Research Conversations Summary Reports

Spring 2025:

  • Giving Voice to the Unheard summary by Feras Alkabani

    A group of us came together to investigate the topic of ‘Giving Voice to the Unheard’ and explore the ways in which our research practice and lived experience can shed light on the subject. Unpacking the theme meant examining the inherent power relations in it: who’s giving voice to whom? Who are the ‘unheard’? Are they actually ‘silenced’? Who is and who is not listening and why? What are yesterday’s ‘unheard’ doing to help give voice to today’s ‘unheard’? To what extent have we moved beyond Spivak’s question, Can the subaltern speak?

    A range of strands emerged as we reflected on our collective experience of being unheard and/or working with the unheard. We explored a matrix of complex power relations that determine who gets to speak when, where and in relation to what context/cause within academia and wider society. The conversation touched on a number of relevant scenarios, case studies and personal experiences: from race and class to gender and sexual identities, we unpacked the intricate ways in which the personal may drive (and sometimes inform) our chosen areas of academic research, artistic expression and practice-led teaching, learning and activism.

    Emerging strands included: meaningful representation (versus tokenism), gender and sexual identities within patriarchal households, care leavers and marginalisation, non-human (animal) voices and languages, positionalities and acknowledgement of privileges and/or lack thereof, the relativity and contextuality of positionality and privilege, collective voices as a form resistance (the case of Syria), refugee camps and sonic revolutions, autism in Taiwan, small utopias, academia as a platform, non-verbal and non-linguistic voices, yoga practice as a voice, storytelling through music, artistic expression and collaboration as a way to give voice, social media, AI and giving/taking voice, voice in the community, academia, research and the community.

    We have agreed to meet again after the end of term (Spring 2025) to explore further possibilities and research initiatives on the theme such as regular workshops, film screenings, reading groups, collaborative research projects and co-writing funding applications on a relevant project.

    If you’re interested in joining our next meeting, please email Feras Alkabani (f.alkabani@sussex.ac.uk) and check our shared Box folder for resources.

    Feras Alkabani, Research Conversation facilitator

  • Memory, Trauma and Society summary by Sarah Maltby

    A group of us from across MAH took part in the Research Conversation: Memory, Trauma and Society including Vincent Du, Tiffany Murphy, Simon Edwards, Micheal O’Connell and Sarah Maltby.  Our discussion implicitly prioritised the subject of trauma, but incorporated how memory and society coalesce around and within trauma as both an individual and collective experience, and in the construction of knowledge and history (individual, collective).

    Common themes emerged in relation to our respective work particularly around embodiment, re-embodiment, in and through re-enactment. Whilst we all conceived of re-enactment and re-embodiment differently, the ability for reconstruction and re-enactment to access and progressively work with trauma and traumatic memory was highlighted, in a move away from the singular voice and particularly because trauma often defies traditional language. This theme was central to Vincent and Tiffany’s work, both of whom work with and on survivors and survival of trauma, and through the lens of performance. Whilst Vincent’s focus is on the use of theatre in documentary reconstruction with survivors (and not) of the Cultural Revolution, Tiffany’s work focuses on trauma informed practice, where re-enactment is central to the re-embodiment of gender-based violence in a manner that prioritises the lived experience.

    Relatedly, we discussed the difficulties of representing trauma and memory. Vincent’s work had explored the enactment of dreams in this regard as a dialogue between memory and trauma. Micheal, whose art practice has not consciously engaged with issues of trauma and memory, drew attention to the potential relevance of these themes across his work, for example his sculptural ‘Car Parked’, an upturned car installation intended to disrupt order and routine, but which became associated with public traumatic memory of road traffic accidents.

    We noted the fluid relationship between trauma and memory in changing cultural and political contexts and where questions regarding the utility and value of memorialisation, and trauma memorialisation, emerge in certain contexts. In Sarah’s work around forgiveness practices in Sierra Leone for example, the notion of forgetting is often prioritised in traditional peace ceremonies which, in turn, refutes a dominant Western interpretation of the value of memory and commemoration.  Similarly, Simon’s work questions the intersection of historical and memory cultures in the construction of Holocaust knowledge, where there is scope to re-think how they can better ‘mesh’ to generate a more sophisticated model of histography.

    Lastly, one of the central themes of our discussion revolved around the issue of ethics in the conduct of, and engagement with, traumatic memory including the ethical implications for respondents and those we work with, but also for ourselves and our own positionality. All of us had experienced the ethical challenges of our research, and where subjectivity and positionality become critical to how they are neogitated. We debated the extent to which lived experience was critical to good research practice and the importance of practicing reflexivity. We discussed the possibility of organising a workshop around ethics to discuss this further.

