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‘Arab Blues’ Scottish premiere with Sad Girl Cinema
No full textThis mental health focused event included a screening of ‘Arab Blues’ (2019), followed by a panel of Arab and North African womxn, chaired by Sad Girl Cinema.
'Arab Blues' is a feature film that follows the story of Selma, a psychiatrist who dreams of opening up her own psychotherapy practice in her home country of Tunis. Sad Girl Cinema is an ongoing film project exploring mental health narratives in screen culture
Lockdown unlocking change in music education practice
No full textWhen Covid-19 lockdown struck in UK music education practice unlocked a ‘new’ normal. My experience in changing delivery of home to online instrumental lessons evidences changes in autonomy and responsibility. Delivering music lessons to people on a one-to-one basis through online platforms, teaching students in their homes, enables development through a combination of education practice and individual practise. Examining what change looks like now and asking what can be learnt from and through these changes, it is possible to question how this new knowledge might enlighten future forms of music education. Unlocking after lockdown means that education will be delivered in a setting where school once again becomes a second home to children and teachers. When re-learning the art of listening is vital in all settings, lessons learnt from instrumental education delivered online at home might help sculpt change to the value placed on music education
Lady Morgan and "the babbling page of history": cultural transition as performance in the Irish national tale
No full textLady Morgan wrote in her Memoirs (1862) that she had been ‘caricatured to the uttermost - abused, calumniated, misrepresented, flattered, eulogized, persecuted; supported as party dictated or prejudice permitted […]; the poor butt that reviewers, editors and critics have set up’. This acute awareness of her own literary celebrity offers a neat encapsulation of Lady Morgan’s aptitude for self-fashioning. Her careful cultivation of multiple identities was never more complex than in its relationship to nationality: Morgan’s claim that she was born aboard ship while her English mother and Irish father crossed the Irish Sea is a notable instance of her preoccupation with cultural hybridity and transition.
Morgan’s alertness to ideas of cultural transmission is evident not only in her
commodification of her Irish identity, as she embodied her fictional heroine Glorvina for enraptured English markets. Her national tales themselves provide a self-conscious account of the cultural circulation of Irish identity, foregrounding themes of representation, performance and perception. Morgan’s writing demonstrates a profound awareness of contemporary theories of cultural change, offering a self-reflexive narrative of historical transition in its critique of Enlightenment models of stadial historical progress. In The Wild Irish Girl (1806), O’Donnel (1814), Florence Macarthy (1818) and The O'Briens and the O'Flahertys (1827), Morgan locates Ireland within a global framework of linguistic, political, historical and geographical divisions, considering the various ways that Enlightenment discourses of sensibility, commerce and civility create dialogues between disparate cultures, nations and historical time frames. In doing so, she reimagines a more conventionally ‘Romantic’ formulation of cosmopolitan national identity and historical progress for the future, offering critics new ways of reading the interactions between the cultural movements
of Enlightenment and Romanticism.
This brand of Romantic cosmopolitanism reflects Morgan’s wider interests, which extend beyond Ireland to consider transnational geographies and histories. Her non-Irish fiction is set against a wide variety of geographical and historical backdrops, including sixteenth-century France in The Novice of Saint Dominick (1805), late eighteenth-century Greece in Woman; or, Ida of Athens (1809), seventeenth-century Portugal and India in The Missionary: An Indian Tale (1811) and newly-independent 1830s Belgium in The Princess; or, The Beguine (1835). Morgan’s non-fiction, in particular her controversial travelogues France (1817) and Italy (1821), demonstrates a keen awareness of Britain’s role within a global nexus of shifting and dynamic cultural forces.
