2023 saw a wide range of activity by staff and students from the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures working with diverse communities and other partners. This blog post summarises some of the activity that took place in Spring and Summer 2023.
Daytimers was a project developed and led by undergraduate student Amina Beg (Drama). The project aimed to explore how collaborative filmmaking can better represent Gen-Z British Asians. The project team working with AfshanDLProductions created Daytimers – a TV pilot (short film) showcasing daytime raves as a specific British Asian experience. This pilot subverts conventional tropes depicting ethnically minoritised communities in Britain as victimised or traumatised in some way. The film is a platform that allows British-Asian women to perform a story that is often undocumented on mainstream platforms and has attracted a significant amount of interest online, reaching over 1.4 k accounts on Instagram. The project involved partnerships with local organisations such as Mango Masala (radio-station), British-Asian Society, OSCH (Our Shared Cultural Heritage) part of Manchester Museum as well as reaching out to local restaurants such as Kitchen Rules on Wilmslow Road. Through this collaborative process it has created the opportunity for students and alumni to work with prospective students and support Manchester based artists, along with reaching out to intergenerational groups of older South Asian women based in Manchester’s communities, which are often overlooked.
Creative Futures in filmmaking 2023 led by Andy Hardman (Art History and Cultural Practices) offered a paid early-career opportunity for University of Manchester alumni to work with Manchester Art Gallery on a series of films that explore its collections and relationship to the city and its young people. Six alumni who have participated in filmmaking courses (in BA/MA Film studies/Drama; History on film MA module; visual anthropology etc.) or who have demonstrable skills in filmmaking from previous education partnered with alumni of Manchester Art Gallery’s Future Creatives programme (in its 7th year) to devise, shoot and edit short films about the gallery, its collections and its young creatives.
Global and Inclusive Shakespeare in Manchester led by Fred Schurink (English, American Studies and Creative Writing) seeks to empower diverse audiences to engage with Shakespeare’s works. It builds on academic scholarship and teaching at the University of Manchester that explores how Shakespeare’s writings and their reception and performance from the early modern period to the present day represent, reflect, and interact with global issues and developments and various forms of human diversity (gender, sexual, social, ethnic, and racial). The project brought together arts and heritage organisations from Manchester and the North West with academics from the University of Manchester. The team held a series of online meetings with key partners to establish the project and organised their first public event. They now plan to develop a series of events and create a network of teachers from Greater Manchester.
Jenna Ashton (Art History and Cultural Practices) developed the project Hidden in the Soil and Scrub to pilot the efficacy of animal-related storytelling (or “animal narratology”) for meaningfully engaging people around biodiversity and animal welfare in the context of urban development. Hidden in the Soil and Scrub is a short story written by Dr Ashton from the perspective of non-human animals, based on the actual current development of a large re-wilded site (an ex-brickworks and waste dump) in a neighbourhood of North Manchester. The project supported international illustrator Irene Sol to transform the story into a picture book, to be printed and shared in workshops by youth workers with local young people in the areas of Miles Platting and Newton Heath. The workshop outcomes and illustrated story will also feature as part of Manchester Museum’s WILD exhibition in 2024 and will be shared with the National Trust’s Curatorial and Experiences teams as part of their training and development.
Come What May is a community festival that took place at the Ascension Church, Hulme 18th-21st May 2023 with the goal of celebrating Hulme’s history, arts, and culture in service of strengthening community networks and power. The festival brought together local artists and musicians, creative enterprises, and a range of social justice and sustainability initiatives for four days of coordinated activities targeted at diverse and intergenerational audiences. The festival marked the 75th Anniversary of the Windrush generation and was held appropriately at Ascension Church, the spiritual home of many local African-Caribbean residents and the historic site of the Viraj Mendis sanctuary campaign. This event was conducted in partnership with the Race, Roots & Resistance Collective, co-ordinated by Kerry Pimblott (English, American Studies and Creative Writing), and co-sponsored by the AHRC.
