Disorderly conduct: the community in the archive

A Complex Parade: Problems and Prospects for Picturing the Nation Wilfred M. McClay (bio) On October 23, 2008, representatives from the United Kingdom’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the United States’ National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) met for a day-long conference at the Old Post Office in Washington, D.C., entitled “Picturing the Nation.” The inspiration behind the conference was the remarkable popular success of the NEH’s “Picturing America” program, which made available to schools and libraries across the United States a selection of forty high-quality reproductions of masterworks of American art depicting characteristic American scenes and themes.1 The AHRC was interested in exploring how a similar set of masterworks might beassembled for the UK, allowing for its very different history and culture. The images in “Picturing America,” which range from a portrait of Paul Revere to a photograph of the Selma-to-Montgomery march, and from Emanuel Leutze’s “Washington Crossing the Delaware” to Joseph Stella’s “Brooklyn Bridge,” made no claim to be canonical. They were not Ten Commandments but Forty Suggestions. And yet the point was to draw together a collection of images that are common and familiar, but also rich and complex; illustrative of American life, but also worth knowing in their own right. The goal of a project like “Picturing America” can be defined in various ways. Partly it is a matter of establishing cultural literacy, identifying images and referents that every one should know. But it is also a matter of providing mental furniture, i.e., furnishing the essential preconditions for other kinds of cultural reflection, conversation, citizenship, and shared memory. These works of art are civilizational markers, points of general reference, tools for cultural orientation. Such images also are often polyvalent in meaning—rich, full, and many-faceted, incapable of being contained or controlled by any interpreter or community of interpretation. It is useful to think of our experience of public buildings and public spaces as a point of comparison. To carry around in one’s head the knowledge of a familiar public building or street is to gain entrée into a cultural meaning that helps us transcend our sense of individuality. But we are not only talking about the places that are seen as consciously memorializing the past. We are talking about everything, down to the names of streets and buildings and bridges and airports and neighborhood landmarks. These mark the places where many thousands of people who came before us have walked, and fallen in love, and grieved, and died, and gone about the ordinary and pluriform business of life. It is one of the public uses of art to connect us in just this way with the lives of those others, to usher us out of the caves of our limited experience into a common public world by providing a number of shared and worthy objects of contemplation. So, to put it in a word: a collection like “Picturing America” is about commonality, rather than canonicity. Click for larger view View full resolution From The Arts (October 1921). Our memories play tricks on us, and they are full of idiosyncrasy. That is why we so profoundly need landmarks, the tangible and visible things that we measure ourselves against: for their permanence. Not that we measure all aspects of our lives against such public landmarks; that would be both ghastly and inappropriate. (In this connection, I think of W. H. Auden’s famous words: “private faces in public places are wiser and nicer than public faces in private places.”) In our private lives we have other and better ways to remember, ones more suitable to such lives’ untranslatable [End Page 2] particularities and intimacies. And yet there is confluence. The best and least conflict-ridden of all secular American holidays, Thanksgiving, is a moment in which private and idiosyncratic markers receive a rare kind of public visibility and endorsement. Small wonder that Norman Rockwell (one of the “Picturing America” artists) made it the subject of some of his most memorable work. Commonly acknowledged landmarks, then, serve to lift us out of our idiosyncrasy and isolation into a world of common experience. It...

This paper explores ethnic and religious minority youth perspectives of security and nationalism in Scotland during the independence campaign in 2014. We discuss how young people co-construct narratives of Scottish nationalism alongside minority ethnic and faith identities in order to feel secure. By critically combining literature from feminist geopolitics, international relations (IR) and children's emotional geographies, we employ the concept of ‘ontological security’. The paper departs from state-centric approaches to security to explore the relational entanglements between geopolitical discourses and the ontological security of young people living through a moment of political change. We examine how everyday encounters with difference can reflect broader geopolitical narratives of security and insecurity, which subsequently trouble notions of ‘multicultural nationalism’ in Scotland and demonstrate ways that youth ‘securitize the self’ (Kinnvall, 2004). The paper responds to calls for empirical analyses of youth perspectives on nationalism and security (Benwell, 2016) and on the nexus between security and emotional subjectivity in critical geopolitics (Pain, 2009; Shaw, Powell, & De La Ossa, 2014). Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), this paper draws on focus group and interview data from 382 ethnic and religious minority young people in Scotland collected over the 12-month period of the campaign.