Furthermore, Morgan’s pioneering role in establishing the Romantic national tale shows an acute self-consciousness about the novel form and its impact on historical and cultural transition. Her reference in the 1846 preface of The Wild Irish Girl to the novel as ‘a fictitious narrative, founded on national grievances, and borne out by historic fact’ belies the ambivalent status of the Romantic national tale as a dynamic and transitory form that operates in perpetual dialogue with contemporary historiography. Morgan’s frequent references to the rehearsing and staging of national identity in the novels themselves reflect the ambiguities inherent to the national tale as a narrative form founded on the literary performance of nationality. Morgan’s own reflections on her role as literary innovator – as demonstrated in her assertion that The Wild Irish Girl was ‘the first attempt at a genuinely Irish novel’ that might fill the ‘long pause in the national literature of Ireland’ – reveal her own alertness to the emergence of a concept of Irish literature as a recognizable body of work with a distinct relationship to historical chronology. Her writing not only offers a complex
and self-conscious reflection on historical change; it provokes and shapes literary transition as an integral component in the Romantic reconfiguration of the novel
The insider view: tackling disabling practices in higher education institutions
Get PDFThis paper reports on research about the experiences of disabled staff members in UK universities, drawing on eleven semi-structured interviews with disabled staff in one university, alongside a group auto ethnography conducted by the first four authors, all of whom identified as disabled academics. Disability is generally considered to be predominantly an issue for students, both in practice and in the literature. By contrast, taking a social practice approach, we focused on the barriers faced by disabled employees, both overt and hidden. We found that disability was still viewed as a medical problem, and that disabled members of staff faced considerable extra labour in organising their own supports. We were often made to feel that we were unwanted and that we were ‘misfits’ in the institution. This paper contributes to theory by showing how social practices can become exclusionary, and how interconnections between practices matter. We discuss ways in which ableism, based on the ideal of ‘individual’ excellence, creates barriers for disabled staff. In the global context of Higher Education, the increasing marketization of universities in higher income countries creates a difficult climate for the values of inclusion
Stories between storeys: the uses of stairs to gain domestic control
Get PDFStaircases were increasingly constructed in homes across English society during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Household stairs became a shared space between residents, such as husbands and wives, families, lovers, lodgers, landlords and neighbours, encouraging different and diverse uses of the domestic structure. Early modern attitudes towards stairs are invoked in a variety of contemporary texts, including inventories, court depositions, diaries, plays and prose. This essay considers the significance of domestic stairs, interpreting a range of encounters and actions that were accorded to and occurred upon this marginal yet meaningful space. It argues that the modes of exchange between individuals were entirely dependent on the space in which they took place. Over the period stairs became structures with powerful associations where power was often exercised by their multiple users who sought to gain control over the home and its inhabitants. This essay explores narratives that were produced on, about and as a result of the uses of domestic stairs, investigating the stories that occurred between storeys
Experiential learning – a systematic review and revision of Kolb’s model
Get PDFKolb’s experiential learning cycle is perhaps the most scholarly influential and cited model regarding experiential learning theory. However, a key issue in interpreting Kolb’s model concerns a lack of clarity regarding what constitutes a concrete experience, exactly. A systematic literature review was conducted in order to examine: what constitutes a concrete experience and what is the nature of treatment of a concrete experience in experiential learning? The analysis revealed five themes: learners are involved, active, participants; knowledge is situated in place and time; learners are exposed to novel experiences, which involves risk; learning demands inquiry to specific real-world problems; and critical reflection acts as a mediator of meaningful learning. Accordingly, a revision to Kolb’s model is proposed: experiential learning consists of contextually rich concrete experience, critical reflective observation, contextual-specific abstract conceptualization, and pragmatic active experimentation. Further empirical studies are required to test the model proposed
"The future has gone bad; we need a new one": neoliberal science fiction and the writing of ecotopian possibility
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My name, my age, my favourite colour... [blog post]
No full textTik Tok has taken the world by storm. It has provided millions of people with entertainment and a creative outlet during a time where a large number of people have felt isolated. In amongst this creativity and community spirit, there is a growing concern of surveillance and data-farming in the app. There are "subtle" ways of acquiring data (location tracking/profile information). But, what if there are more direct ways to manipulate users into giving away personal information? This article will focus on the "challenges" of Tik Tok that (on the surface) promote a sense of community but also coerce the user to divulge a large amount of personal data. Does the acquisition of data need to be indirect when users can provide it freely? This paper aims to explore an insidious undertone of this creative powerhouse