As the academic year comes to a close, I’ve found some time to make a new Corkscrew website. This site is a place to flag-up our events, archive our previous programmes, showcase the practice-research profiles of Birkbeck staff and PhD students and alumni and share resources.
We had another great year of activities at Birkbeck, funded by the Birkbeck Graduate Research School, including two Show and tell workshops where Birkbeck practice-based PhD students presented their work in progress for feedback and discussion amongst peers. Students who shared their work were: Jo Coleman (“Please identify yourself for the tape.”: Demystifying the interview process), Caroline Molloy (Re-imagined communities: understanding the visual habitus of transcultural photographs) in the Autumn term and Golnoosh Nourp (Representations of Iranian female sexuality in Iranian contemporary literature) and Selina Robertson (A curatorial investigation into the hidden histories and cultural memory of 1980s London’s lesbian feminist and queer film curatorial practices) in the Summer term.
Alongside this we ran a series of public Staff exchanges between a member of academic staff at Birkbeck who discussed their practice-research in conversation with an invited guest. These events asked ‘where’s the research and where’s the practice’ in specific examples of work presented by the speakers. In the Autumn term Dr Sophie Hope (Birkbeck) and Dr Anthony Schrag (Queen Margaret University) discussed their research as socially engaged practice embedded in the context of working environments and the challenges this brings. In the summer term Dr Julia Bell (Birkbeck) and Dr Honor Gavin (University of Manchester) discussed their creative writing as research (you can listen to the podcast of their conversation here). We also held 2 workshops for Birkbeck staff, one about developing portfolios for the REF with Prof Anne Boddington and one for supervisors of practice-based research students at Birkbeck facilitated by Dr. Becky Shaw.
We also held two public workshops:
A Doctoral Masterclass in January with Associate Professor Mia Lindgren from Monash University, Australia (organised by Jo Coleman). This Masterclass focused on practice-based research methods in journalism, primarily in radio and audio forms, but with relevance to other fields and formats through exploration of the relationship between the creative project and the exegesis.
In June we hosted ‘Awkward Encounters: Consent in Practice-Research’ a peer-to-peer workshop facilitated by Sarah Jury and Hamish MacPherson for exchanging tactics, methods and concerns about negotiating consent in practice-research.
