Researchers from the Department of History will be delivering a series of talks at Warwick Words History Festival. Now in its twentieth year, Warwick Words is a popular annual event, bringing internationally acclaimed historians to share stories from the past to venues around Warwick.

Constellations of HOME is a legacy project from Agency, part of the HOME: Arts and Homelessness Festival that took place during Coventry City of Culture. Agency was created by the socially-engaged artist Anthony Luvera in collaboration with people who have experienced homelessness in Coventry.

Belgian-born documentary and portrait photographer Martine Franck (1938-2012) is internationally known for her aesthetic rigour and talent as a documentary and portrait photographer. Yet her vast collection of photographs of older persons, where these skills are harnessed to specific critical purpose, has been almost totally neglected. This paper is part of a larger project which uncovers the hidden history of Franck as a photographer of ageing and re-situates her as an unrecognised landmark for cultural gerontology as well as a precursor to the current upsurge of interest in care. The paper will examine the historical context and contemporary relevance of Franck’s work through an in-depth analysis of her first project on ageing, a photobook entitled Le Temps de vieillir (1980). It will also explore the application of care theory to the production and reception of photographic material to show how Franck’s attempt to challenge normative perceptions of ageing becomes newly available under this theoretical lens.

Shirley Jordan is Professor of French Studies at Newcastle University. Her research interests are wide, including 20th - and 21st - century women’s writing in French, art and art criticism, photography, ethnography, and experimental self-narrative across media. Her recent research has focused on ageing, ageism and care as explored in literary narratives, visual representations, and theory. She currently holds a Leverhulme Research Fellowship (2022-23) focusing on the representations of ageing and care for older people made over several decades by Magnum photographer Martine Franck. She is Co-Lead of the NUCoRE (Newcastle University Centre of Research Excellence) on Ageing and Inequalities and Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women’s Writing at London University’s School of Advanced Studies.

Penny Siopis’s films write histories that are markedly alternative. Combining family home movies, amateur or documentary found footage with sound and a written text presented through subtitles, her films tell untold or censored histories. They speak to (auto)biographical concerns and widely shared experiences of colonialism, war, Apartheid, migration, globalisation, and ecological crisis, all the while standing out as strong aesthetic/affective experiences beyond the historical, and as art objects in dialogue with a number of traditions. Here, I am most interested in producing an understanding of her films as a specific form of post-medium cine-writing. My interest is not purely formal, for the cine-writing in Siopis’s films is not independent of the stories they construct; it is a mode of writing beyond-the-book, born of the task of telling history otherwise. By working through her paragrammatical, scripto-visual style, my discussion will circle in particular around the unspeakable film subject produced by her work