Arts and Sciences Festival of Research

11am – Welcome

11:15pm – 12:15pm, MEMORY MAPPER (WALK) - Dr Duncan Hay and Dr Leah Lovett
Memory Mapper, a web toolkit that we’ve made for making interactive maps of local history.
https://www.europeanliterarylondon.org/
https://www.cityofwomenlondon.org/
https://ucl-history.memorymapper.org/

• A one hour walk through Bloomsbury/Somers Town exploring the history of the development of the area.
• A one hour ‘pinning party’ workshop in which we use Memory Mapper to upload photographs/observations collected through the walk.
• Attendees will need a laptop/tablet to upload material to Memory Mapper, and should have their phones with them to take photos.

12:45pm – 1:15pm, Primer for embodied attention - Dr Ali Baybutt
This 30-minute workshop will lay the ground for the diversity of the festival programme through non-verbal modes of relating. Starting from the body anticipates a day of listening, thinking and discussing by attending to the multiplicities of sensing first. Going slow to go quick. Pulling back to advance. Going wide to zoom in. How might we meet across different paradigms in art and science? This workshop suggests arriving the present moment with each other as a way to begin.

1:15pm - 2pm, Impostors and con artists in film and literature - Dr Tim Beasley-Murray, Dr Matthew Sperling, Dr Temenuga Trifonova
Panel on impostors in film and literature

2pm – 2:30pm, Creative Health workshop - Dr Ranjita Dhital
An interactive workshop or talk on Ranjita's creative public health work in Nepal, focusing on the first Creative Health exhibition in Nepal (Kathmandu). This public health research is informed by creative and participatory methodologies and is part of Ranjita’s AHRC funded study Alcohol Co-design and Community Engagement (ACE)  which explores creative research approaches to reduce alcohol harm in Nepal.

2:30pm – 2:40pm BREAK

2:40pm – 3:10pm, PLAY - Dr Kirstin Smith
A short play (or part of a play), performed by 2-3 students, based on Jacques Lacan's thesis focused on a young woman, anonymised as Aimée, who attacked a well-known actress, Huguette Duflos, because of paranoid delusions. Drawing on the visual and dramaturgical conventions of silent film and theatre of the era, the play will explore the relationship between melodrama and psychoanalysis.

3:10pm-4pm, Roundtable - Interdisciplinary Research: A Way Forward - Prof Wendy Sims-Schouten

‘Interdisciplinarity’ occupies a central place in the contemporary research landscape. With their focus on knowledge as process, interdisciplinary approaches have the potential to challenge outdated systems of thought. Nevertheless, ‘interdisciplinarity’ remains a fraught term. In his book Interdisciplinarity (2010) cultural historian Joe Moran revisits Bill Readings’s The University in Ruins (1996) and Hal Foster’s The Return of the Real (1996), two seminal works exploring the ways in which the term ‘interdisciplinarity’ can, and has been, appropriated in the pursuit of the market-oriented university’s goals:

What, then, is the politics of interdisciplinarity? Are the “increasingly routine calls for interdisciplinarity and cross-departmental affiliation […] the siren-songs university management uses to lure departments and other larger administrative units into its own Machiavellian cost-cutting schemes” (Graham Huggan qtd in Moran 168)? Participants in the roundtable will reflect on the personal and institutional meaning of ‘interdisciplinarity’ and speculate about the future of this nebulous term. Participants: Prof Tim Jordan, Dr Rebecca Birch, Dr Ranjita Dhital and Dr François Sicard

Arts and Sciences Library Wall (ongoing) - Sara Wingate Gray
Using proximity technology (NFC tags/QR codes), this poster installation will provide an insight into the diverse and varied world of research produced by academics based within the Arts and Sciences Department, providing immediate open access to specific pieces of UASC research to all users. Arts & Sciences Library Wall will function as a one-stop-shop-front showcase for departmental research, bringing together in one physical location a range of UASC academic research and providing a central public point for dissemination of said research. Users point their smart devices at the poster installation and through use of proximity technology receive individual research outputs (e.g. research article text, sound, audio-visual content) downloaded onto their smart device, which can then be further shared by users themselves as they wish.

The Chemical Atlas (ongoing) - Dr Olwenn Martin
The Chemical Atlas (part of a Climate Crisis Grand Challenge small fund project), loosely based on Anna Tsing’s Feral Atlas, in collaboration with Andrew Barry and Sahra Gibbon who has just launched her Embodied Inequalities in the Anthropocene tool.
The Chemical Atlas Exhibition – field photos from two (or more) case studies, one about mining in Nigeria, another from Indonesia (fieldwork by PhD students).

Research Poster (ongoing) - Helen Omand and Sarah Ferner (practice-based PhDs)
A reinterpretation of the traditional research poster. 

Attribution: Wassily Kandinsky, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons