Launch of the School for the Cultural and Creative Industries (SCCI)

School for the Creative and Cultural Industries Launches.

On 11th October the UCL School for the Creative and Cultural Industries celebrated its official launch and unveiled a new exhibition in the Culture Lab - Power! The celebration was held in the newly opened Marshgate building at UCL East where SCCI showcased some of its state-of-the-art spaces and highlighted teaching and research by its academics and programmes. You can read more about the launch here. In order to learn more about the history and work of SCCI, we interviewed Professor Haidy Geismar the Director of SCCI. 

Get to know: Haidy Geismar, Director of SCCI and Professor of Anthropology

Where would we find you on campus?
I’m the Director of the UCL School for Creative and Cultural Industries (SCCI) and a Professor of Anthropology, so I divide my time between UCL East and Bloomsbury.  SCCI works across three faculties – Arts and Humanities, Social and Historical Sciences, and Education and Society, linking taught courses and researchers working across media, art and creative practice, public history and heritage, conservation and collections. SCCI supports teaching and research in our new spaces at UCL East, and it fosters new relationships across the creative and cultural sector.  I’m particularly proud of our two public facing spaces: the UCL Urban Room in One Pool Street and the UCL Culture lab in Marshgate. They show our commitment to reaching out to the public through experiential and visual project work, and through our collections, making the work of student and researchers accessible and visible and bringing in voices from outside the university. 

What brought you to UCL East?
From very early on in discussions about East Bank, including with the V&A, it was clear that there was an interest in the power of museum and archive collections. Because these are also my research interests I was a part of this conversation within UCL. UCL is renowned for its strengths in object based learning, and since these conversations have started we now have an object learning classroom and the Institute of Making in Bloomsbury as well as the spaces that are part of the School for the Creative and Cultural Industries at UCL East. Working with anything from artworks, artefacts and archives to digital versions of objects, this form of learning is now a central vehicle for teaching and engagement here at UCL East. That experiential learning promotes critical thinking and analysis, connects people with the past, and gives us a greater understanding of what we’re studying or exploring with communities and visitors. 

Where excites you about UCL East?
The collaborative ethos here excites me most. Our new buildings enable us to work beyond the silos of disciplines, departments, and even faculties. You can see in action in our current Culture Lab exhibition, Power!, which I co-curated with Johanna Zetterstrom Sharp, and a team working across all our museums and departments. It explores the concept of power in different ways and includes collections from around UCL. We’ve left a case empty to be animated by young people, working with a visual artist, to respond to the exhibit over the next few months.  

By visibly demonstrating the value of thinking through culture, from collections and archives to audio-visual, digital and immersive media, SCCI highlights the importance of the methods, practices and questions that emerge within the humanities and social sciences. We want to challenge the ways in which the visual and creative arts can be undervalued as vital components of contemporary society. Our strategy is working, as evidenced by the number of partners who are keen to work with us and the students that have already joined our brand new courses. 

What are you into at the moment?  
I read all the time and find walking and cycling around London particularly inspiring. You can see some objects that I collected with my daughter (with the right permissions I should add) by mudlarking by the Thames in the Power! exhibition. I’m also in a singing group and sing opera.  

Your favourite opera?  
Hmmm, it has to be a toss-up between La Traviata and The Marriage of Figaro. You can’t beat the classics