    We have set up a Box folder to accumulate resources in relation to all of the themes above (and more) and inviting anyone interested to join to continue the conversation.

    Sarah Maltby, Research Conversation facilitator

  • Worlds of Feeling and Mass Observation summary by Ben Highmore

    The theme of ‘Worlds of Feeling and Mass Observation’ was chosen because of the large number of faculty whose research embraces a world of meaning less driven by ideation and more by experience and emotion. It was also chosen because of the extraordinary resources of Mass Observation and the historic relationship between the university, the faculty and the Mass-Observation Archive in the Keep. In the end, as the facilitator, I decided to playdown the Mass Observation aspect due to the fact that not everyone involved used this resource for their research.

    We had a good turn out, but perhaps even more notable was the range of disciplines that were involved. From linguists using forms of corpus linguistics to research the emotional valences of recycling to cultural studies scholars feeling the vibrations and vibes of a reggae sound system; from art historians registering the resonances of enthusiasm to social historians looking at the changing historical understandings and moods of the menopause. Our conversations were wide-ranging but two connected questions or quandaries seemed particularly important. One of these was around reason and rationality and the world of affects. Do we, as people researching a world that is not governed by rationality but by affective responses, undertake our research rationally? What does that mean epistemologically and politically? Do we recognise the way that politics has become more and more governed by passion and less to reasoned argument while still holding on to the values of rationality? And aligned to this was the question of validity: what makes for valid research when questions revolve around feelings? Given that some of us produced numerical data in our research while others looked for thick and rich description as our outcomes the discussion was never going to be settled. But what was so encouraging was that our ‘unsettled discussion’ was so stimulating.

    When the table-based element of the conversation was over we retired for tea and cookies. There the conversation turned to writing: to the practices and pragmatics of writing, but also to style and voice. This discussion was in many ways a continuation of what we had already been talking about. It was all to do with ways of registering, ways of rendering the world. To see the world in terms of energies, sensations, pulsations, feelings, orientations, drives, and so on, is to start working with language in a way that requires us to attend to the pull and force of the words we use and the rhythms and syncopations of our sentences. The conversation was, to use the title of John Akomfrah’s wonderful multi-screen film about Stuart Hall, unfinished. It was ‘to be continued…’

    Ben Highmore, Research Conversation facilitator

Autumn 2023:

  • Beginnings summary by Hannah Ludikhuijze

    On 16 October 2023, we held the first Media, Arts and Humanities in Conversation event for the inaugural annual Research Institute theme ‘Beginnings’, which around 40 people attended. In three strands – Beginnings and History, Beginnings and Climate, Beginnings and Creative Practice – we explored a rich tapestry of insights and questions, relating to our own work and beyond.

    In the Beginnings and History conversation Chloe Porter posed two questions to guide conversation around the room: How can we use beginnings and ideas of beginnings to frame questions of the past, and can we think of history without beginnings? In three groups, the room responded. While beginnings grant authority and validation, questioning beginnings is also part of decolonising and questioning the linearity of progress that fixed origin points imply. In terms of etymology, word history and terminology can often be seen as a limitation, falsely equating the emergence of a term with the beginning point of an idea. Indeed, inherent to beginnings is also recovery: recovering lost beginnings and silenced voices. The authority that comes with being ‘first’ makes us question whether ‘firsts’ are indeed useful for designating change. We must ask ourselves which cultural perspectives are prioritised when selecting or designating a beginning. The creation of origin myths also plays a role in this, especially in terms of belonging. For example, in post-religious contexts,  how does secularisation impact our perception of origins? ‘Prequels’ in major film franchises, as another example, show a clear cultural need for origin myths. But what is invested in the avoidance of beginnings?

    The Beginnings and Climate conversation, chaired by Natalia Cecire, centred around the narrative of growth and the humanities. Are there alternative narratives for growth? Research expertise around the role of children, adolescence, neurodivergence, protest, environmentalism and indigenous voices collated in the room. What followed was an emerging discourse filled with tensions and questions. For example, from an environmentalist perspective, what does a close understanding of a landscape mean in terms of patchwork conversation? Inherent to this is thinking about the role of the local, which seems so important: how to make the local seen and represented? This might be a core issue for the humanities: how to make the precise thing seen? Indeed, poetics is looking at the pronoun: what happens when it becomes a ‘we’? Here is also the question of scale, and the tension between collective action and scaled solutions: how do we think about the specific and contingent? Poetics takes the small scale, which makes us wonder: is scaling up something the humanities can’t do? Is what we make bespoke? Or do we need a communication strategy, and to re-centre the role of the media?

