Cultures of Belonging: The Politics of Inclusion, Exclusion and Reparation
Cultures of Belonging: The Politics of Inclusion, Exclusion and Reparation
Connecting Cultures Global Research Priority Annual Event
Discussion and Art Showcase
Join us for drinks and nibbles at this free public event
21st June 2023 4.15-6.30pm
Faculty of Arts Building,
Lecture Theatre 0.03, University of Warwick
Discussion
When cultures come together, who is included and who is excluded? Join us for the Connecting Cultures GRP free annual public event, as we explore this urgent question. Today, more than ever, culture is a political category. But it is also a personal one. Individuals experience culture, as they organise and navigate through their lives. Culture is also something wrapped up with history. The legacies of uneven cultural contact, of cultural appropriation, and of cultural silencing, are still with us.
Three leading intellectuals explore these and other questions as part of a public event. Each approaches the ‘culture of belonging’ from a very different personal and intellectual background.
Dr Janina Ramirez (University of Oxford)
Dr. Janina Ramirez is a Research Fellow in the History of Art at Harris Manchester College, University of Oxford. She specialises in medieval art, gender and cross-disciplinary approaches. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, the Historical Society, and Honorary Fellow at the Universities of York and Gloucestershire. She is patron of the Wolston Prize, Oxford Arts Festival, National Society for Education in the Arts and Design, and is President of Gloucester History Festival. She has led AHRC funded projects including 'Pantheons: Sculpture of St Pauls Cathedral' and is academic consultant for the British Museum, National Trust and Kew Gardens. She has published extensively, with academic works on Julian of Norwich, Early Medieval saints and Viking culture. Her latest book 'Femina: A New History of the Medieval Period Through the Women Written Out Of It', became an instant number 1 Sunday Times Best-Seller. She has also written and presented award-winning documentaries for the BBC.
Professor Charles Forsdick (University of Liverpool)
Professor Charles Forsdick is James Barrow Professor of French at the University of Liverpool and Adjunct Professor in Translation Studies, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University. He has published widely on travel writing, colonial history, postcolonial literature, comics, penal culture, and the afterlives of slavery. He is also a specialist on Haiti and the Haitian Revolution. A Fellow of the British Academy and Member of the Academy of Europe, he served as Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of International Slavery (2010-13) and as AHRC Theme Leadership Fellow for 'Translating Cultures' (2012-21). He recently led an international project on '"Dark Tourism" in Comparative Perspective: Sites of Suffering, Sites of Memory', co-ordinated the Reggae Research Network, and was co-investigator on a project called 'Common Cause Research: enriching the Arts and Humanities through collaborations between universities and BME community partners'.
Dr Xine Yao (University College London)
Dr. Xine Yao is Lecturer in American Literature to 1900 and co-director of the queer studies network qUCL at University College London. Yao’s Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America received Duke University Press’s Scholars of Color First Book Award, honourable mention for the Arthur Miller First Book Prize from the British Association of American Studies, and shortlisted for the University English Book Prize. Other accolades include the American Studies Association’s Yasuo Sakakibara Essay Prize. She is a BBC Radio 3/AHRC New Generation Thinker and the co-host of PhDivas Podcast.
Art Showcase
In response to the incredible work funded by Connecting Cultures, poet Sujatha Menon and film maker Paul Windridge will be presenting a short film which showcases a specially written poem inspired by themes that have emerged from the various projects. In addition, Sujatha will be exhibiting her poetry installation that has been one of the outputs of her writing residency at the School of Life Sciences where she is helping to promote women in science. This includes the presentation of 12 microscopic poems viewed under 12 dissection microscopes, a macro-poem shared as large scale projections of labels on old medicine bottles, and another collaborative film made with Paul Windridge which explores her poem Reticulum, also the title poem of her forthcoming book Reticulum: a constellation of women in science.
Sujatha Menon is a British Indian poet, musician and artist based in the UK and editor of Crowstep Journal. Her poems have been commissioned by arts organisations as well as being published in print, broadcast on radio and reimagined by artists in various mediums. She is the author of two books: The Glass Puddle (Vole, 2021) and Night Swan to Nigg (Cromarty Arts Trust, 2022) and is due to publish her third collection of poetry which is one of the outputs of her current writing residency at the School of Life Sciences. The written and spoken word has emerged from song-writing and performing with the band Satsangi who have been broadcast on radio (BBC) and TV (MTV), featured in magazines such as Rolling Stone and have travelled internationally to share their music,
Paul Windridge is a video/digital artist and short film & music maker, exploring what we might perceive to be reality then presenting it as something completely different. His moving image work is often centred on the atmospheric distortion of time and space - on ambiguity, experimentation and abstraction in order to demonstrate that there’s more to the world than most people imagine. His work has been shown in various film and arts festivals including Paris, St Petersburg, Berlin and Zurich. It has also been shown in events at Tate Britain, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York: on BBC Big Screens nationwide, Big Screen Project Manhattan and at BBC Electric Proms.