relationship between the aesthetic image and the process philosophical figuration in ways that open surprising conjunctions or encounters. Kamini teaches in Edinburgh College of Art and is also a painter who studied at the RCA.

Feminist Writing, Poetry, Identity
Friday 8 February, 2–5pm

Convened by Dr Shehnaz Suterwalla

Join us for an afternoon of readings and discussion about writing and identity with three award-winning writers working within and across fiction, poetry and non-fiction. Guests include Mona Arshi, Preti Taneja and Dr Lauren Elkin.

Mona Arshi's debut collection, Small Hands (Pavilion Poetry, Liverpool University Press ), won the Forward Prize for best first collection in 2015. Her second collection ‘Dear Big Gods’, will be published by Pavilion Poetry in Spring 2019.

Preti Taneja's debut novel We That Are Young was published in the UK in 2017 by Galley Beggar Press, a small independent; it went on to sell in translation around the world, in America with AA Knopf, and to win the 2018 Desmond Elliot Prize for the best UK debut of the year. It was also listed for Europe's premier award for a work of world literature, the Prix Jan Michalski and for numerous other awards. This year, Preti is a judge for the inaugural Orwell Prize for Political Fiction.

Dr Lauren Elkin is the author of Flâneuse: Women Walk the City (Chatto & Windus/FSG), which was a New York Times Notable Book of 2017, and was a finalist for the PEN/Diamondstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. She is the translator of Claude Arnaud's biography of Jean Cocteau (with Charlotte Mandell), which won the 2017 French-American Foundation Translation Award, and of Michelle Perrot's The Bedroom: An Intimate History, just out from Yale UP.