Some of the research activities undertaken towards the completion of this study were carried out as part of the project Digital Heritage in Cultural Conflicts (DigiCONFLICT) that received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 699523 (Joint Programming Initiative on Cultural Heritage), implemented in the United Kingdom by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) under Project Ref AH/S000119/1. I am grateful to all the individuals and families who welcomed me to their homes with open arms and enabled me to explore their photographic collections, together as well as independently. Their kindness, generosity, open mind and sincere cooperation were fundamental to my ability to develop the multiple layers of this study.

The four years of commemorative outpouring and activities in response to the Centenary of the First World War have led to the production of a multiplicity of amateur and professional, academic, media and community histories of the conflict. These can be seen as exciting examples of what Raphael Samuel (2012) once optimistically described as history made by a thousand hands, which can democratize the past. However, all histories are framed by the cultural milieu in which they are produced and the centenary of the first industrialized conflict, which cost the lives of millions across the world1 is taking place in Britain, a fractured country, still reeling from the aftermath of the 2007–2008 financial crisis, which heralded in austerity politics and a restructuring of welfare provision. The centenary has coincided with the rise of UKIP and 2016’s divisive referendum about Britain’s membership of the EU. The commemoration of a conflict, which has a significant place in British national narratives, is taking place against a backdrop of hotly contested debates about who exactly is entitled to see themselves as part of the nation, and who is entitled to support from the national purse if they are in crisis. This has an inevitable, though perhaps, unintentional consequence on the selectivity and the silences in the histories of the First World War that have emerged. My own recent work with heritage organizations and community groups as part of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded Voices of War and Peace World War One Engagement Centre, 2 suggests that in the present political climate, despite the best intentions and determined efforts of many cultural agents, some hands were mu

Front and back cover caption, volume 35 issue 6Front coverWAR TRAUMA IN CONTEXTLost identity (2018), 50×70 cm, acrylic on canvas by Willarekezi.Rwandan Willy Karekezi's painting reflects on how forcibly displaced people imagine themselves in recollections of home and flight. Their memories become fractured, even unrecognizable, over time.This artwork is part of a collection that was shown in an exhibition called ‘When we return’, in Gulu, Uganda, during July and August 2019. It brought together research and visual outputs from Uganda, South Sudan, Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The artwork was an output of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Politics of Return Research Programme, curated by Kara Blackmore (an exhibition catalogue is available).1Based on the Politics of Return work, as well as long‐term research supported by linked Economics and Social Research Council (ESRC) grants, in this issue, Torre et al. argue that the literature underlying the recently published World Health Organization's assessment of mental health in conflict settings is inadequate. It sets aside crucial evidence and promotes misleading responses to suffering.(1). https://issuu.com/lseflca/docs/new_por_catalogue_print_final_sept_2019-digital-isBack coverDetail from Three women on the lake (2018), 245×170 cm, collage on canvas by Kusa Kusa Maski Gael.The figure is located in a dream‐like vision of the lake and mountain range between Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.It is a complex image, full of nuances and ambiguities, linked to the artist's own memories of flight from the Congo, as well as those of the conflict‐affected people he worked with in Uganda.In this issue, Torre et al. warn that conceptualizing war trauma in terms of psychiatric pathologies promotes the symptoms that therapists and aid projects purport to address. Without due consideration for the specificities of lived experiences and cultural contexts, what is actually happening may be largely overlooked, with potentially harmful consequences.

ABSTRACTThis article is a record of conversations held between Margaret Ames and Mike Pearson during the creation and performance of a site-specific theatre project made by Cyrff Ystwyth and directed by Ames. Cyrff Ystwyth are a company of people with and without learning disabilities. The performance, Capel: The Lights Are On, was made by Adrian Jones, a company member with learning disabilities and was his response to research questions that formed the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)-funded enquiry; ‘Challenging Concepts of “Liquid” Place through Performing Practices in Community Contexts’.

The Nature Initiative Research, Development & Demonstration Project, based at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), carried out a series of rapid response research activities to inform the UK government’s efforts to refine research priorities for existing and future international nature-focused research programmes, with a particular focus on ODA contexts in Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Southwest Asia and North Africa, and small island developing states (SIDS). This research was commissioned by the UK cross-government (x-HMG) Environment and Nature Research Working Group representing interests of the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO), the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra), Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) and UKRI (UK Research and Innovation). Research councils that were closely involved include the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). The research was funded by the ESRC.

