Workshops

1. Migration and Reception in the Arts and Education: A Workshop
(hosted by Stirling University)

Wednesday 29 November 2006
D1, Pathfoot Building
Stirling University

2.00-2.30 Registration

2.30-4.00 New Research on Migration, Reception and Diaspora

James Procter (Newcastle), Bethan Benwell
(Stirling), Gemma Robinson (Stirling)
‘Making Sense of “Diaspora” in Central Scotland: an introduction
to the AHRC “Devolving Diasporas” Project’
http://www.diasporas.ac.uk/large_research_projects.htm

Corinne Fowler (Lancaster)
‘How the Experience of Migration has Informed and Influenced
Writing in Greater Manchester from 1960 to the Present: a mid-point
assessment of the AHRC “Moving Manchester / Mediating Marginalities”
Project’
http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/projects/movingmanchester/

Gail Low (Dundee)
Diaspora and English Studies in Scotland’s
higher education institutions: an English Subject Centre Project
http://www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/explore/projects/archive/studexp/studexp1.php

4.00-4.15 Break

4.15-5.30 Locating Diasporas in the Arts

Juliet Wragge-Morley (British Council)
‘EnCompassCulture: the British Council and worldwide reading
groups’
http://www.encompassculture.com/

Grant Williams (Macrobert arts centre)
Adapting Jackie Kay’s The Adoption Papers with macrobert youth
theatre
http://www.macrobert.stir.ac.uk/MACROBERT/whoweare/index.htm

2. Reading, Reception, Diaspora
(hosted by Newcastle University)

An afternoon workshop run in conjunction with the AHRC ‘Diasporas, Migration & Identities’ initiative and the Postcolonial Research Group.

Speakers:

» Derek Attridge (University of York)

» Beatrice Colley (Liverpool Reads and Small Island Read 2007)

» Rajinder Dudrah (University of Manchester)

» Lynne Pearce (Lancaster University)

3. Postcolonial Audiences, 12 May 2010
(G11, Percy Building, Newcastle University)

This informal seminar marks the close of the AHRC-funded ‘Devolving Diasporas’ project in June 2010. It has been arranged around the visit of Dr Michael Bucknor of UWI, Jamaica. Michael has been working with book groups in Jamaica, and the material he delivers on 12 May will represent the final sample of data collected over three years as part of a transnational study of readers and reception drawing on book group conversations across the UK (from Cornwall to Glasgow), in India (Delhi), Trinidad (Port of Spain), Nigeria (Kano and Lagos), and Canada (Ontario).

The seminar will consider some of this book group data alongside a much broader and interdisciplinary series of papers that range across cinema, radio, book and television audiences. As we move between Algeria, North America, Pakistan, Jamaica, and Britain; between theoretical, textual and real audiences; and between listeners, readers and viewers there may be few points of commonality in our analysis of modes of reception. In this way perhaps the seminar will reveal the categorical impossibility of ‘the postcolonial audience’? On the other hand, it may reveal surprising points of sympathetic contact. In either analysis, the event will have achieved at least part of its aim, which is, through concrete, discrete and diverse research to start to think speculatively about what the term ‘postcolonial audience’ might mean. What does postcolonial studies stand to gain or lose by turning its attention to audiences? What sorts of methodology would be required? How do we access and analyse audiences designated ‘postcolonial’?

1.30 – 2pm Tea and Coffee

2pm – Welcome and introductions

2.20 - Alison Donnell, ‘Heard but not seen: women writers and the Caribbean Voices Programme’

2.40 - Neelam Srivastava, ‘“Allegories of Reading: The Reluctant Fundamentalist as a First World Allegory”

3.00 - Guy Austin, ‘Identity, language and audience in Algerian Berber cinema’

3.20 - Discussion

4.20 - Michael Bucknor, "Audience Authority: The Question of Context and Credibility in British/Jamaican Diasporic Narratives"

4.40 - Bethan Benwell, ‘“Reading Formations” or “Reading as Social Action”: the Deployment of Shared Discourses in the Reception of Diasporic Fiction’

5.00 - James Procter, ‘Not Reading Brick Lane’

5.20 - Discussion and Drinks