    In the Beginnings and Creative Practice conversation Jo Walton created space to share some practical advice for practitioner-researchers who are beginning new projects, emphasising the need for these spaces to share developing ideas. A theme which quickly emerged was making art under challenging political circumstances, where certain sorts of ideas and expression may be forbidden, or where audiences may be unwilling or unable to engage with them. How do we begin to speak when the discourse to support those speech acts does not yet exist? The room touched on the use of allegory, and indirectness, as well as absences and lacunae. Within this, conversations around technology and innovation explored how creative practice invites practitioners to frame their work as new, novel and innovative while asking what we might discover by resisting or subverting that.

    Weaving these strands together back in the research common room, a key question emerged: what does humanities engagement with questions of sustainability look like? All groups had touched on this in some form, for example through the tensions between tech capitalism solutions to climate, and the realities of local solutions. How can deep understandings of landscape produce new insights in the ways of working? Overarching was the question of whether these conversations are about beginnings or endings, as solutions are often framed in terms of not thinking about endings.

    The Research Institute’s theme speaks to the crisis of futurity, and the danger of simplistic beginnings which do not have the confidence to project the future. How do we respond to this at Sussex, with our history of a radical focus on power and politics, as well as thinking about compassion and care? We hope that this event has brought strands of research together, and created space to think about the complexity of beginnings and endings.

    Hannah Ludikhuijze, Senior Institute Officer (PGR)

Autumn 2022:

  • Activism summary by Margaretta Jolly

    Work on, about, with or inspired by activism is popular in the School. A group of us came together to think about it as part of this term’s Media, Arts and Humanities Research Conversations. Our discussion touched on the history of social movements, popular culture and resistance, digital activism and commodification, documentary, creative practice and activism, memory studies, pedagogy, situatedness, ecocriticism in music, the aesthetic work of activists, Judith Butler's theory of disobedience, philosophies of speech, power and the possibilities and limits of the university as an enabler of activism. Our research collectively investigates and allies with feminism, women, LGBTQI+, gender equalities, poverty and employment rights, refugee rights, anti-racism and Black power, endangered languages and minority people’s cultural survival, homelessness and housing rights, Travellers’ rights, children’s rights, environment, water and climate justice, to name only those mentioned during our short exchange. Places of study included China, France, Nigeria, Malawi, the UK, Poland, campus and its surrounding communities, Brighton & Hove, the M25 and the globe itself. 

    Nearly all of us felt able to say we have a theory of social change and have investigated social movement theory. Many of us had also taken part in different forms of activism or protest. Yet a starting point for the discussion lay in the tensions between research and activism and a deep question as to how best to tune research towards effective social change. We tested ideas of social labour and employment contract in relation to activism and where impact or community engagement might overlap with, or be necessarily different from, activism. Ethical review process was marked as an identifying moment. We also heard from colleagues engaged in participatory research, creative practice, reflexive or auto ethnographic method and action research. Some stressed organisational, advocacy and other skills training both as observers and participants. One particularly interesting question was whether we acknowledge or learn from activist failures and regrets. This shed new light on activist memory research and resistance by later generations to know their past. We also raised the challenge of activism for causes which we do not share or approve of and debated where academic activism has become weaponised as an idea. The willingness of funders to support research on activism was noted, though we did not conclude on its significance. 

    Many more in the School explore these fields (29 in the School are tagged with ‘activism’ in the University's find a researcher database) and are sustained by intellectual and personal ideas of justice and collective action. The conversation represented a moment of interested listening to each other’s diverse work, in person and across subject area and career stage. Precious time in urgent times. 

    Margaretta Jolly, Research Conversation facilitator

  • Creative Practice summary by Lizzie Thynne

    A group of faculty and PGRs from Critical and Creative Practice (Media), Music, Drama, American Studies, English and Art History took part in this conversation on Creative Practice.  

    Danny Bright, Piotr Cieplak, Augusto Corrieri, Evelyn Ficarra, Irene Fubara-Manuel and Ed Hughes kicked off the discussion with short responses to the following questions, drawing on examples from their own work: 

    • What form of knowledge do you feel your own practice or other practice-led research produces? 
    • In what ways does your practice fit (or not) with existing models of practice-as-research, practice-led research, practice-based research?  
    • Do you consider your practice to be inter-disciplinary/ multi-disciplinary/ undisciplined?! 
    • What does creative and critical practice offer to wider fields of research? 