The main purpose of this article is to show how Functional Grammar of Dance (FGD) can be applied to dance discourse analysis to reveal the discursive strategies that underlie choreographies and support movement-based communication. In recent years, studies in Systemic Functional Multimodal Discourse Analysis (SF-MDA) have benefited from the development of several models of analysis, and from the emergence of a new focus on the materiality of semiotic modes. The Functional Grammar of Dance is a recently developed model of analysis that draws on Systemic Functional Linguistics theory and focuses on movement-based communication starting from dance (particularly ballet as a starting point). The Functional Grammar of Dance has been adopted as a central theory in an international collaborative project funded by the AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council) in the UK and the DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, ‘German Research Foundation’) in Germany, The Kinesemiotic Body, where it has been used with the ELAN annotation system. ELAN annotation based on the Functional Grammar of Dance was used for both live-collected data from dance rehearsals and for dance videos and revealed aspects of dance performances that are not necessarily captured by the naked eye. This paper proposes three case studies where we show that our ELAN annotation with the FGD provides an effective and very flexible interface for the grammaticalization of movement-based communication and the study of movement-based discursive strategies.

As the end of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funding for the Perdita Project drew near in autumn 2005, the team started thinking about a suitable finish to the project. We had had ...

This paper discusses approaches used in an AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council) research project across a number of sites in the United Kingdom. The Disability and Community: Dis/engagement, Dis/enfranchisement, Dis/parity, and Dissent (D4D) project explores issues around disability and community, investigating diverse topics related to inclusion/exclusion. The D4D project is distinctive in the combination of academic and nonacademic Co-Investigators. One objective is to contribute to the evolution of a research language that is accessible to a wider public. Using arts-based approaches, the research team also seeks to develop research methods and an ethical framework that will be appropriate for co-constructed community research. This paper focuses on different ways of exploring and expressing participant experience. First, it considers the use of cultural animation (CA) as an alternative to the traditional interview, providing participant and researcher reflections. Cultural animation is a participatory arts-based and embodied methodology of community engagement and knowledge coproduction that draws on everyday experience of participants. Transcription poetry (TP) converts interview transcripts into poems. Short interview extracts and poems are selected here to illustrate the approach. D4D team members believe that CA generates authentic and rich data where there is not only fidelity to participant experience through the TP process but a greater resonance in the words than would have been the case in traditional representations.

This paper reports on the first author’s ongoing Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded PhD research exploring the potential for disruptive design interventions within the context of health and social care. This paper describes an ongoing project to map the services available to people with dementia and their carers, with a specific emphasis on the services available before the patient receives a formal diagnosis of dementia.Many service users are simply unaware of the support available to them, and are left to navigate their own paths through the unfamiliar and intimidating landscape of dementia services. This paper reports on the development of two tools for use by carers, patients, and dementia service providers. These tools offer innovative ways of enabling service users to visualise the pathway of their current and future care, whilst also allowing service providers to identify the strengths and weaknesses in the type of support they provide.

Chapter 3 presents an overview of the nature of the hoard evidence from Roman Britain, based on the work of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)-funded joint British Museum and Leicester University research project, titled Crisis or continuity: Hoarding in Iron Age and Roman Britain with special reference to the third century AD. The project, led by Roger Bland, has collected data on all Iron Age and Roman coin hoards found in Britain to understand their archaeological context and the changing nature of hoard deposition during this period. Analysing numismatic data alongside information on the archaeological and landscape context of coin hoards allows this material to be reintegrated into wider social and archaeological narratives for Roman Britain and studied alongside the large data set of single finds held by the Portable Antiquities Scheme. This approach also highlights a number of methodological issues in the interpretation and definition of coin hoards.

This co-authored book chapter is an output of 'Extending Empathy Network - A Network to Exchange Tools/ Methodologies and Processes from Design, Performance and Restorative Justice'. This was a 12-month collaborative project with Canterbury Christchurch University (PI L Gamman) which commenced in August 2014 to June 2016. Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)/ Research Networking Scheme.

The United Kingdom has been a pivotal national player within the development of community music practice. There are elements of cultural and debatably pedagogic innovations in community music. These have to date only partly been articulated and historicized within academic research. This report, funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council, brings together and reviews research under the headings of history and definitions, practice, repertoire, community, pedagogy, digital technology, health and therapy, policy and funding, and impact and evaluation. A 90-entry, 22,000 word annotated bibliography was also produced an informed group of fifteen practitioners and academics reviewed the authors’ initial findings at a knowledge exchange colloquium and advised on further investigation. Some of the gaps in research identified are: an authoritative history, an examination of repertoire, the relationship with other music (practice), the freelance practitioner career, evidence of impact and value, the potential for a pedagogy.

Biopharma Is Going Digital … Bit by Bit