Making noise: ancient horns and modern audiences was developed by Melanie Giles (Classics, Ancient History, Archaeology and Egyptology). The project broke through the glass case, using fragments of ancient instruments and their modern replicas to bring the sound of the past back to life. Working with renowned musician, Letty Stott, the project enhanced engagement with heritage: challenging perceptions of the role of music in the past whilst widening gender diversity caught up in contemporary brass playing. University of Manchester students worked together to develop and rehearse a new ‘ancient music’ composition, working with visitor audiences at Vindolanda Roman fort in live rehearsals, a handling session, Q&A and final staged performance. Recruiting students from across the university promotes diversity amongst brass players; responds to Letty’s Stott’s gender activism in brass playing, and provides greater equality of extra-curricular performance opportunities whilst fostering a taste for life-long public engagement in our students. Its audiences – public visitors, schools groups and heritage workers at Vindolanda Trust – had the opportunity to participate in the creative process; enriching their vision of how the past can be brought to life through experimental archaeo-musicology.
The public event Archiving and curating Black music and popular culture in postwar Britain organised by Roddy Hawkins (Music) provided a space to reflect on the urgent challenges – practical, ethical, political – involved in the curation and archiving of Black music in postwar Britain. With special guests Linda Brogan and Mykaell Riley, we heard about two different projects that have challenged narratives of Black British music and popular culture, making visible – and audible – the sounds, voices, places, technologies and stories that have, until recently, remained metaphorically and literally buried. The talk was followed the next day by a workshop at the British Pop Archive, John Rylands Library, with representatives from local, regional and national popular culture archives, music industry, and academia. Building on the themes and discussion at the talk, the workshop aimed to construct a roadmap for future research, collaborations and partnerships, ahead of a major exhibition curated by Mykaell Riley which will investigate 600 years of African influence on British music, to be held at the British Library in 2024.
Scott Midson (Religions and Theology) worked with Caroline M. Parker (Anthropology) to host Universities in Prisons: A documentary and Q&A about one university’s 20-year struggle to provide tuition-free, full-time higher education to incarcerated students. Bard Prison Initiative (BPI) spent two decades fighting to establish university education in prisons across New York state. Now in its twentieth year, Bard Prison Initiative has awarded 715 degrees. This event shared Bard’s Emmy-award nominated documentary, College Behind Bars(60 mins), which takes an intimate look at the lives and experiences of a dozen Bard Prison students and their families that confronts and challenges conventional wisdom about the purpose of both education and incarceration. Following the screening, we heard from a panel made up of alumni of BPI.
Andrew Fearnley (English, American Studies and Creative Writing) worked with Lianne Smith (Archivist and Library Manager at the Ahmed Iqbal Ullah Race Centre and Education Trust) on US Progressive Politics in the Late Twentieth Century: Making Lou Kushnick’s Oral Histories Available. The project aimed to open up a unique collection of oral histories relating to America’s social justice and progressive movements in the late twentieth century. These are housed in the Lou Kushnick papers at the Ahmed Iqbal Ullah Race Centre. There are ninety-four interviews in the collection, comprising around sixty individuals, and the majority of interviews were recorded between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s. Together they capture a diverse range of voices, including union organizers, mayoral advisors, academics, city aldermen, lawyers and legal campaigners, tenant organizers, police officers, and church ministers. They offer reflections on the direction of national US politics amid the rise of neoliberalism and Republican politics, and on the trajectory of progressive programmes in particular locations between the 1960s and early 1990s. The project is guided by a common wish to expand access to these materials, and to make them available firstly to wider publics, and especially to the groups who contributed these histories, or about whom they relate in the US; and secondly, to undergraduate and postgraduate students within SALC for the purposes of research and teaching enhancement.
Citizens’ Assembly: A Play For The People is a new play by Andy Smith (Drama) concerning the climate emergency written to be read out loud by an assembled group of audience-participants and then discussed. It forms part of a larger ongoing research project called Plays For The People, which aims to encourage the exploration of social, ethical and moral questions through collective acts of play. Citizens’ Assembly is a collaboration with applied arts practitioner Lynsey O’Sullivan. It builds on the experience of previous plays in the project, and has been developed with and delivered to audiences of all ages and backgrounds across several locations in the North-West. A series of performances are planned for 2024.
Following a successful pilot in 2021 Manchester City Council and the Medieval Quarter Development Group launched the Manchester Medieval Quarter Festival on 23-24 September 2023. This event was developed in partnership with the Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies and led by Ingrid Rembold (History) and Gillian Redfern (English, American Studies and Creative Writing). The festival included events and workshops, screenings and performances, celebrating and educating the local community about Manchester’s often unseen and unknown medieval past and culture. Members of CMEMS worked with key institutions including Manchester Cathedral and Chetham’s Library to develop the festival. In September 2023 they curated an afternoon of events on the Saturday of the festival at Chetham’s Library, including a screening of South African Mystery Plays, a partnership event about manuscripts with Blackwell’s bookshop, and a workshop on non-European music from the medieval period. They also contributed expertise to a ‘treasures’ exhibition of Chetham’s medieval manuscripts.