    Irene described their work around ‘the border’ as a created zone which they interrogate through animation, exploring how biometric physical borders connect to physical borders. They suggested that a fertile ground for practice-led research is, for instance, imaginatively addressing the gaps in the archive, giving as an example of such a method, Saidiya Hartman’s ‘critical fabulation’ in her book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: an account, set in New York and Philadelphia at the turn of the twentieth century, that blends history and fiction to chronicle the sexual and gender rebellions of young Black women. Practice-led research could be especially potent in exposing gaps in what is considered ‘knowledge’. 

    Evelyn suggested that her work provided not ‘knowledge’ but an experience which could not be simply translated into words. Her current work around robot opera is focussed on the theme of putting oneself in the place of the other and imagining what the subjectivity, thought processes and voice of the robot might be (or should that be robots?!), with voice being a crucial but particularly under-developed aspect of robot design.  

    Ed’s work is concerned with how orchestral music can incorporate new instruments and embody natural forms. He explores productive collisions between texts, contexts and musical expressions so, for instance, creating a libretto from interviews with carers in a community opera that was staged at the ACCA, creating new understandings through putting words/text in different musical contexts. He is developing a project working with young people on musical re-telling of myths and fairy tales.  

    Danny noted that creative practice doesn’t always produce knowledge in a conventional research sense. Knowledge derived from practice-based research could take other forms such as the bodily knowledge gained from doing a thing and learning through the process of performing e.g. how playing with unconventional or new instruments challenges how one would normally perform or what one could normally achieve as well as disrupting perceptions of what music is or what a performance is. 

    Piotr’s recent work has been looking at the use of vernacular photography in Argentina in relation to the last dictatorship through both written outputs and film. He questioned an ‘illustrative’ approach in the use of creative practice in academia and stressed the interaction form and content produce new understandings that cannot be equated to written exegesis. 

    Augusto provocatively asked how do we allow art into the institution (of the university) without forcing it to adopt the language of the institution? He recounted the Twitter lament of an artist, Tai Shani, who complained of how practice in the academy is subject to ‘flattening and absolute quantification’. 

    This led to a general discussion of to what extent creative practice could or should conform to demands of knowledge production in the academy and in particular the demand to explain or contextualize one’s artistic output for REF or funding purposes.  

    Tai Shani wanted to be able to say about her work ‘It just came to me’ i.e., that the role of intuition should be acknowledged. Some felt that it was a privileged position to be in the academy where one could be paid a salary to include making creative work, that the requirements for this to be contextualized to identify its research contribution were not necessarily a hindrance or a burden and that in any case, all art, has a conceptual basis and intuition can be seen as the result of implicit knowledge and practice. The point was also made that any ‘art’, itself a monolithic concept, is made in a context of production with its own constraints and norms. Irene usefully concluded by recounting an encounter with a student who when asked what he thought was strong about a piece of creative work, said “it’s cool”. ‘’Well,” they said, “but what principles of cool have you applied to your work?’’ 

    It was suggested that having ‘Creative Practice’ as a conversation topic tended to ghettoize it and encourage a sense that it needed to justify itself as research. 

    The notion of what ‘rigour’ meant in a practice context was raised – is it the rigour of the idea behind a work or the rigour that has gone into the making? Also, could writing about practice work be writing about what it is not in it rather than what is? 

    Lizzie Thynne, Research Conversation facilitator

  • Translation summary by Aaron Kahn

    A group of us met to discuss the concept of Translation in a quite broad way. Most people think of translation as simply restating something in another language, but throughout our conversation, we discussed the many varieties and nuances of translation. In the process, we discovered how each of us uses different forms of translation in our research practices, finding some common ground across the board.

    Each participant revealed how the significance of translation has affected them personally and professionally, and all agreed that it is a vital skill in our global community. Translation can be linguistic, cultural, physical, spiritual and theoretical, among other qualifiers. The most immediate impact has been that as a result of this conversation, a Media, Arts and Humanities colleague has agreed to teach a unit on the new MA in Translation Studies, beginning in September 2023.

    With the long history at Sussex of studies in languages, linguistics, culture and many other related fields, we look forward to the continual development of research in Translation Studies in the future.

    Aaron Kahn, Research Conversation facilitator