Manchester’s DNA: CRISPR and Gene Editing Performance Project led by Jerome de Groot (English, American Studies and Creative Writing) is part of ‘Manchester’s DNA’ an ongoing project engaging cultural and heritage institutions around Oxford Road with cutting-edge genetic techniques. The project has developed a community of practice with key organisations around Oxford Road: Manchester Food Bank, George House Trust, Contact Theatre, Olympias Music Foundation and the Elizabeth Gaskell House. As a consequence of the partnership work around identity, migration, genetics and history, the Contact Theatre’s artistic director Keisha Thompson has invited the Manchester’s DNA project to be part of her new, developing artistic work. This is a devised, collaborative piece on the ethics and consequences of gene-editing and CRISPR technology, to be performed at Contact in April 2024. Engaging with this work and collaborating on its development presents an opportunity to participate in the development of an exciting and innovative piece of performance.
Marco Biasioli (Modern Languages and Cultures), Thomas Drew (MLC) and Réka Polonyi (Drama) worked together on the inaugural Defiance festival in May 2023 focussing on art from Central and Eastern Europe that cannot be showcased in its place of production. The festival offers a platform to artists to ‘defy’ political constraints, but also political categorisation. This approach gives the opportunity for a broader and more inclusive scope, dispensing with the expectation of direct political criticism from artists who hail from illiberal countries, and welcoming also those practitioners whose art does not deal with politics directly. Seeking to start a conversation between various networks of artists, academics and venues in Manchester, Defiance consists of a series of public events involving a wide range of cultural forms, including theatre and performing arts, visual art, literature and film.
Peter O’Connor (History) collaborated with Manchester Academy in Moss Side to run a History of Global Manchester essay contest for KS3 students. After having a master class session, the group were asked to research and write a 500 word history piece on the theme ‘global Manchester.’ The group were encouraged to get creative with the project both in terms of the topic they are researching (it can be a person, object or event) and the way the final submission was presented (as a traditional essay, a first-person narrative etc.). The contest was intended as a pilot for a larger future project.
Professor David Olusoga’s Lecture for Schools was held at Manchester Cathedral on 10 May 2023 for a number of local sixth forms and organised by Sonja Bernhard (SALC Outreach). Professor Olusoga(History) highlighted the importance of studying history both as a discipline vital for identity politics and as a way of understanding Britain’s legacy in the modern world. The event also introduced the students to how these histories are studied at the University of Manchester.
Sexuality Summer School 2023 led by Jackie Stacey was themed (Up) Against Nature. A contranym, ‘against’ has two contradictory meanings, offering the sense of both ‘in opposition to’ and ‘up close to’. This semantic ambiguity opens up ideas of the proximity of love and aggression discussed in psychoanalysis, the twists and reversals in queer theory’s so-called ‘anti-social turn’, and the intimacy necessary for all critical reading and writing. Responding to the growing hostilities towards gender and sexual minorities in the midst of a climate emergency, this year’s Sexuality Summer School considered what it means to be ‘(up) against nature’. The 2023 Sexuality Summer School engaged with debates from across a range of theoretical and artistic practices and included film, photography and live performances in a range of public events.
The Centre for New Writing again led the University of Manchester’s Schools Poetry Competition which ran from March-April 2023. Winning entries from each school were featured in Manchester City of Literature’s Schools Writing Trail, a showcase of the best student writing in Greater Manchester, which ran from 1 June to 15 June in conjunction with the Festival of Libraries.
Musica is a week-long festival over International Women’s Day to celebrate music making by women, non-binary, and trans musicians that is hosted every year by members of the Manchester University Music Society. They hosted numerous successful events which gave many students a welcoming environment to perform and compose in. The 2023 festival included a jazz jam which took place at Fuel café in Withington, a Polyphonic chamber music concert with all the pieces composed, and predominantly performed, by female, non-binary, and trans musicians, a Bandeoke night at Fuel café, Musica club night at XLR in Withington and the annual Musica Symposium featuring Popgirlz – a support group for women in the music industry.